Best Of

Still working through how I feel about Toad’s rework, but there’s one aspect of his kit that was unequivocally nerfed to what seems like an almost comically unnecessary degree; his Poison Passives.

For those who don’t know, Toad’s kit used to work roughly as follows:
• Toad can inflict weak but long-lasting Poison Debuffs.
• Upon reaching 10 Poison Debuffs, they are converted into a single short but potent Poison Passive.
• The Passive version was decently stronger at base, but also increased the damage dealt by +100% per Prowess on Toad. Given that he could stack up to 15 Prowesses, the damage was pretty good at max.
(He also inflicts the Passives when the Debuffs are Purified by Skills, but we can ignore that for this discussion).

With his buff, Toad got some nice offensively-minded tune-ups like faster ramp, but they completely gutted his Poison Passives. The base damage is much lower, and now they simply “scale with special damage” as opposed to the flat 100% base damage increase per Prowess, no matter how weak they individually were. Toad’s total Prowess potency is actually some of the highest in the game, but in practice it’s simply not enough to make up for how much they took away.

Here’s how much a max Prowess Poison Passive deals:

And let’s compare that to a single Poison Debuff (which does not scale with Prowess, it’s a static damage value):


Just looking at the tick value, it’s clear that when you consume 10 Poison Debuffs to inflict the Passive, you’re actually dealing less damage per second, and by a significant amount. Not to mention this is the MAX damage it can deal, if you’ve got less Prowesses the damage gets pathetic. Add in the fact that the Debuffs last longer (I don’t have an exact value because the kit description mysteriously doesn’t mention it) and the damage difference is clear as day.

So what’s even the point of this ability anymore? Before, it was a clear thing you wanted to work towards as often as possible because the Poison Passive cashout was well worth it. Now, this ability is less than worthless; it would be actively better if Toad didn’t have this ability as it is now, because as weak as his Poisons Debuffs are, triggering the Passive just pushes his Poison damage even lower. I get the sense that with the other buffs Toad got Kabam felt like they could tone down his Poisons and lean him more towards big specials like most Mutants, but this is just unfun when there’s an ability that actively fights against you like this, even if the consensus ends up being that Toad’s other improvements make him an objectively better champion.

While I unfortunately doubt anything will be done at this point, I seriously hope Kabam considers looking over Toad’s buff again. This frankly feels like a change that never should have made it past testing, because it just doesn’t make sense even from the perspective of needing to tune it down a bit - this is just clearly too much.