I used to use Blight religiously because I thought that I'd be able to stack the Blight at such high volumes that it would outpace Poison's DoT. Once I discovered that Poison deals % of total Health damage, I realized that Poison is objectively better in the longest runs. It's a shame because I really, really want Blight to work. It synergizes extremely well with my personal play style.
@@dinodan1803 Well, these tests show that even if you speedrun to mithrix, poison still does more to a lot of the enemies and most importantly, mithrix. Even if blight was better early, getting to just press 1 button then run in circles is a way easier way to win, even if it is more boring. If anything, hopoo should buff blight, but they likely never will since they do not find balance to be important.
This is probably the most complete and balanced comparison between the two skills I have ever seen, and it's obvious you put in a ton of work to make it that way. I hope this reaches all corners of the ROR2 community!
never thought about that, interesting. Generally me and my friends don't like it when 2 people play the same survivor though, less competition for the same items, and the increased diversity is more fun to us
Every single time my brother plays Poison, he always says “I shoulda went with Blight.” Yet, when he plays Blight, he ends up wishing he went with Poison! 😂
Poison is better for damage, but it makes you wish you're with Blight because you'll have like 20 Wisps at 1 health with no way of killing them in time. Blight just servers for actually getting rid of them but makes you wish you had more damage.
It's not really that much different of a build - the absolutely crazy stacks of CDR were only there to get Epidemic down to 0.5 seconds, which allows the purest comparison between the two passives. A single Purity is enough to get max CDR on Bite or Spit.
@@shrunker684 Now it acts like burn or hemorrage, I understand your argument and you're right, bu what if it would be % of totaldamage or dps times the stackt amount?
My best advice for newcomers to the game is to avoid the official risk of rain discord for questions about the game for reasons like that :) Welcome in though!
I always had the perception that Poison was just objectively better than blight, and that blight needed some other edge on Poison to make it the optimal choice for some situations. It's interesting to see some of that stance validated by the results of the testing.
That video was so well done and researched! We talked the other day on YoShiffy's stream. As a new Acrid main (the last 4 days I've been loving playing the little pooch) Thank you for the obscene amount of detail and effort bud!
Honestly the fact that blight does less damage in a one stack case and only a bit more with two it should make sense it should have an advantage to either help it stack faster compared to poison but that five second lifespan kills it so hard even with max CD. Wonder how many results would change if blight had better damage or time duration to make it compete better.
ye, and a lot of survivors kits need to have some abilities buffed or at least changed as well. notably id put having some way for rex's self damage mechanic to work either in hand with or around the E8 modifiers, since they completely close off his self damage playstyle entirely, or hunteress' arrow rain which is pretty much objectively worse than ballista in almost everyway.
Blight only makes noticeable advantage on max cdr, when normally piles of dps items will already destroy without blight or poison practically. Which means practically blight is far worse.
Sort of true. With 2 purities I've found that you can get 7-10 blight stacks on a single target with just M2 + R. I've found this is a great build when on multiplayer to let your allies take on hit items and you can get by with less.
@@Hectorlphyou can get by with less on poison acrid too, and even more so since his damage scales with the enemy’s hp and blight doesn’t. Blight is possibly more optimal if you run a purity or two, but preferably just run it if there are two acrids in the game, since poison can’t stack.
Great comparisons and analysis! Thank you for being brave and covering this topic as a smaller ror RU-vidr. I'm scared that you-know-who might bully and vilify you for this as well, but it seems like you know what you're getting into lol I've subbed and look forward to more videos like this! Keep it up! :)
The incorrect info deserved to be called out, you should scroll through the comments, you might see a familiar face. Thanks for enjoying the content :)
Hell yes the glory of good method! Gratz on the video sir, and amazing job on the test design. And yeah, at the end of the day, use what skill you want :)
fantastic video! thank you for confirming what I always say, blight needs some small buff, to make it feel more worth its time. My idea is perhaps to provide a 1% attack speed and speed de-buff per stack of blight. This isn't insane, but considering how close blight is in allot of its so called "better" scenarios, I think this small buff could really help level the playing field, giving it a more support based choice
It's worth noting Blight's Shaped Glass and Spinel Tonic synergy still, since those are base damage and not bonus damage. But two lunars existing isn't a very good argument for something.
Sorry if I'm missing something important here, but wouldn't these increase Poison's damage output by an equivalent amount? How would these two items put Blight at an advantage? I'm also fairly confident that the other base damage items (Focus Crystal, Delicate Watch, Armor Piercing Rounds, etc.) also affect base damage in the same way as these lunars, so I'm not entirely sure where you are getting the idea of other base damage items only applying "bonus damage". Are you able to explain how these are different?
