Talk:Poison Arrow

Poisoning demons

It almost certainly did as of 0.9. Not adding, as it either might have changed or my memory might be faulty, but I'm pretty sure I remember it working. Since demons are all rPois, Poison Arrow is really not very effective in general against them, so it's something that rarely comes up. -Ion frigate (talk) 22:16, 21 August 2013 (CEST)

It's a spell I've never used, but the bits and pieces I've read about it in various places seems to state that it's best against natural holiness opponents, okay against demonic, and bad against undead. There actually are some demons that can be poisoned (mostly 5s and then Antaeus), so it seems like they'd have poison resistance, not poison immunity. *shrug* Perhaps I'll just run a venom mage someday and find out firsthand. --MoogleDan (talk) 22:30, 21 August 2013 (CEST)

It's actually really weird. BEAM_POISON_ARROW checks monster::has_lifeforce() in order to inflict the poison status on poison-resistant enemies, but NOT for non-poison resistant enemies. The function has_lifeforce() checks for plant or natural holiness. So the upshot is that poison-resistant demons take damage appropriate for their resistance, but are not inflicted with poison. Non-poison-resistant ones both take full poison damage and are inflicted with poison (this would even be true of a non-poison resistant non-living monster). So that would be why I remember poison arrow poisoning demons, but it doesn't usually. Honestly this sounds like a bug - it should either check the holiness for both or neither case. -Ion frigate (talk) 00:19, 22 August 2013 (CEST)

Oh those wacky devs. Thanks Ion! --MoogleDan (talk) 13:52, 22 August 2013 (CEST)