Ranting Ahead

[David Turner]

So I wondered into the path of some scorpions today. Seriously, WTF is the idea behind giving them (or anything other than a boss creature that is meant to be fought by multiple people) poison like that? I got hit once total, and the poison from that single hit killed me. Now, granted, the character I was using isn't built specifically for combat, but he does have a con score that is well above average. And, to make matters worse, when I tried to drink a potion it spilled with no enemies around and just about the same time as I took damage from the poison. Why is POISON, a damage over time effect, causing a potion to spill? Unless it was because I was walking at the time, trying to get away from these "low level" creatures who can somehow kill in one blow. I very much hope that it isn't the case that any character is so stupid that they are incapable of walking and drinking at the same time (or even pausing when they are walking to drink) they must spill the liquid that they are attempting to consume in order to prevent themselves from choking to death on it.

PS: This is just me venting, I don't actually expect anything to happen about it. Feel free to completely ignore this post as you see fit. Now that I have written it, I won't take the situation too seriously.

[Quinasa]

I understand your frustration with this. The scorps, in my opinion, are the biggest things to avoid in the entire game. Even the poisonous mummies don't hurt you as badly as the scorpions do.

[Irania]

Ya. EVERYONE avoids them unless their constitution is amazingly high enough to withstand the poison.

[Taiah]

They are usually slow moving so avoidable, but sometimes if you hit fast enough can avoid a sting, not pleasant when they do though, most get ghosted.

[Athian]

Scorpions are indeed highly toxic, i believe some of them are more toxic then spiders, mummies aren't very toxic as far as I've seen nor are wasps.

As said above they're slow with a very low attack rate and usually you'll dodge them more often then not even with fairly low skills, they have very low health and die in a few spare blows. The only time they are dangerous is at very low skills or on the occasional sting.

The real issue is that unless you have a druid buddy you aren't packing any antidotes. There were once Antidotes and other potions sold by NPCs but they were removed in order to force the interaction(dependency) with druids. This turned out to be a bad idea when considering how time consuming the druid system is overall and how often players come and go. So now any time you are out around a poisonous creature you run a pretty big risk of dying to poison if you don't have potions or a mage. Unfortunately there isn't much of a fix for this, if you see something poisonous put on a shield and don't take the risk even if it's not a very strong monster, as the poison it has might be very strong.

p.s. you cannot walk and drink potions at the same time. depending on your constitutions the smaller potions probably won't save you from poison unless you have very many of them...a lot of time a scorpion sting is an death sentence for your average joe.

[Estralis Seborian]

Scorpions will, as it seems, not survive the VBU, at least not the way they are. Poisoning in general is something a developer should take a look at, last time I checked, poisoning was rather... complicated without need or gain. While I'd assume it to be a very simple long time effect that reduces your hitpoints at a constant rate for a given time, poison seems to be a secondary attribute(!) with the damage you take changing over time. Also, it looks like poison is server driven; this is especially strange because regeneration is script driven.