Hello everybody. to keep things concise, I intend to use this thread to discuss my findings while testing a Wugushi. I noticed there seems to be a lack of information out there surrounding certain Wugushi skills. I’m currently only 1st circle, but I’ll keep this thread updated with detailed information as I find new stuff.
Firstly, let’s cover the 1st circle and what it has to offer.
–Poison Pot System–
A source of immediate confusion for new Wugushi, the poison pot is a mechanic that could really use a small mention or mini-tutorial. The Wugushi uprade npc says absolutely nothing about it, and it’s very easy to miss that little tag that pops into your hotbar.
So what is the poison pot? Think of it as a point system that goes towards all of your poison-based attacks. The pot can initially hold 1000 points, and you drain X amount of points per attack. As the pot empties, you can refill it by converting various items into points (typically insect or plant related materials). The amount of points restored will depend on the item consumed.
The pot also has a card slot, but that hasn’t been implemented yet and currently does nothing as far as I’m aware. I’m really looking forward to see what they do with this, personally. For now, it can be completely ignored.
If for some reason you run out of materials, the Wugushi master will sell bottles of Venom, which can be used to restore a large amount of Poison. Personally, I would much rather spend time stocking up on my own ingredients than buy these, but they’re convenient enough for those who don’t mind paying.
–Poison–
The Wugushi is an interesting class, as it relies almost entirely on a single damaging status effect for most of its power. Poison is, for the most part, easily cured but incredibly deadly if it’s left unattended. The damage per tick is primarily mitigated or enhanced by elemental affinity towards the ‘poison’ element rather than physical or magical defense. Heavily armored enemies can still take obscene amounts of damage from poison, whereas they’d shrug off a bleed (which is considered physical damage over time) without a problem.
This status ailment is affected by elemental properties, and you’ll notice a slightly different audio cue as well as a small text prompt telling you how much bonus damage is being dealt/reduced by the enemy’s alignment. Poison damage deals 50% extra damage to earth element monsters, and is reduced by 50% by Poison element. It’s neutral to everything else!
It’s worth noting that each of the Wugushi’s skills seem to produce a different kind of poison status effect. The poison employed by Needle Blow isn’t the same status effect as the one used by Wugong Gu or Zhendu for example. They have different icons and can stack independently on the same target.
–Circle 1 Skills–
Needle Blow
This is going to be most Wugushi’s first skill. A dart is fired at the enemy, dealing immediate poison damage and then inflicting a heavy poison status effect. It has a pretty long cooldown at 25 seconds, and only affects a single target, but it hits hard. Rather frustratingly, this skill sometimes doesn’t proc poison at all, in which case it goes on cooldown and a brunt of the damage is wasted.
You’ll mainly be using this when you want a single priority target to die. It’s going to do a huge amount of damage to a single target unless they happen to resist poison, and early on you’ll straight up kill most enemies with just a lv 1 proc.
Ranking this up increases the strength of the poison effect as well as how long it lasts, starting at 6 seconds and increasing by one second per rank. Needle blow inflicts a status effect called ‘Needle Blow Poison’, and has its own unique icon to go with it. You can consider this a ‘toxic’ or ‘bad poison’ compared to the others.
There isn’t too much else to say about this skill, so let’s move on to one that’s a little bit more misunderstood.
Wugong Gu
I started testing this skill under the assumption that it was every bit as bad as everyone keeps saying it is. That the spreading mechanic was ‘buggy’, ‘weird’, and ‘underwhelming’. Well yes, it certainly seems that way until you realize that the tooltip is terribly misleading as to how this skill actually works. The way the skill is described, you’d expect it to spread to anything around the initial target, and then continue to spread with each new instance of the infection. Sadly, that’s not how it works at all. After much testing on slow-moving mobs of enemies, I was able to figure out the spreading mechanic and it’s been consistent for me ever since.
Wugong Gu is a blow dart attack that inflicts a status ailment on a single target called ‘Infection’. This poison damage is weaker than both Zhendu and Needle Blow Poison, but if the infected target takes damage from any source, it will spread a non-transferable version of the status to an enemy standing near the host with each successive hit that lands on the host after that point.
Here’s the kicker though - the tooltip doesn’t tell you that the maximum amount of infected enemies is increased by one per skill point (along with the damage and duration). So at lv 1, you’re going to spread the poison to one target next to the original host at maximum, no matter how many times you attack it.
Attacking enemies infected by the status doesn’t transfer it further. Only the original host can transfer the status when struck. The AoE is a bit more generous than it looks, but smaller than I’d like. It’s still a very usable AOE attack though…once it’s got more than two levels.
This is one of those skills that looks and feels weak but scales up pretty well with level. At 5 points, it can easily melt a small pull of 6 monsters, providing you can hit the host 5 times before it dies. It comes with an Attribute that increases the damage over time duration on subsequent infections by one second per Attribute level. It may not put out big numbers per tick like Needle Blow, but when maxed out it ticks far longer and over a larger group of enemies. I actually chose to get this to lv 5 first before Needle Blow and did not regret my decision.
When mobbing with this skill, try to aim for the monster at the very back of the pack. They’ll inevitably walk through the others as they get into position, allowing you to spread the infection optimally.
You do need to attack the host each time you want to spread the infection, so try to put the infection on something tanky, If they die too fast to the first few ticks, that longish cooldown is wasted. Position lag can also make things tricky. It’s also capable of failure, much like Needle Blow, which is something I feel could really use a change.
Yes, this skill isn’t amazing, especially compared to Throw Gu Pot, but it’s much better than I was lead to believe.
Zhendu
This is an interesting one. A buff to yourself and all members of your party that will, for one HIT only, inflict a damage over time effect on the enemy struck. This is a single-target spell unless you’re working with a Linker. Sadly, you cannot cast Zhendu and then apply the effect to multiple enemies through Tear Down or something like that. In that case, it will pick one at random.
The damage per tick is mid way between Wugong Gu and Needle Blow, however it ticks for one second longer at base level, and increases by two seconds per level, making it quite significant in terms of damage in its own right.
Zhendu can stack with other poison-inflicting attacks. This means that you can cast Zhendu, then immediately cast Needle Blow to place two instances of poison on the same target. This becomes particularly delicious when you find out that Zhendu has an Attribute that causes enemies who are under the effects of Zhendu to lose 7 poison resistance per Attribute level.
More coming, this thread is a work in progress. If you have any discoveries of your own relating to the Wugushi class or poison mechanics, please feel free to add them and I’ll try to compile them into the main post.
