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.

now dats some high quality testin there, partner

The best thing about blight is that it allows you to have two acrids in a multiplayer game.

Amazing work, cured my jaundice

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! 😂

Man I hate being autistic why am I up at 3am watching a video on which fictional lizard spit is better

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!

so basically, they just need to buff blight's damage to like 120% to make it a good sidegrade

Wow I always knew blight was weak, but not THAT weak. You need absolutely perfect build to have an advantage for 10-30 seconds over poison. Yikes.

One of my favorite mods was the one that made Blight refresh on application, just that change made blight feel real good.

So essentially, poison is better in nearly all realistic scenarios. Thanks for the testing!

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.

THANK YOU, I just got into risk of rain 2 and whenever I asked anyone about this people got mad

Confirming what anyone who's actually experimented with both passives with all other abilities already know. Good tests all around, good job!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

If Blight DPS wasn't capped and if Acrid had a method of stacking stacks faster, it'd probably be really fun. As it is it just doesn't compare sadly.

NODDERS

I cry at this data, but respect the graph and system

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

"But blight stacks" they said. "It'll be fun" they said.

Cannot imagine how long, tedious, and arduous it must've been to test these. Insane dedication, huge props for deciding to do these tests

a rare youtube channel who sources the fucking music. from this alone, I will subscribe

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 :)

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

Great comparisons and analysis! Thank you for being brave and covering this topic as a smaller ror KZfaqr. 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 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

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.

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.

15:44 So winner of the Test 11 result is posion right?

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

You have the best background music for your vids

Actual science, coming through JOHNSOULS

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.

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 can feel the pain that must of went for typing the subtitles at 15:24 and seeing it after you already uploaded it.

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

"It does however have a damage cap of 5000% damage per second" Oh no. Anyway...

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

Amazing Vid! Very informative and still easy to understand, you couldn't do it any better. Keep it up! :)

2:08 off topic from the video, but Mithrix just teabagged you in the background

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)

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

*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

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

This is awesome! Now that I know how blight works, I can create better scenarios for when I wanna try using blight for the first time.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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%.

They could make Blight actually good by reducing its damage but letting it stack like bleed

I'm sure someone else said something already, but Test 11 has a typo. Winner was Poison, not Blight.

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

"This video is more than an hour and a half long" *checks video length* Huh?

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.

So the TL;DR is that regardless of poison or blight is that we should be stacking bungus at all times and that wungus users main artificer

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.

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!

man said "yall are fuckin dumb as hell" in the most polite and helpful way possible as a video

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

Did you do any testing with Glass enabled?

1:04 No need to thank me

melee acrid special when i need full melee acrid

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.

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

ty for the vid

Hopefully this doesn't spark more community drama like the last time content creators made a video on the difference between poison and blight.

Damn, I use blight because there is purple in the icon

Anyone who plays acrid for 10 minutes knows poison is just better

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…

This is fantastic. I cant help of think a missed scenario perhaps. Testing w items that increase base dmg. Could this be important?

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

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?

Bro watch out for Woolie lmao

thankyou

Hey Cap, maybe you can separate the extreme outliers to actually get some benefit of comparison with the bar chart.

Blight should apply in M1 attacks

not this fucking debate again

What da dog doin

Imo Blight should make blighted enemies

I have never seen the blight icon until today

I wonder what would happen if they just let blight tick infinitely.

Conclusion: poison can do a butt ton of damage and blight can definitely kill things

blight would be nicer if stacking it refreshed previous stacks.

how do you skip stages to do testing? is it console commands? if so, which one?

I mean I already knew blight was bad but this helped confirm it

Solution: more acrid

I wonder did the dev create Blight because they thought Acrid can apply it with his M1

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

The video quality looms 7 years ago, not 7 months lol

Soooooooo blight is booty. Got it.

yeah but what if we did 4 person multiplayer with everyone running blight

I wonder would things change much in Blights favour if its stack duration was doubled

Well fuck

Poison >