Viper Strike
The thieves guilds of Oriath teach a wicked skill to all initiates - the feared Viper Strike. Employing the skill, a claw, dagger or sword user coats their weapon with deadly venom, a concoction so virulent it permanently marks any weapon it contacts. Once the toxin is applied, the weapon will poison any it strikes, burning deep into their veins, causing wracking, crippling pain. Additional hits will increase the concentration of the toxin, stacking it up to lethal levels quickly. Few have survived an assault of Viper Strike and those who have never forget the agony.
Skill Functions and Interactions
A viper strike does extra initial damage, and then also has a 50% chance per hit of adding a 'debuff' (a degen charge) which does DoT damage proportional to the size of the initial physical hit, and this debuff ticks off for the next 7 seconds by default. There is no upper limit to the number of debuffs that may be stacked; it is simply a function of attack speed and debuff duration.
Viper Strike damage is therefore driven by physical damage, with additional modifications from bonuses to Chaos and DoT damage.
Gem level progression
Template:GemLevelTable |- ! 1 | 1 || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A || 5 || 0% || 70 |- ! 2 | 2 || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A || 5 || 4% || 308 |- ! 3 | 4 || 16 || 5 || 8% || 2,560 |- ! 4 | 8 || 25 || 5 || 12% || 8,813 |- ! 5 | 12 || 33 || 5 || 16% || 22,895 |- ! 6 | 16 || 41 || 6 || 20% || 68,427 |- ! 7 | 21 || 52 || 6 || 24% || 150,439 |- ! 8 | 26 || 62 || 6 || 28% || 581,328 |- ! 9 | 32 || 75 || 6 || 32% || 566,989 |- ! 10 | 38 || 88 || 6 || 36% || 1,143,783 |- ! 11 | 42 || 96 || 7 || 40% || 1,426,490 |- ! 12 | 46 || 104 || 7 || 44% || 2,737,323 |- ! 13 | 49 || 111 || 7 || 48% || 3,289,072 |- ! 14 | 52 || 117 || 7 || 52% || 3,350,845 |- ! 15 | 55 || 123 || 7 || 56% || 9,936,192 |- ! 16 | 58 || 130 || 8 || 60% || 21,346,246 |- ! 17 | 61 || 136 || 8 || 64% || 50,693,883 |- ! 18 | 64 || 142 || 8 || 68% || 90,050,361 |- ! 19 | 66 || 146 || 8 || 72% || 147,034,294 |- ! 20 | 68 || 151 || 8 || 76% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 21 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 80% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 22 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 84% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 23 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 88% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 24 | 68 || 151 || || ||class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 25 | 68 || 151 || || ||class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 26 | 68 || 151 || || || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |}
Damage Formula
Character builds constructed around Viper Strike will want to optimize their damage output, and this involves striking a balance between physical damage, chaos and DoT bonuses. The formula which expresses how these different factors relate to overall VS damage is however not simple.
Since each hit has only a 50% chance to apply a DoT charge (official patch notes and some in-game language call this a 'debuff,' but visually it behaves much more like a charge of poison), the total damage output needs to take into account the fact that not every hit will be equal. The simplest unit of VS damage would involve two hits, one which sets a charge, and one which does not:
- Hit 1: (VS Hit)
- Hit 2: (VS Hit) + (VS DoT) * Duration
The total damage for this sequence is therefore:
- Total Damage = 2 * (VS Hit) + (VS DoT) * Duration
The real complexity comes from what factors into the (VS Hit) and (VS DoT) terms. We'll get better insight into how the total damage depends on physical damage, chaos bonuses, and DoT bonuses if we can express these two different hits in terms of those factors.
VS Hit
The simplest of the two is the VS Hit. The Viper Strike gem brings a physical damage bonus, and then also applies 10% of this physical hit as chaos damage. This chaos damage is further modified by any chaos damage bonuses.
- VS Hit = (Physical Hit) + 0.10 * (Physical Hit) * (1 + Chaos Bonus)
- = (1.10 + 0.1 (Chaos Bonus)) * (Physical Hit)
Where Chaos Bonus is expressed in terms of a decimal (i.e. 10% is 0.10)
VS DoT
Each tick of each charge per second does chaos damage of 25% of the initial physical hit, which is then further modified by bonuses to chaos and DoT damage as follows:
- VS DoT = 0.25 (Physical Hit) * (1 + Chaos Bonus) * (1 + DoT Bonus)
Note that each of our three basic damage sources - physical, chaos, and DoT - compound one another in this term multiplicatively. And yet passive node bonuses to each of these factors boosts them only additively. This means there will be diminishing returns to stacking just one of the bonuses in favor of the other two.
Total Damage in terms of 3 factors
Putting these two results back together again, in the two-hit sequence from above, we have:
- Total Damage = 2 * (Physical Hit) * (1.10 + 0.1(Chaos Bonus)) + 0.25 (Physical Hit) * (1 + Chaos Bonus) (1 + DoT Bonus) * Duration
- = (Physical Damage) * (2.20 + 0.2 (Chaos Bonus) + 0.25 (1 + Chaos Bonus) (1 + DoT Bonus) * Duration
From this derived formula it can be determined at any stage whether a character would get more damage bang for their buck by investing in physical, chaos, or DoT bonuses. Physical damage is obviously the most dominant factor, but since many characters will often have a large degree of physical damage bonuses anyway, it's a legitimate question whether further (additive) boosts to physical damage would accomplish more than a new bonus to chaos or DoT bonuses. Here are a couple sample results from the above formula as rules of thumb:
- If the current physical damage bonus is 100%, and the current chaos (or DoT) bonus is 0%, then a 10% bonus to chaos damage (or DoT) would have roughly the same impact to total VS damage as a 10% bonus to physical damage
- If the current physical damage bonus is 200%, and the current chaos (or DoT) bonus is 0%, then a 10% bonus to chaos damage (or DoT) would have roughly the same impact to total VS damage as a 15% bonus to physical damage
Working out the numbers for other situations is left as an exercise for the reader
Quest reward
This skill can be gained as a reward for finishing quest:
- Mercy Mission in Act 1 (Normal), by Shadow
- Breaking Some Eggs in Act 1 (Normal), by Shadow, Ranger and Duelist
- The Caged Brute in Act 1 (Normal), by Ranger
Version history
Version | Changes |
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1.2.0 |
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1.0.3 |
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1.0.2b |
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1.0.2 |
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0.9.13 |
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0.9.12qq |
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0.9.12d |
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0.9.5 |
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0.9.4 |
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0.9.2 |
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0.9.1 |
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