Foraging for herbs and poisons. Types of poisons and play balance

McMackMuck

I searched the AoC Discord for "poison" to see what had already been discussed.
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Most of the previous conversations (over last 6 months) seemed to be damage-over-time type poisons, with little mention of debuff poisons or hallucinogens.
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Foraging:
If AoC intends to offer more depth then google "Rolemaster herb list" for ideas on how herbs/poisons could be climate/ region specific, with rarity / difficulty to find. Other roleplaying systems are available. "To steal from one is plagiarism, to steal from many is research."
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The above list may be over-the-top for players that don't intend to use poison, but AoC doesn't, perhaps, need to go that far.
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To much focus on additional DPS?
Additionally, debuffs could include inverted controls, distorted graphics, edges of the screen start to black out giving tunnel vision, swapping people for mushrooms on your screen (help!, which mushroom is the CLERIC?). This is my favorite area to explore as it opens up many possibilities. A target under the effect of poison should be an easier target to deal with because they are pre-occupied by the effect of the poison. Having to let your cleric know you are poisoned so that they can help reduces your effectiveness.
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Play balance:
Time to onset. I understand the desirability from a players perspective, but from a Devs perspective, why do game poisons need to be so focused on immediate effects? I think they become much more interesting when they take at least several minutes before the player realizes something is wrong. It also gives another dimension to combat if at a few minutes in the Cleric has to start alternating between "Heal" and "Cleanse". Maybe "Cleanse" isn't a cure all, it just reduces poison severity or duration?
The difficulty of obtaining the poison; foraging in a different region (because the best poisons come from the most remote locations, obviously) requiring skills to recognize the herb/leaf/root/nut.
The skill and time to concoct the poison, requiring basic tools for basic poisons through to specialist alchemy tools for the more potent poisons.
Applying poison in combat, especially when target is armored, should result in a significant amount of wasted dosage when you miss or armor gets in the way. Then the poison user needs to take another action to coat their blade again. All that preparation for a low success rate.
A high constitution should reduce the effectiveness of poisons, racial differences also.
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Any feedback?

BlightEmpire

I wont lie... in some ways i love the ideas in others i hate it. Reasons i like it are it would add a LOT of depth if you wanted to say.. infiltrate a node and poison their water supply to give everyone a minor debuff if they drank it within so many hours... reducing skill damage 5% etc i dunno you get my point. Adding in not just poison plants but also poison animals as well to harvest toxins from could be interesting. On the other hand from a developer side... its a nightmare x.x your talking lots of design and development hours. So as a feature i think it could be interesting but not until well after game release. Fun ideas though.

McMackMuck

I agree that it's potentially a lot of work. I hadn't thought about mass poisoning, only single target use. All of it would need balancing.
With any idea I raise, I would just be over the moon to know that they had considered it. At the end of the day I want to play their game, with whatever content they deem appropriate. If they like the ideas but they're too complex given their already heavy workload, then they can just squirrel it away for future assessment under the heading "herbs and poison".
Good additional point about extracting toxins from monsters.

Guajatu

I really like the poison element both in terms of collecting poisons of various intensities/lethalness and poison spells. I really hope summoner class can use poison spells too. 💚💜🤎