A few weeks ago, we asked for your questions about game mechanics to help the community understand some of the intricacies of Path of Exile! We've collected some of your questions and have asked Mark to answer them below!
How does the Sadist skill on large elemental cluster jewels interact with Skitterbots?
It does not. Skitterbots inflict their ailments, but they do not have the Sadist passive skill
How would ignite work in this scenario? You hit an enemy with a spell that has 100% chance to ignite for 1000 damage. Elemental Overload procs after a second and you keep damaging the enemy with the same skill. Does the old ticking ignite get overridden by the stronger one due to the damage bonus from Elemental Overload?
All the ignites you inflict will be on the enemy until they expire, but only the highest-damage one will actually apply at any given time. The first time you hit the enemy while you have the Elemental Overload bonus on the skill will deal 40% more damage and thus inflict a stronger ignite that will become the one that is applying. The hit that grants the EO bonus will not do this, as you didn't have the buff when calculating that hit, so that hit's ignite is not boosted.
How does Reaper minion decide which of your other minions it will eat when it decides that it's hungry? Is it random or is there a priority of some kind?
The Reaper does not separately decide that it's hungry and then chose a minion. Each time it picks an action, it evaluates all possible actions and picks one. For each of your other minions it can see, there are two possible actions involving eating that minion which will be weighed against other possible actions (similarly for each enemy, there are actions that could attack that enemy, and there are several more possible actions for attacking which are limited only to its current aggro target if it has one).
Eating a minion to heal has a high weighting, but is ignored if the reaper has higher than 75% life or already has the buff from eating a minion.
Eating a minion just for the buff has a lower weighting, but is ignored if the reaper already has the buff or there are no enemies around that minion (so it won't move away from the enemies to eat a far-away minion).
There are no variations in weighting based on minion type, etc, but the Reaper cannot eat "immortal" minions which can't be damaged, such as skitterbots, as they're invalid targets for the eating action, and cannot.eat untargetable minions like raging spirits because they can't be targeted.
Can it eat phantasm minions?
Yes.
Also, are phantasm from summon phantasm support affected by other support gems?
Yes.
Do all splitting projectiles from Sniper's Mark come back and hit the original target when using a returning projectile skill like Spectral Throw or only a few?
None of the returning projectiles will necessarily hit that target when returning - returning sends them back to you (or whatever fired the projectiles if that's a totem or similar), not to where they split.
If that target is in the way of some of the returning projectiles then one of them can hit it but the others will not.
Are non-damaging ailments' effects based on the base damage of the inflicting hit or the total damage?
They are based on the damage actually taken by the enemy.
Why does skill effect duration increase the duration of some minion skills such as offerings and not other minion skills like skeletons?
This is incorrect. The duration of Skeletons is affected by modifiers to skill effect duration.
Why does Divergent Hatred not apply the movement speed buff to the player if we use something like Arctic Armour, Frostblink, etc.? Thel gem does not specify that it has to be chilled ground from an enemy, yet it only seems to work if it's chilled ground from an enemy.
Chilled ground only does things at all to enemies. It effectively does not exist for allies.
What exactly constitutes "your chilling areas"? Do Skitterbots count?
Specifically the four things listed in the reminder-text in game: Chilled Ground, Creeping Frost, Frost Shield, and Vortices. Skitterbots are not one of those things, and if the chilling skitterbot instead worked by creating one of those effects around itself, that would be the skitterbot's chilling area, not yours.
More generally, how is credit for causing ailments counted when the effects aren't directly caused by you, e.g. Corpse Pact + Inpulsa's?
The ailments in that situation are directly caused by you. Corpse Pact is your passive skill, it causes you to inflict chill and shock. In a nonstandard way to be sure, but you are still inflicting those ailments.
Enemies entering your chilling areas in general does not count as you chilling them, or as anything chilling them - they just become chilled.
I can't give a more detailed answer because I'm not sure what you mean by "credit for causing ailments".
Is the corpse cap shared between all things that generate corpses or is the cap unique to each skill? For example, do the corpses of Desecrate contribute to Unearth's corpse cap?
Those skills each have their own limit.
What happens if you have 100% chance to flee and 100% chance to taunt?
The monster will be Taunted, and unless the monster has a chance to ignore Fleeing, it will Flee. Taunt does not prevent Fleeing - Taunt prevents targeting objects other than you (they effectively become invisible to the taunted enemy). Fleeing from you is an action that targets you, not something else.
Does the modifier given by "Master Toxicist" and Darkscorn "poisons created by you have a x% chance to do x% more damage" apply to poisons applied by skills used by minions, totems and mirages?
The actual modifiers in question are "Poisons you inflict during any Flask Effect have 20% chance to deal 100% more Damage" and "20% chance for Poisons inflicted with this Weapon to deal 300% more Damage".
Your minions inflict their own poisons with their own skills (and weapons), so cannot benefit from these.
Totems, Mirages, Traps, and Mines all use your skills, which are affected by your stats, and for attacks, use your weapons as the base. These will be affected.
If I cast a curse (e.g. Flammability) and it's gaining Doom, and I re-cast it on the same target, does the Doom counter reset? Or is the curse duration refreshed but the existing Doom counter remains, and will continue to count up if possible?
The new Hex replaces the old one, because they cannot both exist.. Each hex has its own doom.
