Fill with bile

[Leodane]

Hiya, folks,

I'm throwing together a druid/spider DoT build, and try as I might, I can't think of a reason to use Fill with Bile. I'm probably going to be running inject venom, toxinball, heart thorn, and terrifying bite for poison dots. Even running 4 applicable dots, I'm struggling to see the value of Fill with Bile compared to running Cosmic Strike or Regrowth. It just seems like the least effective damage-in-slot choice. I get that it functionally saves me a little power and about 1 second of combat time by having an ability which frontloads damage like that onto other abilities, but this build is running modified healing sanc, modified web trap, and brambleskin, so power isn't so much of an issue.

Druid loadout will be rotskin, heart thorn, toxinball, brambleskin, healing sanc, and TDB. Am I missing something, or is Fill with Bile just hot garbage? Even the mods don't make it look that attractive.

I have 4 poison dots. It adds 40x4= 160 up front. Each dot ticks 6 times, so 6x5x4 = 120 more damage for 280 damage...or I could slot cosmic strike, or even delerium for more. Even with the + to indirect poison damage mods, it still isn't competitive.

[Celerity]

I haven't looked at spider/druid since lvl 70 was the max and even back then I only hastily threw together a build but immediately I see you misunderstand some things.

Firstly it can stack up to 3x since the buff lasts for 3 minutes with a 60 second cooldown, similar to the mentalism waves lasting 60 seconds with a 20 second cooldown. I think it also gets multiplied by the indirect poison damage +x% from spider mods (but this may have been changed?) so for example inject venom 5 does 240 poison dot by default, with the lvl 70 indirect poison damage mods this would be 240*2.4 = 576.

With fill with bile this becomes (240+6*5*3)*2.4 = 792 which means fill with bile actually adds 792-576 = 216 damage to every ability with a poison dot plus the extra 40 direct damage too and this is of course using the lvl 70 mods.

You can also say that unless you have all 12 skills on cooldown often, it would always be worthwhile to use fill with bile since it's essentially a pre-combat buff. I personally found this to be the case and in fact I also used premeditated doom and discounting healing sanctuary, since it's a heal I never found I had all other skills on cooldown even then.

Worth noting too is that fill with bile does not need mods to be good, it could mean the difference between making max-enchanted and non max-enchanted gear in your build or just if your current build is tight on mods, it can help alleviate it a bit and allow you to stack mods on your other abilities which is nearly always better than spreading them out.

Just from my personal experience, modded healing sanctuary should be enough healing solo for the vast majority of things and honestly I don't think throwing regrowth in there, although it is a great heal, would have too much of an impact on your fights. I personally used an extra poison dot attack (grappling web) which meant it was even more effective for me too. I would absolutely use cosmic strike however as it is just a fantastic ability. I never found rotskin to be that great solo since it's armour damage only and more often than not I think the debuff didn't pay for itself compared to using a different ability. I did get incredibly tired of using this build however since upkeeping brambleskin, premeditated doom, fill with bile and healing sanctuary was all way too much work.

[Yaffy]

The damage bonus from Fill with Bile multiplies with bonuses for other moves. So for example, if you had "Toxin ball damage +%50", and you used Fill with Bile to give +40 damage to Toxin Ball, that +40 would get multiplied by +50% for a total of 60 poison damage. Additionally it gets boosted by any sort of boost to poison damage as well for both direct and indirect sources, so it does get multiplied by Spider's indirect poison passive. This basically means it benefits from any % based mods to poison or to your poison based attacks, so if you have a lot of them, it's definitely worth running. You can't stack the buff on yourself unfortunately, but it's not hard for it to out damage cosmic strike each minute.

[Leodane]

Iiiiiinteresting. I didn't realize it could stack with itself. Does that mean the "+ to health" mod stacks, too? Running with that mod twice, with three instances up, that's about +450 hp...in that light, it seems quite good. That changes things significantly. And if it is added before percentage +'s, that's even better. Ok, I'll give it a go.

Edit: read Yaffy's closer and tested it - does not stack with itself.

[Celerity]

I didn't realize it could stack with itself
Yes, sorry that's my mistake. I haven't used the build in probably nearly a year and misremembered. It is still a really effective skill though.