ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Ok, I haven't gotten very far, but it seems like a potential problem that you can refresh and build stacks of poison damage. I had a hobbit slinger run out of ammo (stupid capricious Find Ammo skill) but he had a dagger of poison and despite having an awful STR and doing almost zero damage with his melee attacks was able to take out surprisingly tough monsters with it. He'd just kite them around, periodically whacking them with the dagger to keep the poison going and each whack slowly built the amount the poison ticked for to a decently destructive level.

I raise this as an issue because while its a really cool mechanic, it strikes me as a relatively hard to balance source of damage, either trivially small or potentially OP on things that take a long time to kill. Has anyone played around with this at higher levels?

At higher levels I doubt that poison alone will kill most monsters, especially when there is quite a few coming at you.

If understand Elliott correctly both the poison duration and the poison damage stack? So say each strike deals 1 poison damage for 5 seconds, after 10 hits you will be doing 10 poison damage for X seconds (depending on time between hits). That does strike me as a problem... maybe the poison damage should just take the max of the current attack and the already existing effect instead of stacking?

Na, poison & burning effects do stack but they stack this way:
* a first effect is setup for 10 turns at 10 dam per turn (total of 100)
* a second effect is setup 5 turns afterwards for 10 turns at 5 damage (total of 50)
* the resulting poison total damage is (10turns-5elapsed_turns) * 10 + 5turns * 10 over a duration of (10+5)/2

In the end it will ahve dealt exactly the good ammount of damage (150)

Really? I was pretty sure in one case I was able to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-12x the original "tick" value at a time. I can't recall exactly what the numbers were (it was in one of the starter dungeons so it wasn't very high) but if a single application did 1.5 damage, he was getting ticks of 18 or so.