Vile Vistani gear -- poison spell power or ranged power?

[Jyhdif]

I was looking forward to building a Vile Chemist-Vistani whose poison damage matched the phys damage. I have been let down in heroics so far, and am wondering now whether there I should continue into epics if a pure alchemist Vile Vistani will just be a worse version of whatever the dominant thrower is now, without even big poison numbers to excite.

Therefore, I would like some advice on Vile Vistani throwers in Epics from anyone who has played one:

Do you build like all other throwers and just add negative/poison spellpower to the mix?

The videos I have seen of Vile Vistanis appear to show the same high phys damage numbers of all vistanis, with pretty meager posion damage (e.g. 5-15k phys damage and 500 poison damage). Does this match others' experiences?

When poison/negative spellpower conflicts gearwise with ranged power, do you always take ranged power? For example, Wallwatch set vs. Esoteric Initiate set.

Does adrenaline multiply poison damage from vile chemist as well, or only phys attack damage (it states 400% increase, and does not add any qualifiers)?

I was hoping to go shiradi because of the fun procs, but what have been others' experiences with the two? Do the new (for me) cooldowns on shiradi prism, for instance, kill the fun?



EDIT: no response to wall of text, so revised.

[Selvera]

As a vile vistanii melee I can comfortably say that your physical damage number easily outstrips your poison damage number essentially regardless of what you do. The reason for this is how the math works.

My physical damage/hit starts at about 1d4+10 (average 12.5) or so at level 3 when you first get poison damage of 1d6 (average 3.5), for 3.5 base poison damage to match 12.5 physical damage you would need over 200 spellpower at level 3, which I don't think is possible, given that metamagic does not apply to spellsword. And that's not even factoring in melee power or crit; which skews things father in the melee damage direction.

while at level 30 I'm looking at closer to 10.75(1d4+3)+130 (average 200), while poison damage maxes out at 6d12 (average 39), In gearing I tried to prioritize spellpower over melee power whenever it was sensible to make the choice, but I still end up with somewhere in the realm of 150 melee power and 800 spellpower (using a ravenloft belt that's about to melt); so 200*2.5 = 500 physical damage (before crits, which effectively double this number), 40*9 = 360 poison damage. For 39 poison damage to match 200 physical damage with 150 melee power, you'd need around 1300 spell power, on non critical hits. (Or you know 2560 spellpower to match the numbers with critical hits). The only way I could see this even close to happening at endgame is to nerf that physical damage number low enough to match the imbue damage, the other way doesn't seem feasible.

That's not to say the poison damage is useless; there are plenty of enemies in the game that shrug off physical damage; but once you hit them with the immunity bypass the poison damage will melt them pretty fast.

Wallwatch set vs. Esoteric Initiate set? I went with profane experiment and got all of doublestrike/shot, Int and spellpower, while either of those sets (or the melee version of them) would miss out.

Does adrenaline multiply the poison damage? No.

Can't comment too much on shiadi/fury on a build like this; I run in shadowdancer which has lots of nice bells and whistles to it; including an extra lair of sneak attack damage, some stuff that makes it so you live in melee range, and instant kills.

If you want to talk thrower, I imagine that most of your damage numbers shown by "top players" showing off their builds will be showing off what it can do while using multitude of missiles; which grants another 50 ranged power but no spellpower. And also may stack up precise shot for even more ranged power unmatched by spellpower.