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 attack does increased physical damage, and then also has a 50% chance per hit of adding a 'debuff' (a degen charge) which does DoT damage equal to 25% of the initial hit (all damage before any chaos bonuses or DoTs are applied). There is no upper limit to the number of debuffs which may be stacked; it is simply a function of attack speed and debuff duration (7 seconds base).
Viper Strike's initial hit is best scaled as physical damage (although elemental scaling is possible as well), 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% || 10% || 70 |- ! 2 | 2 || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A || 5 || 4% || 10% || 308 |- ! 3 | 4 || 16 || 5 || 8% || 10% || 2,560 |- ! 4 | 8 || 25 || 5 || 12% || 10% || 8,813 |- ! 5 | 12 || 33 || 5 || 16% || 10% || 22,895 |- ! 6 | 16 || 41 || 6 || 20% || 10% || 68,427 |- ! 7 | 21 || 52 || 6 || 24% || 10% || 150,439 |- ! 8 | 26 || 62 || 6 || 28% || 10% || 581,328 |- ! 9 | 32 || 75 || 6 || 32% || 10% || 566,989 |- ! 10 | 38 || 88 || 6 || 36% || 10% || 1,143,783 |- ! 11 | 42 || 96 || 7 || 40% || 10% || 1,426,490 |- ! 12 | 46 || 104 || 7 || 44% || 10% || 2,737,323 |- ! 13 | 49 || 111 || 7 || 48% || 10% || 3,289,072 |- ! 14 | 52 || 117 || 7 || 52% || 10% || 3,350,845 |- ! 15 | 55 || 123 || 7 || 56% || 10% || 9,936,192 |- ! 16 | 58 || 130 || 8 || 60% || 10% || 21,346,246 |- ! 17 | 61 || 136 || 8 || 64% || 10% || 50,693,883 |- ! 18 | 64 || 142 || 8 || 68% || 10% || 90,050,361 |- ! 19 | 66 || 146 || 8 || 72% || 10% || 147,034,294 |- ! 20 | 68 || 151 || 8 || 76% || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 21 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 80% || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 22 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 84% || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 23 | 68 || 151 || 9 || 88% || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 24 | 68 || 151 || || || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 25 | 68 || 151 || || || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |- ! 26 | 68 || 151 || || || 10% || class="table-na" style="text-align: center; " | N/A |}
Damage Formula
Optimizing damage output 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 (GGG refers to this as a 'debuff,' but visually it appears more like a charge of poison), any consideration of the total damage output needs to take this into account: not every hit will weigh equally. The simplest complete chunk 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
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 basic components of VS damage, (VS Hit) and (VS DoT), in terms of those other factors.
VS Hit
The simplest of the two components of total VS damage is the VS Hit, or the initial strike. The Viper Strike gem increases the physical damage of the basic attack, and then also applies an additional 10% of this hit as chaos damage. This chaos damage is further modified by any chaos damage bonuses the character may have.
- 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 (e.g. 10% is 0.10)
VS DoT
Each tick of each charge per second does chaos damage of 25% of the initial 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 component multiplicatively. Bonuses from passive nodes and gear, on the other hand, boost each of these separate factors 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 Physical, Chaos, DoT
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)
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 an increase to chaos or DoT bonuses instead. 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.
Also note that critical strikes, which were not taken into account above (for simplicity's sake) would skew the balance even more strongly toward physical damage. Some VS builds may be justified in avoiding DoT or chaos damage bonus nodes altogether.
Duration and Attack Speed
In the formula above, you can see that duration is also a factor for total damage. The default duration is 7 seconds, but this can be increased with either support gems or skill duration passives. More than 7 seconds to kill a mob is however already very slow, most mobs should die much faster than that, and so it's probably only in boss fights where the extra duration would be a significant benefit. Situational use of an increased duration support gem in those cases would probably be a more efficient tactic than passive node investment.
A complementary benefit can come from attack speed, especially now (starting in 1.2) that there is no longer an upper limit on the number of poison charges that can be stacked, and yet each hit has only a 50% chance of stacking a charge. Many hits delivered quickly should allow you to then run around out of reach while watching a boss' health drain away.
Vulnerability Curse
Vulnerability is an especially good curse to use with Viper Strike. It has an immediate effect on the initial physical hit, which in turn will also increase the DoT ticks that follow. Above and beyond that, vulnerability introduces extra bonuses for DoT damage, and so the curse has a kind of double-dip effect for boosting total damage.
Quest reward
This skill is the very first gem found by a Shadow on the Twilight Strand beach.
It can also be found as later quest rewards:
- 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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