Hi all, I've had the urge to make a character that focuses on using poisons. But I've run into a couple of issues with this idea:
1. Poisons are very expensive.
2. Many of the poison DC's are too low to be effective.
I'm trying to find ways around these two problems. I figure that if I craft the poisons using craft (alchemy), I will be able to save some gold.
I'm not sure what to do about the second problem, though.
Does anyone know of any options out there that will help make poison use viable? Are there any feats or equipment that will help increase the deadliness of toxins?
I will more than likely be playing an alchemist, by the way.
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Hi all, I've had the urge to make a character that focuses on using poisons. But I've run into a couple of issues with this idea:1. Poisons are very expensive.
2. Many of the poison DC's are too low to be effective.I'm trying to find ways around these two problems. I figure that if I craft the poisons using craft (alchemy), I will be able to save some gold.
I'm not sure what to do about the second problem, though.Does anyone know of any options out there that will help make poison use viable? Are there any feats or equipment that will help increase the deadliness of toxins?
I will more than likely be playing an alchemist, by the way.
Well you are in luck then! Depending on your level you can do a number of things to make it easier and playing an alchemist is just what you are looking for which I will innumerate below.
First bonus is the poison resistance and use from the class that will help if you ever are exposed in the process of making or using it.
The discovery Concentrate poison allows you to increase the DC of any poison by 2 and add 50% to its duration. Depending on how much poison you have available you can concentrate multiple doses and make even nastier poisons.
For example
You have 20 doses of Bloodroot
Boil down 16 does to make 8 doses of concentrated Bloodroot(DC 14 1/round 6 rounds).
Boil down those 8 doses to make 4 doses of double-concentrated poison(DC 16 1/round 9 rounds).
Boil those 4 down for 2 doses of triple-concentrate(DC 18 1/round 13 rounds)
Do it once more and you have an uber concentrated Bloodroot(DC 20 1/round 19 rounds) and it only took you 8 minutes and it cost you 1600g in mats which you can reduce by 2/3 if you craft them all yourself. This poison will only last an hour so make sure you dont waste it.
Next you can take the Sticky Poison discovery that allows a weapon to remain poisoned equal to a number of strikes equal to your Int mod. Level 6 requirement.
Aside from that once you hit level 3 crafting poisons only takes half the time it normally would This also stacks with the Master Alchemist feat (You can gain access to this at level 6) that allows you to create a number of poisons equal to your Int mod as well as speeding up the process of making any alchemical item (Not just poisons) by a factor of 10. Meaning in your downtime you will be chugging out poisons an a truly astounding rate.
As for making poisons more useful my suggestion is to diversify what you are carrying, and don't be afraid of ingested, inhaled, or contact poisons either. There is an item from the Adventurers Armory called the Syringe Spear that lets you inject poisons into the enemy as if they ingested, contacted, or were injured by it in addition to the normal damage it would do. Filling it requires 1 minute to do unfortunately so it is really only useful once a combat at best.
Also, don't forget you can poison your bombs too, so when you throw them the primary target it affected by the poison.
Feel free to ask me for any advice as well, hope this helps :D
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In terms of effective weapons for poisons the best way of getting it to work is by using any weapon you are more likely than not to hit with, be it a specialized weapon or otherwise. Daggers are typically the choice for carrying multiple poisoned weapons at once as they weigh very little but shuriken work GREAT if you have the proficiency with them because they are both ranged weapons and drawing them is a non-action.
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The problem with poisons is there are a TON of beasties and a few classes outright immune to them. In my current game another player had a homebrew class called the poisoner, write up on this forum, it was a neat concept but the amount of poison immune foes made it situational at best.
There are two ways to deal with the problem of poison immunity. First there's ravages from Book of Exalted Deeds. They effect ANY evil creature(and they add said creature's charisma mod to their damage), even those specifically immune to ability score damage of any kind like undead ect. They effect evil elementals, undead, clerics, outsiders and deities even more.
The second is have your alchemist invest half his feats/discoveries in bombing. Anything that isn't evil and is immune to poisons plan to assist with by bombing.
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Drow poison is the stuff. Spread it like water on everything. Then when you get a little higher level concentrate it then spread it.
If you are making an alchemist get sticky poison and use it. Don't apply it to single use weapons (arrows/ bolts/ shuriken) since it is expensive.
Hmm... that's about it. Deathblade is a decent goto poison at higher levels, if you craft it and use sticky poison the price gets down to a reasonable level.
