Not being able to heal is really dangerous in some circumstances. It can also be a "Okay let's flee and wait".

I've only gone as far as T2 and from what I've experienced poison seems very ho-hum. It doesn't last that long and it doesn't do that much. When you notice your poisoned you wait 6 seconds until it wears off. If you are in the middle of a danger room then you run around and shield for 6 seconds until it wears off. Sure, if you're low on health, need to heal, and you're poisoned, then poison can ruin your day. Otherwise it doesn't have the "oh snap" feeling that other status ailments give you.

Trying to use poison is futile. Sure, it works on the jelly king fight, but that's because you're forced to use poison there, and you usually have a full complement of knights taking turns throwing 12 poison vials at the big jelly cube. If jelly king wasn't around I doubt anyone would pack poison weapons or vials. And I think poison bombs are a joke. Burning a weapon slot to inflict poison status on a bunch of enemies? It's only useful in the jelly king fight, and personally I think pure damage and poison vials are better than a poison bomb there.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with poison is it's duration. It doesn't last long enough. If you could defeat the enemy during the short time they are poisoned then you didn't need to poison them in the first place. They should modify poison so that it either lasts longer or taking damage while poisoned refreshes the poison duration.

@eek5

A fight in a poison arena will not take three times longer than a fight in a shock arena except, perhaps for the fact that in a shock arena you wouldn't be able to survive 1/3 of the time you could in a poison arena. You argument is heavily flawed in that it assumed you're constantly poisoned. Let's compare that bogus situation to the other status effects, shall we?

-If you're constantly on fire, you'll lose all your health and die.
-If you're constantly frozen, you won't be able to move. Enemies will interrupt any attempts at a charge attack which would be your only means of attacking someone behind you. You'll die.
-If you're constantly shocked, you'll be regularily interrupted, hurt by the shock, hurt by an enemy while you're shocked, and die.
-If you're constantly stunned, you'll move incredibly slowly and won't even be able to dodge lumbers. You'll die.
-If you're constantly asleep, you'll die.
-If you're constantly poisoned, fights will take a bit longer and you can't heal.

You're not constantly poisoned, though. You'll be a tiny bit inconvenienced for about five seconds. Run a bit around at your full, uninterrupted speed and you can take that pill anyway. Your attack power is reduced for a bit, so you can just charge up an attack to unleash a full power when the status wears off. You'll take a bit more damage when poisoned, sure, but all the other status effects would either already damage you if you get hit or make it easier for several enemies to get more attacks in on you.

You can't seriously deny that poison arenas are a joke compared to any of the others.

And hell, imagine if there was a sword like the Faust or Fang of Vog that was really powerful and the only backlash was that it had a chance of causing strong poison towards yourself on charge attacks. It would be so risk-free nobody would care about it.

@OP Similarily, poison on enemies don't work the way you think it does. It does, in fact, not work great on monsters. You're better off with setting the enemy on fire so it will outdamage the healing or freezing them so you can kill the healer more easily, or shocking them so both happen at the same time.

A simple fix would be to make poison last four or five times longer. It would still be fairly useless, but at least you wouldn't spend so much time applying it to enemies. Not being able to heal due to that poison shot that hit you half a minute ago; that's when we're talking about tactical ramifications.

I just got an idea : Shield should be easy to break when we are poisoned (by halfing the health). Or unavailable at all.

At first I expected to lose some health from poison. I think that would make sense.

Poison on players works just fine. It may often be an inconvenience, but at times it can be lethal, or at least harrowing. If you are at low health, getting poisoned is a major concern.

Poison on monsters, however... it does seem to be a general consensus that it's way too weak and the only reason to ever bother with Poison is Royal Jelly.

I don't think making poison never wear off until you took a remedy or an elevator would be excessive. Judging from your reaction, though, it seems four or five times would actually make poison dangerous.

All my statements describe a hypothetical situation in which you have the status applied during the entire fight. That was eek5's scenario. He said the entire fight would take 3 times longer which would only be true if you had the status applied during the entire fight. I say we make it so.

I dunno' why I mentioned sleep. I also dunno' why I didn't mention curse.

Making it so that if you attempt to heal while poisoned, you lose as much health as you would have gained.

Like if you walk over 4 tri-hearts while poisoned, you take 12 bars of damage instead of restoring 12 bars of health.

It would make sense because enemy healers damage poisoned monsters instead of healing them.

Poison does not really lower defense either. It gives attackers a boost. Just look at the numbers - it's a damage bonus for the attacker. Not a defense malus for the poisoned "victim". It scales with the attack's dmg only... not with defense. Which in my opinions is the main problem with this status. It's just not useful enough.

Fire is just straight damage, Freeze and Sleep lock you in place, Shock does both.
Curse makes attacking unwise, and stun slows you down.

However, Poison doesn't make people's fighting style change. You can still keep attacking and blocking as usual. And unless if your shield is broken, you probably take rarely damage.

Poison needs to last a bit longer

This is not my main comment. However, I agree. When i get hit by poison, I just stand there, (party members hate me at times like this) until it wears off. Usually, I also attack weaker monsters during this time, since they can't make much damage, like jelly cubes and such, (not the RJ, obviously) Still, poison seriously looks icky. Really. I'm not senile. But anyways, I think that it is pretty harmless, but isn't that good when it's used against you? We're not here to make the game harder, people. If you want to make the game harder, focus on more unique ways, like new monsters or something, not perfectly (almost) fine statue effects.

My favorite status effects (I know this is random) are shock, freeze, and curse. Fire is just really boring sometimes, even if it's the only statue effect that ever killed me, and sleep is just... what you do every night, and poison is, you know.