@@gamerh0st Poison's %health damage isn't impacted by base damage items. Those are the only two base damage items in the game, along with Irradiant Pearl. It'd still increase damage if you're not hitting %health damage, but most of the time in the mid-late game you're going to be hitting it regardless. Bonus damage items such as Watch, AP, Focus Crystal, and Rachis increase %health damage too.
@@Kirn. I would love to see the evidence behind base damage items not effecting %health damage because it completely does. I did the testing for this and can provide you the evidence of this if you would like it.
It'll increase the upper limit of the %health damage (Because it's capped at 5000% per second) and increase the floor for damage (Since it's at least 100%) but anything between the two will be unchanged until you hit the 5000% cap pre-base damage buffs.
I like Poison better myself but devil’s advocate, the lethal damage of blight can make the early game easier and let Acrid get ahead in items to more easily snowball into a god run where it no longer matters which passive you have. That said though, Acrid’s already very good at breezing through the early game, that’s not a weakness that needs addressing
The one thing which wasnt tested in this vid, regardless the best test would be to have skilled plaayers play the same seeds with each passive and compare them in real runs Which would still favor poison because blight is kneecapped as a passive in the first place
i knows its super late but even with blight being lethal all it really means is that wisps die easier, which while fair is not really that relevant, cuz you can just press R run away from the wisps then come back and R again, blight is just bad period
Great tests and analysis. It hurts knowing my favorite choice is a bit weaker, especially late game. I think the only thing not considered in this is multiplayer. It's pretty conclusive the poison is better or roughly equal to blight in all solo scenarios. That said, if you are letting teammates take on-hit/proc items, you can rush a max cooldown build very early and be pretty successful with just 2+ purities, and on death items (gasoline, wisps, etc). It's similar to tests 14-16, but you spam M2 + R (+ Shift for stunlocking some enemies). Add in a visions of heresy and you become a turret with that cooldown reduction as well. So my point is that blight is better for multiplayer since many characters depend on on-hit or crit to succeed, so you can take blight and cooldowns to compliment your team by letting teammates get super powerful while also relying on heavy blight damage to carry you until you get wisps or a forgive me please build going.
I take Blight out of personal preference. I don't know if playstyle comes into account as much because I think people can argue my playstyle fits into Poison better. To specify, I spam skills a lot, that alone can justify some of Blight, but another thing is that I get into a separate build in the rest of the run, not exactly focusing on either of Acrid's passives, so maybe some people would say, "Why not go for Poison then, its a lot stronger generally, it scales off the enemy's max HP so especially on Mithrix it's going to do better, basically you get more damage overall". Honestly man, I don't know. Maybe it's the Lethal factor? I probably got spoiled by that fact that I get a little bothered leaving enemies at 1 HP, even with the knowledge of my other skills doing base damage to kill them anyway. For early game, I wouldn't really wanna waste my skills and wait for their cooldowns just to kill someone whos at 1 HP only to be ambushed by 176 other Blind Pests and Clay Apothecaries after I get that one kill. So I guess TL,DR: I prefer Blight because I can focus on an enemy specifically and not have to worry about them because I know they'll die to Blight.
This is also why I prefer blight. You can infect enemies early game and move on and know they’ll die. Poison leaves a lot of 1hp enemies running around that you’d have to attack again - god forbid they’re flying enemies too cus you’d have to rely on your spit cooldown to take em down one by one. This boost early game is a big advantage. In later levels neither blight or poison fees like it has much of an effect cus you’re doing so much damage through other means anyways, so blight wins for me as it has that advantage early game
Okay, I'm now enlightened by noakuu's reply. I don't think I've been noticing it at all but it does help with early game especially with flying enemies. Needing to hit them twice with Poison, I prefer when it just kills, even with Epidemic some flying enemies can be too high when R is aimed at the ground, and there is that possibility to just miss and get into cooldown. Even if someone were to just say "aim better", I think I would still prefer the immediate lethality from early-game blight
I don't like melee Acrid but I still use blight I do use his primary to get close and his secondary I always keep it on spit because I like it way more plus blight is more fun for me also the best thing to do is if you have a friend that is an Acrid main just play with him and let him use poison while you use blight or vice versa because when you mix both of them then it's very fun
Acrid just doesn't have a lot of reliable ways to continually proc Blight to stack it for insane damage. Like, if you get a couple of Tri-Tip Blades for Commando, you're stacking bleeds quick because his primary has both high fire and proc rates. All Acrid has to apply Poison/Blight are his Spit and Epidemic skills, both of which only apply the debuff once. You're best bet is stack Magazines to Spit multiple times, but it's still meh. Poison just seems like less of a hassle to get use out of than Blight, even if it doesn't kill enemies outright.