What is the radius of Profane Bloom explosions?
22.
Does it scale with modifiers to area of effect?
Yes.
The occultist's "You cannot be stunned while you have energy shield". Say I take a hit that would fully deplete my energy shield; can this stun me? Or does a hit have to land when I already have 0 energy shield to be able to stun me?
You were unable to be stunned when you were hit, so that hit cannot stun you.
How does the Corrupted Soul keystone interact with Petrified Blood? Would the 40% of damage delayed only be applied to half the damage received, making it 20%?
Petrified Blood does not modify or delay damage taken. It only changes the loss of life caused by taking the damage. If some of the damage causes you to lose things other than life, such as Energy Shield, petrified blood does nothing with that.
Assuming you have sufficient Energy Shield to go with soul, and no effects like Mind over Matter or Guard skills causing you to lose other things instead, half of the damage taken from hits will cause you to lose Energy Shield, and half will cause you to lose life. Petrified Blood changes only the amount of life lost.
Do multiple sources of Fire Damage over Time Multiplier stack additively or multiplicatively?
All modifiers to Fire Damage over Time Multiplier in the game are explicitly additions to the base value - they use "+" to show this. No multiplication is occurring, and how the modifiers stack with other modifiers does not matter because adding them all up and applying them together has the same result as applying each separately.
Any hypothetical future modifiers giving increased/reduced or more/less Fire Damage over Time Multiplier will follow the standard way those modifiers work, adding a % of the total base and added value to itself, and stacking additively or multiplicatively with other such modifiers respectively.
Currently, how does Valyrium interact with things such as The Agnostic keystone passive skill and the Mask of the Stitched Demon?
Mask of the Stitched Demon does not affect maximum energy shield, which is what matters for calculating stun with Valyrium, so there is no interaction here.
With The Agnostic (or any other case where you have zero maximum energy shield) the stat on Valyrium currently does nothing, due to a bug which doesn't handle a value of zero correctly. This will be fixed at some point in the future.
Do they work like Chaos Inoculation does regarding stuns and elemental ailments, where the effect was based on how much of the relevant stat there was before the effect was applied?
No. That behaviour is specific to overriding maximum life with CI.
Can totems benefit from the Cruelty buff? And what about traps/mines?
Totems, Traps, and Mines use your skills. If you have Cruelty, your skills that are supported by Cruelty Support will deal more damage over time. This is true regardless of whether those skills are used by you or by your totems, traps or mines.
If a totem somehow gained the Cruelty buff itself, that would do nothing, because even if it had skills of its own, those wouldn't be supported by Cruelty support.
Does Bloodthirst Support and Mirage Archer Support interact? If the player is low life does the Mirage Archer get that added damage bonus?
Bloodthirst Support makes your skill deal more damage when you are on low life. Mirage Archer is using your skill, which has that bonus.
For the Totem skill tree Mastery: 5% of Damage from Hits is taken from your nearest Totem's Life before you; if the hit is large enough to kill the totem, is the extra damage wasted as overkill damage, or is the extra damage applied to the player?
Anything which says damage is taken from something "before" something else can only work for as much loss as you have of that thing. Excess after the first thing is depleted must be taken from the original thing, just like how normally damage is taken from Energy Shield before life, but a hit which deals more than enough damage to deplete ES will take the remainder from life.
Why don't Damage over Time effects shatter already frozen enemies?
Because shattering something requires an impact to break the ice.
In which order are armour and resistances applied when taking the Transcendence Keystone? Do you use the damage number after or before resistances are applied to calculate the percentage of the damage armour mitigates?
For each damage type, if you have a Resistance which applies to that damage it applies first, then if Armour applies to that damage, Damage Reduction for that type from Armour is calculated and applied to the remaining damage (any Additional Damage Reduction is added to that from armour, but currently this is only possible to get for physical damage).
This means that resistances lower damage before it gets compared to armour to work out how much reduction armour applies, and if armour is applying to multiple damage types, that calculation and reduction happens separately for each of them, rather than once for the total damage amount.
Can Boneshatter's self-damage be converted(physical to cold, for example) or critically strike?
It cannot be converted because self-damage does not come from your/your skill's stats - if it did all your increased/more damage modifiers would also apply to it. For similar reasons it cannot crit, but stats on you can affect the crit chance of hits you take, so despite it not being able to roll a crit, in theory a future stat that caused all hits you take to be critical strikes would apply.
When is a character dead? Can you be below 0 hp and then a mechanic instantly gives you health back on the same frame/servertick?
"Dead" means having 0 current life. It is not a separate state, just a shorthand name for checking whether life is currently 0.
If you have "gain 1 rage per hit up to once per second" from a cluster jewel, and you have the axe mastery that does the same, will you now gain up to 2 rage per second?
Each of those effects has its own entirely separate limitation. You can gain 2 total rage within a 1 second timeframe - 1 rage comes from one effect and the other rage comes from the other effect. Neither effect can exceed its own limitation, but neither of them knows about the other. They're entirely independent.
Can monsters that become "untargetable" (such as burrowing bugs and devourers) and which have the Soul Eater modifier "eat souls" while untargetable?
Being untargetable does not stop eating souls. However, the monsters you're describing are doing a lot more than just becoming untargetable, and in general something which has burrowed away will not be able to eat souls until it returns.
devtrackers.gg