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Game Mechanics

A 'poison' is a Damage Over Time (DOT) attack. While a target is poisoned, their affected HAM bar will take on damage at every 20 second tick cycle of the poison after the target has been poisoned. As an example, if a player is hit with a 100 damage poison, 20 seconds passes by and then the player takes 100 damage. A poison will last until cured by the cure poison ability, teras kasi artist meditation, Force Cure poison, Total Heal Other, Total Heal Self abilities or its duration runs out. Each form of poison attack has a base chance (possibly a potency value) of applying the poison effect. This base chance is checked against the target's poison resistance to determine the ultimate percentage chance for the effect to land.

Poisons cannot be used to kill or incapacitate a target as it will only bring the target down to 1 point of HAM at the least. Poisons will be removed from the target when they are killed. Poisons can be stacked on the same ham pool of a target provided that the poison sources are different. As an example, a player can attack a target with an Action Poison A and Action Poison B poison pack and have both effects go off. When applying poisons from the same source type, the highest strength poison overwrites lower strength poison if the target is already poisoned on that particular ham pool by a similar type of poison. For example if a player uses a 100 strength Action Poison A and then uses a 200 strength Action Poison A, the 200 strength poison will overwrite the 100 strength.

Combat medic effectiveness skill modifiers are factors that work to affect poison damage.

Note: NPC and creature poisons may be stacked on a player or pet's same HAM pool even while using the same special. This was presumably done to make PvM more challenging to players. Player pets however do not have this functionality and are limited to the normal rules affecting players. When the same specials are used, the added damage gets included with the ticks therefore if a 150 damage dot was originally applied and a 2nd 150 dot from the same special is applied also, the next tick will be 300 damage. The creature/npc poison timers and ticks are probably refreshed as well.

Note: No known formula exists for calculating the chance of a poison to be applied to a target nor for the effects of poison resistance on these chances but there is probably a 5% base chance to apply a poison as well as a 5% chance to resist a poison attack, similar to the mechanics of other dots.

Poison Sources

Poisons have a number of sources including:

• Special Attacks
• Creature Attacks
• Inherent Weapon Features

Special Attacks

• Apply Poison -

Combat Medics have the ability to launch Poison canisters at enemy targets. These Poison canisters come in area of effect and single target varieties. Combat Medics have access to Poisons that can damage primary stats.

Creature Attacks

Creatures have access to five forms of diseases:

• Mild Poison
• Medium Poison
• Strong Poison
• Poison Spray

All creature Poison with the exception of poison spray target the health ham pool only. Poison spray acts as a multi pool targeting effect.

Note: During pre-cu it seems that the disease timer was affected by other things such as potentially CL or perhaps certain creatures were given custom timers for their disease duration. This information seems to be impossible to find so the timers for their disease durations can only be generalized within the range of data collected.

Note: The sarlacc disease is specific to the sarlacc creatures on dathomir and tatooine. If a player gets within a certain range of the sarlacc pit, they will be diseased (disease resistance apparently affects the chance for the sarlacc to apply the disease to the player). There is no data presently for the sarlaac disease strength but it is probably a strong disease variant.

Inherent Weapon Features

Weapons with inherent Poison will execute this effect on any target that is hit by the attacker. Weapons with inherent or potentially able to have Poison effects include:

• Donkuwah Knife
• Janta Knife
• Nyax Sword
• Exceptional Weapons
• Legendary Weapons

Presumably special attacks that utilize weapons with inherent Poison effects can be considered area of effect Poisons if the special utilizes an area of attack. The Poison effect from the weapon would attempt to apply its effect individually on each target within the radius on the attack if the Poisoned weapon has a radius attack or if an area of effect special is used with that given weapon. Weapons with inherent Poison effects also have a potency value which makes a check against the defender's Poison resist modifiers to determine the percentage chance of successfully applying the Poison effect. Dots from weapons will only execute on the target if the player is certified to use the weapon. Each successful hit on a target consumes one dot usage from the weapon.

Some things to note:

• Poisons from different weapons that apply their dot to the same ham stat will not stack with one another unless the weapon used are of different damage types, meaning two kinetic damage type weapons with dots will not stack but a kinetic and energy based weapon dot will stack on the same HAM pool. - (This seems to be an exploit that allowed multiple dots to be stacked onto a target. For example a player using a health dot stun pistol then a health dot energy pistol to stack two health dots on a target)

Poison Types

There are 4 types of Poison attacks in SWG:

• Area of Effect Poison
• Single target Poison
• Multi pool Poison
• Targeted pool Poison

Area of Effect Poison

These attacks will hit all targets within a certain radius of the attacker, where the radius is dependent on the special used and area of effect radius component on the weapon used (if the attack is done with a weapon that has an aoe component to it). Area of effect Poisons can consist of Multi Pool Poisons such as the creature attack Poison Spray. Presumably special attacks that utilize weapons with inherent Poison effects can be considered area of effect Poison if the special utilizes an area of attack. The Poison effect from the weapon would attempt to apply its effect individually on all targets within the radius on the attack.

AOE Poison sources include:

• Poison Spray
• AOE specials inflicting disease with weapon on targets within radius
• ApplyPoison

Single Target Poison

These attacks target a single target

• ApplyPoison

Multi Pool Poison

These disease attacks will randomly target one of an enemy's ham pools to apply the effect to. These attacks can have their effect applied to all of the primary ham pools.

Multi pool disease sources include:

• Poison Spray

Targeted Pool Poison

These Poison attacks will target a specific HAM pool to apply the effect on.

• ApplyPoison

Formulas

Poison damage is based around two things:

• The Poison effectiveness (or strength)
• The attacker's combat medic's Combat Medicine Effectiveness modifier

To calculate Poison damage, the following formula is used:

Real tick damage =

Real Tick Damage = (poison effectiveness) * (1 + (CM effectiveness) / 100)

Poison effectiveness includes the Poison strength stat on a creature's attack, the combat medic's Poison packs or the strength value on dot weapons. Poison sources that dont use CM effectiveness modifier would use 0 for this part of the formula.

Source References