The ONE scenario that pulled me off of poison for some considerable time was when the teleporter boss was 3+ clay dunestriders. The poison brings them all low health relatively together, and then they all suck each other back to full HP. I was actually softlocked in the run and had to restart.
In conclusion: *Poison* will do *better* in *the long run* because of it's "Target's max hp% damage" and with slower playstyle/not many cooldown reducing items *Blight* will do *better early* on or with many cooldown reducing items but will fall quickly behind poison if you still have the base cooldowns Remember that poison only needs 100 seconds of uptime *no matter your damage* on an enemy to bring it to 1 hp, this helps greatly later on when enemies turn really tanky and you still don't have good damage options
the thing to point out is that AP rounds work with poison, even just getting 10 of them is more than enough to make all bosses dies in a reasonable time period, blight is objectively worse
Wonder if blight would be better if it scaled exponentially but had a cap allowing for basically bursts of higher tick damage. Or maybe blight could have higher proc coefficient
Even if you only do some napkin math, as long as you can keep poison up reliably, _minimum damage_ on poison will always outscale blight unless you're applying blight _more_ than three times every ten seconds. And if enemy health is high enough for Poison to scale at all, the math just gets worse and worse for Blight. Blight is only conceivably better against fodder enemies with so little health that the marginal gains in dps aren't needed.
I was going to bring up how there’re methods for doing a faster damage over time application without the need of accounting for cooldowns, increasing the effective maximum stacks… but that’s even more unlikely to achieve (Attack Speed Stacking + Backup Mag + Bind M2 ability to scroll wheel to the point that it’s better than just getting 0.5 cooldown on everything)
Blight needs a serious rework to be a viable and reliable sidegrade to poison. As it stands it is worse is every realistic scenario, and only outperforms poison in extremely advantageous conditions. Just buffing the damage of blight is boring and unoriginal and runs the risk of it becoming stronger than poison, continuing the vicious cycle. I've been thinking of a rework inspired by the heart of heresy and it's ruin debuff, where you deal more damage the more debuffs you have stacked. It could make for a perfect combo build and also be an alternate burst damage playstyle for acrird instead of his usual DoT playstyle. Applying blight stacks a debuff similar to current blight, but it has no timer and doesn't go away unless the enemy dies and the enemy who has been debuffed by it takes more damage from your skills the more stacks of blight they have been inflicted by, with no limit to how high you can stack the debuff. This would help blight not deviate from its current role of stacking debuff while also making it a perfectly good sidegrade. I can already imagine doing 30K damage to a boss, and that boss proccing a 100K damage atg to completely obliterate some other poor soul
that seems like an amazing idea and it isnt just "make new stacks refresh old stacks" wich a few mods already do now we just need an experienced modder to do this
None of these scenarios were realistic, 40+ minutes with 0 items? When you get items and proc chains Poison's strength of high damage over time is lost due to doing more damage denying time while Blight's lethal factor shines despite doing less damage killing enemies Poison would've kept alive. You're basically choosing between 1 more hit or chance of no more hit.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 the fact that poison doesnt kill is only a problem until you get even 1 on death/on hit item, so its a non exsisting problem in late game, also neither poison nor blight have a proc chance, so poison benefits just as much from proc chains as blight
The only scenario I see where you can feasibly use blight is if you're going for glass on acrid... and even then you can get outscaled pretty hard by poison just because it scales for you
Dang, would be cool if they buffed blight by giving it some sort of special effect, like it ignores shields, stops enemy healing, etc. That way it would be more of a "damage vs utility" choice, rather than one being overall just better
*note: this following comment may come off as patronizing to blight acrid fans, i want to assure you it is not my intention, imo blight acrid fans are gigachad* Fret not, blight acrid fans who don't like that poison generally outperforms it, there is a solution to this dilemma: Mods! I'm sure there's mods that buff Blight. And if not, there are modded survivors that also use stackable DoT's as a huge part of their kit. I can think of 2: Nemesis Commando from Starstorm 2, and Desolator from the Tesla Trooper mod. Both are very fun, although I don't have Starstorm 2 downloaded anymore because I felt like it added too much stuff I didn't like and I didn't want to go disable 90% of the mod in config. Also Nemesis Commando's DoT stacks infinitely lol
So according to your data in this video. It seems that poison is faster or only slightly slower at killing mithix than blight is at killing mithix in almost all runs, While blight with max cdr (and God mode) is faster in late game at clearing elite mobs and teleporter bosses. Thanks for taking the time to test all of these things.
