Plaguebreak against NPCs & PCs

Zama666 · January 2023

Does Plaguebreak proc as often on PC as NPCs?
It seems when I attack guards - they all get infected and a few booms go off and I see it on Combat Metrics.
But player (ie ball groups) it seems to go off less often....do resistances prevent it?

Or am I doing something wrong. I am dealing direct damage....(i hope)

Tanks,

Z

fred4 · January 2023

It goes off on death. Guards are easier to kill. I'm not sure whether they cleanse. Players may not. Some builds / classes don't have a cleanse and may not wear Mara, Curse Eater or the like.

Zama666 · January 2023

@fred4 ok I got it

Dealing direct damage causes enemies to become a Plague Carrier, dealing 1000 Disease Damage over 10 seconds and applying the Diseased status effect. If the plague is removed early it explodes and deals 735 Disease Damage to all enemies within 8 meters of the carrier, increasing by 50% per enemy hit. This effect can occur once every 20 seconds per target, once per attack, and scales off the higher of your Weapon or Spell Damage.

so they are likely getting hit, but not getting cleansed...
Or not dying!!!

CameraBeardThePirate · January 2023

Plaguebreak also has a per target cooldown now. Lots of people use it in PvP, so it's possible you arent seeing it proc on players as often because some other player recently applied it to the target you're trying to apply it to and the target is on cooldown

Necrotech_Master · January 2023

ball groups also run huge amounts of mitigation, and the plague explosion itself is also affected by battle spirit, so by the time all is said and done even if you hit someone with plague and it exploded in a ball group, its probably not going to be that impactful unless they were getting sieged at the same time, but once they explode as camerabeard mentioned, then they have a 20 sec cooldown

20 sec is a long cooldown, if they explode 1 sec after you afflict them, its 19 sec downtime, if it explode 9 sec after afflicted (just before it runs out), then it will still be 10-11 sec of downtime on that target

NPCs both die easier, and the battle spirit scaling does not seem to affect dmg done to NPCs, just to players

OBJnoob · January 2023

Little off topic but... Here's what I don't like about plaguebreak (I don't mind the way it functions, it's literally just this one thing that bothers me)

It used to be that when an inner front door got busted down the defenders were downstairs fighting and healing WITH the NPCs. Sure you had a person or two upstairs pouring oils, but for the most part you were downstairs fighting. It was nice to have the NPCs help. Making the actual players harder to focus... Providing some damage and confusion... Throwing the occasional negate. It made sense. It was the advantage defenders are supposed to have.

Now? Everybody stays upstairs until all the NPCs are dead. Because the big plaguebreak bomb from NPCs dying, and whatever weird OO and VD comes with it, is the main worry. Because yes, it is MUCH easier to pop an NPC than a player. So by the time defenders get started defending the entire downstairs is swarmed with attacker's and the flags are already half flipped. It's pretty dumb.