Combat Medic Archive

OK, I wanted to know how poisons stack with each other, how diseases stack with each other, and how poisons and diseases stack together. Some very interesting stuff came out of this testing. If you want to skim, the key stuff is in red

I tested using the following meds. I deliberately left them pathetic (other than potency) in order to keep my target alive to see the results -

Action area poison A -20 effectiveness (40 damage)

Action Poison A -22 effectivenss (44 damage)

Action Poison B - 27 effectivenss (54 damage)

Action Poison C - 38 effectiveness (76 damage)

Action Disease A - 18 effectivenss (around 47 wound damage?)

Action Area Disease A - 16 effectivenss (around 43 wound damage?)

Quickness Disease A

Health Disease A

Timers

Disease Usage

• Disease operates on a 40 second timer


• Diseases with the same target stat will not stack. For example, my action area A did not stack with my action A. If I threw the weaker one (area) first, the stronger one (single target) would replace the weaker one. Subsequent throws of the weaker one would always get resisted while the stronger one was still in effect. Subsequent throws of the stronger one would stick, but I do not know if this extended the duration or not (did not do any tests on duration).


• Diseases with different target stats will stack. Health, quickness, and action diseases all caused wounds on their own 40 second timers (based on when the disease was applied).


• When disease tick, the white (damage portion) of the HAM bar stays constant. This has the effect of increasing the black portion and decreasing the healthy portion by an amount equal to the wound.


• If no pre-existing damage exist, the wound will stop at +1 HAM.


• If pre-existing damage exists, the wound will incapacitate the target.


• If the target does not heal the pre-existing damage or cure the disease after they get back up from incap, adisease will kill the target after 3 incaps. As expected the grace period has been removed.

Poison Usage

This is where the fun starts

• Poison operates on a 10 second timer. The poison timer surprised me because everyone seems to take 8 seconds as gospel. It does appear like the first tick of damage takes 8 seconds from the first "burn" sign, but subsequent ticks are definitely 10 seconds each. I suspect that lag between the thrower, server, and recipient is responsible for a small delay in the target receiving the poison message and that the timer is really 10 seconds on the first tick.


• Poisons against different stats will stack. We knew this already.


• You cannot stack poisons using the same poison pack. For example, Using the single target B poison twice did not increase the poison rate. No big surprise.


• Poisons of the sameschematic (i.e. two separate single target Bs) will not stack. Again, no surprise.


• Poisons of different schematics will stack. I stacked a single target A, area A, single target B, and single target C all on the same action pool and all 4 ticked (on their own timers) within the 10 second window. Total observed damage was 210 (not exact due to speed of damage and regen), which is right around the expected 214 (40 + 44 + 54 + 76).


• Poisons will stop at +1 HAM. They will still be active. Normal HAM regen can occur between ticks. While active they willreturn the HAM to 1 every 10 seconds. This is the known dot change from the patch and it behaves as expected.

Stacking Poisons with Disease

And the fun continues

• Any single disease on a stat will stack with any poison(s) on the same stat. These will operate on their own timers. I did stack the 4 poisons and one of the diseases simultaneously.


• A consequence of wounds decreasing the healthy portion and poisons reducing the healthy portion to 1 is that stacking a poison with a disease will incapacitate the target

That's all you need to know. Until SOE fixes this (assuming that they do), poison + disease = incap or death to target. But the other new news (well, people have speculated, but I've never seen any direct evidence) is that B poisons stack with C poisons (and A for that matter if you are a masochist). You can theoretically stack 6 poisons on the same stat. Oh yeah, and you can add a disease

I'm not thrilled with the inability to do 10 points of damage in PvP (using a novice marksman DH17 carbine and overcharge shot I was doing 80 to 200 points of pre-armor damage - sure that's 8 to 20 points to the 2 stats that weren't directly hit, but after 75% AR1 composite, that 80 to 200 becomes 10 to 25, so the 8 to 20 becomes 1 to 2.5 - ouch!). But for now, we alternate ways to incapacitate targets (actually kill them if it's a mind disease...) within 40 seconds (which isn't as nice as 20 or 30 seconds, but oh well...).

Interesting, thanks for writing this.

That is AWESOME news Happymob!

I tacked this to the top of my screen... good work!

My area C diseases tick every 20 seconds

Good info... I probably need to test area and single target C poisons as well as C diseases to time them. The timing was done with A level meds. A 20 second timer would be very welcome.

Great work, Happymob, thanks for taking the time to let us know.

Thanks alot for the great information!

1 cure poison application cures all stacked poisons right?If not docs are going to think their cure stims are bugged

Wow I didn't know you could stack A with B and C poisons, I'll have to check that one out myself lateron.

Thanks for the info

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1 cure poison application cures all stacked poisons right?If not docs are going to think their cure stims are bugged

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Good question. I'll test this when I test tick time on the higher, experimented diseases and poisons.