Poison Dart

Poison Dart is a Witch Doctor Tier 3 skill unlocked at character level 6. It's a ranged attack in which the Witch Doctor blows a poisoned dart at the enemy, dealing initial poison damage and damage over-time.

Background

Diablo III Skill [e]
Poison Dart Active, 5 ranks
Used by:	Witch Doctor
Skill Description:
Fires a deadly poison dart that deals X-X poison damage and an additional X-X poison damage over X seconds.
Skill Details:
Type:	Direct Damage
Quantity:	Duration
Effect:	Direct
School:	Magical
Mana cost:	Unknown
Cast time:	Unknown
Duration:	None
Cooldown:	Unknown
Synergies:	Unknown
Requires:	N/A
Prereq of:	N/A

The Witch Doctor uses a blowpipe to fire a poison dart.

Skill Design

This low-level direct damage skill first appeared in 2010. The casting animation is fairly slow, but the projectile itself is very fast and accurate.

Skill Rank Table

Blowing darts.

• Rank 1: Fires a deadly poison dart that deals X-X poison damage and an additional X-X poison damage over X seconds.

Synergies

• None known.

Skill Rune Effects

The runes for Poison Dart were discussed at BlizzCon 2010. Wyatt Cheng narrated a short video of them in action:

The Witch Doctor's new skill called Poison Dart and that kind of fit with the Power Rune before but then we changed the skill so we had another version that would make it a rapid-fire skill and then it worked really well with Multistrike but then we had this wacky idea of the Witch Doctor being able to shoot a live snake that would attach itself to monster's faces and stun them. Where does that fit? It doesn't fit anywhere so we just changed the names of the runes then we can come up with as many kinds of wacky ideas as we want.

With that said, the rune effects for poison dart are as follows:

• Alabaster rune: A snake is fired out to bite the face of the enemy.
• Crimson rune: Substantial fire damage is added to the dart.
• Golden rune: Mana is recovered with dart hits.
• Indigo rune: Grants machine gun darts, allowing four (or more) to be fired in very rapid succession.
  • Rank one: Fires 2 darts.
  • Rank two: Fires 4 darts.
• Obsidian rune: Darted enemies are slowed.

Development

Poison Dart was revealed as a Witch Doctor skill in early August, 2010. It came from a forum post by D3 CM Bashiok. A fan proposed a dart gun weapon for the Witch Doctor, and got more than he bargained for in the reply. :

A blowgun that you can buy different kinds of darts and also have different blowgun skills like a rapid shot and critical shot.

Bashiok: Wow, pretty good guess. We have a new witch doctor skill called Poison Dart. Pretty much this.

Poison Dart was added to the game after the three-skill tree arrangement was removed, so it was never officially assigned to a skill tree, but it would clearly have been in the Voodoo Skill Tree if it had been, along with all the other spell-like Witch Doctor direct attacks.

It was first seen in Blizzcon 2010 and skill runes were also shown at this moment.

References

• Full Witch Doctor Skill Trees and Stats