Viper Strike

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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.

Viper Strike is an attack that hits the enemy with chaos damage and applies poison.

Skill Functions and Interactions

Viper Strike applies Poison on hit that unlike the default lasts 8 seconds. Viper Strike specifically overrides the poison duration with its own base skill duration.

Gem level progression

Level			Damage Effectiveness	Attack Damage	Exp.	Total Exp.
1	1	0	90%	90%	0	0
2	2	0	93%	93.4%	70	70
3	4	16	97%	96.7%	308	378
4	7	22	100%	100.1%	1554	1932
5	11	31	103%	103.5%	6667	8599
6	16	41	107%	106.8%	26047	34646
7	20	50	110%	110.2%	49725	84371
8	24	58	114%	113.6%	95714	180085
9	28	67	117%	116.9%	169595	349680
10	32	75	120%	120.3%	283759	633439
11	36	83	124%	123.7%	453996	1087435
12	40	92	127%	127.1%	703128	1790563
13	44	100	130%	130.4%	1061223	2851786
14	48	109	134%	133.8%	2065870	4917656
15	52	117	137%	137.2%	2507110	7424766
16	56	125	141%	140.5%	5798936	13223702
17	60	134	144%	143.9%	15083919	28307621
18	64	142	147%	147.3%	27792735	56100356
19	67	148	151%	150.6%	43869739	99970095
20	70	155	154%	154%	242081556	342051651
21	72	159	157%	157.4%	N/A	N/A
22	74	N/A	161%	160.7%	N/A	N/A
23	76	N/A	164%	164.1%	N/A	N/A
24	78	N/A	167%	167.5%	N/A	N/A
25	80	N/A	171%	170.8%	N/A	N/A
26	82	N/A	174%	174.2%	N/A	N/A
27	84	N/A	178%	177.6%	N/A	N/A
28	86	N/A	181%	180.9%	N/A	N/A
29	88	N/A	184%	184.3%	N/A	N/A
30	90	N/A	188%	187.7%	N/A	N/A
31	91	N/A	189%	189.4%	N/A	N/A
32	92	N/A	191%	191.1%	N/A	N/A
33	93	N/A	193%	192.7%	N/A	N/A
34	94	N/A	194%	194.4%	N/A	N/A
35	95	N/A	196%	196.1%	N/A	N/A
36	96	N/A	198%	197.8%	N/A	N/A
37	97	N/A	199%	199.5%	N/A	N/A
38	98	N/A	201%	201.2%	N/A	N/A
39	99	N/A	203%	202.8%	N/A	N/A
40	100	N/A	205%	204.5%	N/A	N/A

Damage Formula

Specify the reason an update is needed using |reason=. Optimizing Viper Strike damage output requires striking a balance between physical, chaos and DoT damage modifiers.

Calculations of total damage must account for the fact that each hit has only a 50% chance to apply a DoT charge, which is achieved here by applying half of the DoT damage to every hit (the 0.5 factor). Over a sufficiently large number of hits this method of approximation is accurate.

Total Damage = (VS Hit) + 0.5 * (VS DoT)

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 first 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.

First of all, we need to calculate the physical damage without any global "increased" modifiers. We start with the Weapon Damage (including all physical modifiers found on the weapon - meaning whatever the weapon tooltip shows), and apply any global additional physical damage:

Min = Weapon Min Damage + Added Min Damage

Max = Weapon Max Damage + Added Max Damage

The average will suffice for our calculations:

Base Damage = (Min + Max)/2

Now we split off 10% of the weapon damage for the extra Chaos damage, and apply all "increased" and/or "reduced" damage modifiers accordingly:

Hit Damage = Base Damage * (1 + sum(increased Physical/Melee/Attack Damage)) + Base Damage * 0.10 * (1 + sum(increased Physical/Melee/Attack Damage) + sum(increased Chaos Damage))

Next, we apply our Critical Strike chance and Multiplier:

Total Critical Strike Chance = Weapon Critical Strike chance * (1+ sum(increased Critical Strike Chance))

Total Critical Strike Multiplier = 1,5 * (1 + sum(increased Critical Strike Multiplier)))

Total Hit Damage = Hit Damage * (Total Critical Strike Chance * (Total Critical Strike Multiplier - 1.0) + 1.0)

Note: I only cover the most basic version of this calculation here. I did not include any added Elemental or Chaos damage, nor any "more/less Damage" modifiers. Since "more/less physical damage" is a common occurrence, to add those you simply calculate the Hit Damage as mentioned above, then multiply it by (1 + more/- less) for each of those modifiers.

Now that we have the Total Hit Damage, the DPS shown in the skill tooltip (which only considers the initial hit) can be calculated simply by multiplying it with your total APS as well as your Chance to Hit (which is quite complicated to calculate - simply check your character screen):

Total APS = Weapon APS * (1 + sum(increased Attack Speed))

Tooltip DPS = Total Hit Damage * Total APS * Chance to Hit

VS DoT

Each tick of each charge does chaos damage of 25% of the initial hit per second, which is then further modified by bonuses to chaos and DoT damage as follows:

Damage per Second = 0.25 * Total Hit Damage * (1 + sum(increased Chaos Damage) + sum(increased Damage over Time))

Total DoT Damage = Damage per Second * 7 * (1 + sum(increased Duration))

This is, assuming the DoT stays on for the full duration.

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 could be a 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, since there is no upper limit on the number of degen charges that can be stacked.

Vulnerability Curse

Vulnerability is an especially good curse to use with Viper Strike. It has an immediate effect on the initial hit, which directly increases 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 VS damage.

Quest reward

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Vendor reward