Path of Exile 2 retains many of the interesting mechanics from the original game, allowing many original POE 1 fans to quickly master this sequel and get a brand new gaming experience without having to learn it for a long time. Among them, Damaging Ailments is one of the features introduced by POE 2 from the original game, but please note that the system is not immutable, and understanding the changes and how to calculate them can help you best utilize them in your build. Let’s take a look!
Overview Of Basic Mechanics
When thinking about Damaging Ailments in Path of Exile 2, I like to look at them in three parts, including the hits that cause Ailments, the resulting Ailments and their Magnitude, and the damage that entities take from Ailments. Breaking down Damaging Ailments into these three parts makes the system easier to understand and helps understand how to amplify or not amplify the damage caused by these anomalies.
1. Hit That Causes Ailments
First up is the hit that causes Ailments. What you need to know is that all of your personal damage modifiers are applied to the hit at this stage. So any added damage, such as any damage multipliers from your passive skill tree, anything on your character that would improve the damage of that hit is applied at this stage.
This is very important because your damage modifiers are only applied once, and that’s where they happen, they are not applied a second time directly to Ailments themselves. This is why in POE 2, scaling your hit damage scales directly with Ailments inflicted, because once all of your damage modifiers are applied to the hit, the damage of that hit is used to calculate the extent of Ailments inflicted. This means that if you want to quickly boost your Ailments damage, the most straightforward way to do this is to upgrade your modifiers with POE 2 Exalted Orbs.
To summarize this step, the hit is scaled by all of your personal damage modifiers, and the hit is used to calculate Ailment before the hit interacts with anything on the target.
2. Generated Ailments And Their Magnitude
Moving on to the second part, here are the generated Ailments and their Magnitude. Magnitude is a term that is used primarily to describe the strength of an Ailment. It is the amount of damage that a Damaging Ailments deals relative to the hit that caused it. Therefore, we will go into detail about Magnitude of each Ailment as we go through each Ailment in detail.
But what you need to know at this step is that Ailments have already been created from step one, and your damage modifiers do not directly scale the damage dealt by Ailment. Instead, the only way you can directly modify Magnitude dealt by a Damaging Ailment is by using a modifier that improves that Ailment’s Magnitude. Most of these modifiers increase Ailment’s Magnitude, and by adding them together before applying them, you can think of them as multipliers for the damage dealt by Ailments.
So if an Ailment’s Magnitude is increased by 100%, then its base Magnitude is essentially double what it is now.
Besides Magnitude modifiers, the only other modifiers that interact directly with Ailments Magnitude are the effects of Ailments, a much rarer stat that is a multiplier for Ailments Magnitude.
For example, if Magnitude of an Ailment is increased by 100%, then your Ailment Magnitude would be 200%, and if the effect of that Ailment is increased by 50%, then your Magnitude would be 300%. Note that effect modifiers are multipliers of the total Magnitude, and cannot be added together with the more common increase Magnitude modifiers.
So summarizing, at this step, Ailments cannot be further modified by your personal damage modifiers, as they have already been applied in the first step, but anything that can directly adjust Ailment’s Magnitude will be used to increase the damage caused by this Ailment.
3. Damage Entities Take From Ailments
This brings us to the last step, which is the damage that Ailments take on targets. Now you can actually increase the amount of damage that targets take from Ailments.
This is because once an Ailment is applied to a target, the damage it now causes must go through the target’s mitigation layers, so anything you can apply to a target to make them take more damage will increase the damage caused by Ailment. These modifiers will not directly adjust Ailment, but they will adjust the damage that the target takes from Ailment. For example, using Curses to lower their resistance or Shocking them to make them take more damage.
To summarize, in this step, you can apply debuffs to the target to make them take more damage from Ailment.
This is a basic overview of Damaging Ailments mechanics. Looking at it in this simple three-step process can help you understand this mechanic better, although in reality all of this happens very quickly.
Damaging Elemental Ailment Types
Now, let’s talk about each Damaging Elemental Ailment specifically, starting with Ignite.
Ignite
Ignite is a damaging Elemental Ailment that deals fire damage over time for 4 seconds. By default, only one instance of Ignite can damage a target at a time.
Instead of a simple base system of added chance from modifiers, the chance of inflicting Ignite is now tied to Ailment Threshold. The chance of inflicting Ignite is 1% of Ailment Threshold for every 4% of damage the target takes.
Additionally, Ailment Threshold is usually directly tied to max life, but for monsters with much higher life, their Threshold scales to allow the player to apply Ignite to them.
So whenever you see a modifier that grants you an increased chance to Ignite, these modifiers do not actually increase your chance to Ignite, but rather the chance to Ignite on a hit is determined by the size of the hit multiplied by the target’s Ailment Threshold. Importantly, by default, only the fire damage on a hit will have an effect on the chance to Ignite.
Right now, the base Magnitude of Ignite is 20% of the total fire damage dealt on a hit, as fire damage per second, and this number can scale with modifiers. Some skills or unique items have modifiers that interact with the chance to Ignite, so if you want to increase Ailment Magnitude dealt per hit, don’t be stingy with your POE 2 Currency, it’s definitely an excellent investment for the right gear.
Poison
Poison is a Damaging Elemental that deals Chaos Damage over time and lasts for 2 seconds. By default, the damage dealt by this Ailment bypasses Energy Shield directly.
Note that only one Poison on a target will deal damage at a time, however, you can adjust the amount of Poison dealt to a target using the relevant modifiers, the highest-damaging Poison will deal damage up to the maximum amount of Poison you can deal.
Poison is a simpler system of additional chances, gained by modifiers, which will be added together to give you a chance to poison on a hit. However, there are also modifiers that increase your chance of dealing an Ailment, these modifiers will act as a multiplier on your chance to poison.
The base Magnitude of Poison is 20% of the total physical and chaos damage of the hit. This number can be scaled by modifiers, multiplied directly by the damage contribution of the hit to Poison.
Now there is a very important note here, and it is relevant to all Damaging Ailments, but is particularly important for Poison. Because Poison can be caused by both physical or chaos damage types, but assuming you strike with pure physical damage to cause poison, or if you have modifiers that increase chaos damage, these will not apply to the strike, since you are only dealing physical damage. Therefore, they will not apply to the poison caused, either.
So be careful and only invest in damage modifiers that can amplify the strike, otherwise you will not only waste those hard-earned POE 2 Divine Orbs, but also make your modifier system more redundant.
Bleeding
Finally there is Bleeding, which is a Damaging Elemental Ailment that causes physical damage over time, which lasts for 5 seconds by default.
Damage caused by Bleeding will directly bypass Energy Shields, but importantly, if the strike only damages the target’s Energy Shield, the strike that causes Bleeding must damage life in order to cause Ailment, otherwise it will not cause Bleeding.
The chance to cause Bleeding is an additional chance-based system that will aggregate all relevant modifiers to provide your chance of causing Bleeding when you strike. Any modifiers that increase the chance of inflicting an Ailment will multiply your chance of inflicting a Bleeding.
The base Bleeding Magnitude is 15% of the total physical damage dealt by a strike. However, you can scale this number with modifiers to directly multiply the damage contribution of the strike to Bleeding.
It’s worth noting that Bleeding now also has a special mechanic that allows the target to take double damage from an Ailment while moving. So you can force the double damage mechanic by aggravating the target’s Bleeding.
Anyway, that’s all about Damaging Ailments in Path of Exile 2, they work very differently to POE 1. Hopefully, this helps you understand the differences, and I’ll see you next time!