unless you grinding donuts... you can get mastery with obliteration... and you can get that with beads. Mithrix is an ass and I'll go void and feck with the creb before his ass. let me be a vomit dog. I like the idea of blight. I'm dumb and poison is easy.
from how each works poison is better final phase because no items means nothing to poison itll still do set scaling dmg meaning can get items back from mithrix faster vs blight being nerfed in phase 4 dmg wise if you are on say monsoon or a run ran a big long or are looping
I think if his melee applied poison/blight it'd make Blight way better, even if just the 3rd hit applied Blight he could get a bunch of attack speed and stack it
I feel like the lack of items outside of cd items really skews this unfavorably towards poison since Blight fricking scales infinitely with damage where as Poison is capped by your base damage which generally doesn't get very high
Wow, who would've guessed, "Melee" Acrid's damage comes from his claws, and not which passive you use, and the selection seems... Rather obvious of the two of which one you'd pick based on the information presented in this video.
well, I mean, they is the most mobile survivor. why punch things when you can just vomit; and it is acid and fire and electricity? and maybe a feather if you can't jump scrub.
If blight doesn't even reset duration like bleed, why does it even do less damage per stack to poison. Just nerf leap-zone application tick-rate and increase the base damage from 60% to 100%.
something to consider for mithrax is final phase blight loses a ton of dmg potential thanks to losing items at start of phase hurting its dmg and overall capability to keep it on him poison wont care and will do % of his health dmg getting your items back faster and a better chance to kill him especially if you take a long time or are on mid to high difficulty modes where he can just one shot you if you cant get a chunk of damage in to steal items back meaning poison will do it better letting you focus on not getting clobbered in those scenarios solo or will help by just doing flat solid dmg in team play
Probably my biggest criticism of this game is that so many skills are just pointless. Sure unlocking a new, much better ability felt cool on the game boy or something, but having an actual balanced kit that offers more diversity of play is way more interesting and replayable
I would test it by setting the attack damage to 1 damage or 0% damage, that way you can use every ability as it comes off cooldown and not worry about change in outcome. Would let you play exactly as you normally would. With something like a TAS, you could do a normal fight first (every attack damages), then replay the same inputs but with 0 attack damage, until the fight would normally end. At that point, you can then see the exact amount of damage that either poison or blight contributed to a kill.
Blight ime works fine if not even better in the early game but falls off HARD in the late game when acrid needs to be more strategic about when and where he goes in for attacks
Just as a heads up, at around 15:24, Test 11 shows poison as being faster than blight but says that the winner was Blight anyway. Great video all round otherwise!
It seems to me that the biggest deciding factor here is raw DPS (poison) vs easier weak enemy clearing (blight). I always preferred blight over poison despite the damage difference because of its simple "fire and forget" method of dealing with wisps. I have a feeling that people who prefer blight really prefer to focus on gathering items in stage 1 and/or play with artifact of swarms. Even though I prefer blight, I did notice it became useless to the point of imperceptible after about 10 minutes on monsoon difficulty. It seems like blight is for rushing actual kills and getting money for chests, easing the difficulty earlier but making boss fights rely entirely on your items.
Sucks that we’ll probably never see a reworked blight this passive needs something to keep it viable late-game bad it should never be the case that the passive more reliant on heavy management of uptime should be consistently beaten out by the drop it and forget it style of passive
It is still viable late game, late game you have a lot of items and are procing things. Throwing a Blight Epidemic when you have Gas, Uku, and AtG is going to be as effective as poison since the chain is liable to kill things but if it doesn't Blight can which will chain Gas. Remember this video has 0 proper testing. Yes it isolated the passives... but no one uses just Acrid's passives 40 minutes into a match.
@Dragoonsoul7878 Bruh, how can you say that? We are here to test blight vs. Poison, not items. The test shows that poison has higher dps overall. Items do the most killing late game doesn't change the fact that poison has more dps.
Does poison's 1% maximum health damage per second scale with Watches, AP Rounds, and/or Shaped Glass? I wasn't sure if they scaled up that or just the alternative 100% damage per second that it could also do. If its both then yes those items wouldn't help any one version more than the other, if they're only impacting the 100% version of poison, then any time you're doing a test where Poison would sometimes trigger as the 1% health and not the 100% damage, then those items would impact blight more than they would Poison. Whichever the case is I wasn't sure based on your initial explanation of why you aren't using them that you provided in the video.