If you craft poisons you probably want to take the master alchemist feat so you can craft 4-5 doses at a time and much faster.
My brain isn't entirely in gear right now so that's it
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The discovery Concentrate poison allows you to increase the DC of any poison by 2 and add 50% to its duration. Depending on how much poison you have available you can concentrate multiple doses and make even nastier poisons.
For example
You have 20 doses of Bloodroot
Boil down 16 does to make 8 doses of concentrated Bloodroot(DC 14 1/round 6 rounds).
Boil down those 8 doses to make 4 doses of double-concentrated poison(DC 16 1/round 9 rounds).
Boil those 4 down for 2 doses of triple-concentrate(DC 18 1/round 13 rounds)
Do it once more and you have an uber concentrated Bloodroot(DC 20 1/round 19 rounds) and it only took you 8 minutes and it cost you 1600g in mats which you can reduce by 2/3 if you craft them all yourself. This poison will only last an hour so make sure you dont waste it.
In theory this works, but it takes 15 min to brew the whole thing. 1 min each for the 8 concentrated, 4 double, 2 triple, and 1 uber. 8+4+2+1=15. Also, the very first dose of concentrated poison spoils 1 hour after you make it, or 46 minutes after you finish the uber-poison which, arguably will spoil the whole thing. This would put a hard limit of 5 concentrations, requiring 32 does of poison, 31 min, and the resultant poison would be good for another 30 min.
Keep in mind, that is for the Alchemist.
If you make a Rogue(Poisoner) the results take even longer. You're looking at having to take the Master Alchemist feat, and even with Skill Focus, you're looking at three days to manage a batch of poison at 1st level. I'm still looking into feats or processes to shorten that time, since classing into Alchemist is not really ideal.
There's this feat HERE, then the Master Alchemist feat, but it still isn't easy.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but there's rules for modifying poison during it's creation in the Kingdoms of Kalamar Players Guide. You can give a poison a +5 DC for a 50% increase in cost and a +10 craft DC, though it doesn't really put a limit on it, I think 5 is the intended cap (DC 40 Drow poison? EEK!). You can also make poisons deal more damage(and more types of it), and while that gets insanely pricey, adding Int damage to a sticky poison can prove fatal in a single round of combat.
You can also use a Cityscape weapon enhancement Assassination (+1) which adds 1 to the DC of any poison it's coated with per enhancement (+5 Assassination Dagger = +5 DC to poisons it delivers).
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Do it once more and you have an uber concentrated Bloodroot(DC 20 1/round 19 rounds) and it only took you 8 minutes and it cost you 1600g in mats which you can reduce by 2/3 if you craft them all yourself. This poison will only last an hour so make sure you dont waste it.
Having a duration of 19 rounds is kind of pointless, even with a +2 fort save you are making the DC 20 save in 10 rounds. The poisons that require 2 consecutive saves to cure are much much harder to resist. Also, the slow rate it acts makes it only marginally effective in combat.
Compare this to deathblade, roughly the same cost and it's DC 20 it requires 2 consecutive saves and works twice as fast... much better for the money.
Dragon Bile. No cure... DC 26. Strength based but extremely difficult to resist and capable of putting a low strength character on the floor. No cure means regardless of how many saves they make it has to run it's course. Concentrating this to make a DC 28 and 9 rounds of damage, now that's brutal but twice the cost... and strength damage isn't as good as con damage :(
Drow poison... put them out of the fight and it's dirt cheap. Crafting and using sticky poison it's only 5gp/ hit. Cheap enough that you can afford it not working 9 times out of 10 and it's still not a bad deal.
I don't know if you can concentrate poison multiple times, the rules are silent on it. Seems like most of the time it's not really worth it anyhow.
If you can coordinate with another player the spell pernicious poison is a death sentence on the right target.
Let's say we have a witch a barbarian and yourself. Witch uses evil on bad guy targeting saves, barbarian runs up with her spell storing greataxe and connects, discharging her pernicious poison spell (no save). At 8th level and above that's a -8 to saves.
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reviving an old message here X-D
couldn't find quickly rules for how easy / hard to contact with poison when handling a weapon that has poison applied.
interested in:
- chance of contact (i.e. % roll?)
