Purpose/effects of non-integer poison durations?

Aedris43

Example: Stinkhorn and Nirnroot can be combined to make a poison that "Deals 1266 Poison Damage per second for 5.5 seconds

My question is... does that extra 0.5 seconds do anything at all? Is it merely there as an artifact of some underlying calculator in the game? Poisons that have effect durations that are 3.9 seconds and 2.2 seconds seem plentiful, but it seems like the 3.9 second one has 30% extra that doesn't do anything while the 2.2 second duration has only 10% and the 6.5 second duration has only 1/12th "wasted."

I don't even know of anything in the game that ticks faster than 0.25 seconds (stamina loss when blocking).

Does anybody know if the remainder has any practical purpose or meaning?

Aedris43

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

There's no "rounding down" in poisons like there is in the champion point trees, @Aedris43.

You get exactly the time that's displayed in the tooltip.

Poisons are created this way only because ZOS wants a lesser duration for the stronger three-effect poisons versus two effects. Which makes sense.

I understand what you were saying about effects. I guess I was so focused on damage that I didn't realize what you were saying. I experimented quite a bit and found that for damage, the extra .5 doesn't seem to do anything. When you apply a DoT, the first tick happens immediately, so a poison damage with duration 5.5 does 6 ticks, 1 immediately and 5 more over the duration. The extra 0.5 seconds the debuff is up doesn't do anything except maybe count for sets or abilities that allow for affects against poisoned enemies.

Taleof2Cities

There's no "rounding down" in poisons like there is in the champion point trees, @Aedris43.

You get exactly the time that's displayed in the tooltip.

Poisons are created this way only because ZOS wants a lesser duration for the stronger three-effect poisons versus two effects. Which makes sense.

Aedris43

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

There's no "rounding down" in poisons like there is in the champion point trees, @Aedris43.

You get exactly the time that's displayed in the tooltip.

Poisons are created this way only because ZOS wants a lesser duration for the stronger three-effect poisons versus two effects. Which makes sense.

I don't think this answers my question. I get why you'd expect reduced duration for multiple effects, that's why I asked about a potion with a single effect that still has 5.5 seconds. It ticks 5 times right, not 5.5 times (how could it tick for a half time?)... so what gives?

cheemers

I think the extra fraction of a second doesn't apply another tick.

katorga

Wouldn't it be ironic is all of those non-integer timers were the cause of lag? They are everywhere. Half seconds on poisons, .4 seconds on ultimates. And so on.

What is the rational for a extra .5 second duration that does not produce a dot tick, why is it even there? The only thing I can think of is that when developing poisons they started with a damage every half second, and decided it was too much.

YandereGirlfriend

This has bothered me forever and I had the same suspicion as OP that a significant percentage of a potion/poison simply gets ignored by the game.

It would be an easy task for ZOS to balance the alchemy ingredients and passives to yield integer results and clear the air of this issue forever.