Poison always chooses the higher of the two between 1% of the target's max HP or your base 100% damage. So if you stack so many damage items that a 100% attack would take off more than 1% of the target's HP then it will do that much damage instead. IE one tick of poison will always do more damage than one tick of a single stack of blight.
I don't understand how there could be drama over this. Anyone who has actually tried using blight soon realize it's only slightly better than poison at stage 1 and then slowly gets worse over time.
It has worse scaling at the advantage of not being capped, no? If it has (60% damage )x (amount) it has the potential to surpass the poison cap at one point?! I haven’t played this game so dunno how much you can boost your damage…
The only other thing you really need to know is that blight stacks run out after 5 seconds. Each stack is independent so it cannot be collectively reset to infinitely increase damage. And given the enemy HP scales much faster than your ability to stack blight, poison is the better choice. The only time it's not is when you on the first or second stage in the game where the scaling isn't as heavy. This is assuming you're on monsoon however, the hardest of 3 available difficulties. (excluding eclipse)
The Bleed debuff, which can be applied by a number of items, stacks and does renew. Tbh they should've just made blight bleed to balance it with poison
I prefer to use blight because of its ability to kill. In the early game this can be much more useful when you don't have many items that can take advantage of poison's ability to bring things down to 1hp. Once you get into longer runs with a larger variety of items, the fact poison ticks for more damage means less to the run than scoring proc chains with your skills and equipment.
I find it strange that over half the tests were using epidemic only (including all the max CDR tests), with just a few using the full kit. Wouldnt that be biasing this group of tests towards poison a lot?
I do explain my reasoning for the tests I did in the early part of the video that answers that question, and still provided good tests for all builds (except for neglecting frenzied leap) for comparisons. Anyone is always welcome to test different scenarios they feel like should have been tested, and I talk about that and provided all the tools for them to be able to do it in the later part of the video and description. It'd be awesome to see more data regarding different test scenarios. I just didn't have infinite time to think about, test, and edit 100s of different scenarios.
hmm, that reasoning at the beginning seemed kind of flawed to me, but I appreciate that you encourage others to conduct their own tests. It's a high quality video
@@groove_sad5867 it's because he wanted to test the damage of blight and not the other skills per say, since more often than not the majority of acrids damage comes from his skills regardless of poison or blight (which is what some of the additional test set out to do) it would probably be a good idea to make test with only spit, bite, leap or whatever to determin acrid overall damage throughout his kit
I would agree, but he never explicitly states that because poison had better test, it is therefore better. He instead urges the viewer to look at the data themselves and determine what they prefer. It goes without saying that certain test are going to be more important to look at than others. For example, a similar thing can be said about max cooldown reduction blight test, as there is almost no realistic scenario in which this would occur. However, in the same way the endemic test were done to show off a particular playstyle, the max cooldown test were done to show blight at its absolute best. So rather than looking at the cumulative, its better to look at each individual test and determine which best applies to your playstyle/preferred senario.
the cool thing about blight is that it scales with your dmg. Shaped Glass and Spinel Tonic for example increase its dmg. Poisons dmg can't be increased. Blight can definitely be much stronger than poison in some runs
What do you mean? If 100% of your damage is greater than a monsters health, poison will choose that damage instead. And 1% of a bosses health bar can be massive.
It’s funny because I’ve only been able to beat monsoon using acrid with blight. Tried using poison run after run before that because everyone says it’s objectively better but it just never felt like it was working out well. Blight has gotten me through many times now
probably because you're shit at finishing off 1 health targets but we've all been there, eventually you grow to understand how to get around poison's one downside and absolutely shit on all the high health bosses
Because this video doesn't show items in the equation. If you have a single Gas then Blight is very liable to kill and start a huge chain reaction. This is amplified with things like Uku and AtG which helps early game to get kills rather then Poison's follow up hit. As you get more items things like Mythrix being actively hit are going to make Poison and Blight have notably smaller gaps. With true late game it ultimately comes down to ensuring you need 1 more hit or a chance to 1-shot enemies. Till eventually neither matter.
This sucks. I wish that blight wasn't just inferior. It would provide more choice if you want to play fire and forget acrid or aggressor acrid. What's the chance that Hopoo will re-balance it?
It would be slightly better than poison against low max health enemies, and being able to actually finish off weak enemies like swarms of wisps might make it actually worth it as a quality of life pick. Still gets blown out in the late game as soon as the hp scaling on poison picks up at all.
If so it was definitely not intentional, proves that poison is just the reliable option if i did mess up on spawning the enemies while making the video