- save (same as poison, would be best guess)
i was told only a measly 5% of contact it (e.g. a pc inadvertently picks up an assassin's blade and it makes contact on herself or an ally).
i was thinking pc would easily contact poison if not aware -- as pc grabs that cool weapon after dispatching foe.
but it ended up having only 5% of contact, and fort dc 12 (sad rofl) -- poison use sucks on a average adventure then / element of surprise.
is there actual rules written somewhere, or is so not worth it that they didn't write anything for it?
thx
Mid to high level tactic for wood kineticists with a couple blast infusions, however they never run out, it has a scaling DC and it costs them nothing.
Nagaji venomblade. provides a significant penalty to saves, lots of free poison but not limiteless.
There's an alchemist archetype that gets basically limitless poison but its not strong, but its free and scales and eventually gets pretty good.
Otherwise something like drow sleep poison and its a backup.
Helps if the party is willing to let you sneak into a camp, throw like five doses of an ingested poison into the stew pot so the save dc is all high then wait things out too.
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reviving an old message here X-Dcouldn't find quickly rules for how easy / hard to contact with poison when handling a weapon that has poison applied.
interested in:
- chance of contact (i.e. % roll?)
- save (same as poison, would be best guess)i was told only a measly 5% of contact it (e.g. a pc inadvertently picks up an assassin's blade and it makes contact on herself or an ally).
i was thinking pc would easily contact poison if not aware -- as pc grabs that cool weapon after dispatching foe.
but it ended up having only 5% of contact, and fort dc 12 (sad rofl) -- poison use sucks on a average adventure then / element of surprise.
is there actual rules written somewhere, or is so not worth it that they didn't write anything for it?
thx
If the weapon is actually trapped there's a real chance, but if it's just poisoned for use then there's a 5% chance of poisoning yourself as you pick it up at most.
The Virulent weapon enhancement adds the weapon's enchantment bonus to the DC of any poison applied to it. It's not PFS legal, but neither is fun, so I it's totally up to you (or your GM).
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reviving an old message here X-Dcouldn't find quickly rules for how easy / hard to contact with poison when handling a weapon that has poison applied.
interested in:
- chance of contact (i.e. % roll?)
- save (same as poison, would be best guess)i was told only a measly 5% of contact it (e.g. a pc inadvertently picks up an assassin's blade and it makes contact on herself or an ally).
i was thinking pc would easily contact poison if not aware -- as pc grabs that cool weapon after dispatching foe.
but it ended up having only 5% of contact, and fort dc 12 (sad rofl) -- poison use sucks on a average adventure then / element of surprise.
is there actual rules written somewhere, or is so not worth it that they didn't write anything for it?
thx
The issue with poisons is that they are typically prohibatively expensive for what they do. You can find the rules to poisons here and here. It's the same information on both sites. I find D20 better organized, but I provided the nethys link because it's an "official source".
Anyway, there is a 5% static chance that you poison yourself when you are attempting to apply poison to a weapon. Poison Use negates that chance. This is the only thing poison use does. You also poison yourself when you roll a nat 1 on an attack roll with a poisoned weapon. Poison use does nothing to stop this, but my guess is most DMs house rule that it does.
Otherwise, unless it's an actual trap, you do no risk poisoning yourself just picking the weapon up. The same way you don't risk cutting yourself when you pick up a weapon that's sharp. This makes sense because usually it's the pointy end that's poisoned and most people don't pick weapons up by the pointy end. How often do you cut yourself from just picking up a cooking knife?
The only way a character can make regular use of poison is if they can have something that is cheap and scales with level. In addition to the methods mentioned by Ryan Freire. The serpentine bloodline which can be picked up by sorcerers or anyone taking eldritch heritage, provides a poison attack that scales with level. Unfortunately, while it's free you only get so many per day.
Edit: Then, there's the problem that there are large groups of monsters that are just flat immune to poison. Meaning even after spending effort on abilities to make your poison worthwhile, it will do nothing when fighting certain enemies. Enemies that are commonly encountered in most games at all levels.
Poison has very little support for its effective use. There seems to be no in-game methods to get around poison immunity, which as previously stated, is quite prevalent. The game included ways to get past immunity to fear, but not poison.
Even a level 20 Serpentine Sorcerer with Scaled Soul, which allows them to use Serpent's Fang as often as they desire, is only going to have a DC ~25 save... which isn't awesome. And even that's being quite generous with a 20 Constitution factored in. Maybe a DC 27 if you can take Ability Focus for it.
At that level, any Fortitude save DC below 30 is pretty much automatically passed by everything except the most foolish and ill-prepared of adventurers.