Poison Creeper

[Crystalion]

damage of rabies and poison creeper are not added together.

This, I believe, was written in reply to QuickShifter writing:

Add rabies and PC for nice area of effect damage.

So I should clarify what I've said before, lest there be confusion.

Poison damage over *duration* time, does *not* stack (as of v1.10, though some versions of D2 do, iirc).

The (typically) tiny initial frame's worth slice of poison damage from attacks *does* "stack" (i.e. you'll get this damage from an attack even if the target is currently poisoned with a more powerful poison such that the new attack's duration poison is discarded/ignored).

Now the Poison Creeper's mats are something of a rare and special case, because when (and only when!) more than one target is on the mat in close proximity to another target, the submissiles that make up the mat go nutso, apparently throwing their poison attack at the targets each frame.

In simple terms, Rabies and PC will not work together normally. However, the "nutso" situation of uber PC mat effectiveness, should not, afaik, be impeded by the targets already being poisoned (by any source, including Rabies).

In other words, I currently believe there is nothing wrong with using Rabies with PC, other than the fact that *only* the nutso damage situation of PC mats will then be useful, in practice.

In short, however, PC isn't very useful in Hell, unless you're making use of the nutso effect, and so I'm presuming that anyone reading this thread will not be overly interested in using the mats "normally".

Caveat Emptor: the current theory and research about how/why this anomalous PC effectiveness arises does not include, afaik, careful controlled confirmation of this "nutso" stacking with other poisons effect... and I am not in a position to do such a complex test for at least a week (I'm on a trip).

p.s. I'm not very impressed with the damage output of either fully synergized Rabies or of the nutso mats in Hell difficulty unless you either have a lot of patience and some clever method of crowd control or alternately some other powerful attack... YMMV. But in normal/nm they both seem really really powerful to me.