Lowering CON lowers the max hp, but not the current. When you lower CON on a damaged enemy it actually appears to have the alarming effect of RAISING their HP bar because they suddenly have a greater reatio of hp left compared to their total.

It only lowers current hp if the current is close to max, so disease and other -CON effects are best used on full HP enemies that you intend to kill before the effect wears off.

What's the point of Scoundrel's Venomous Strike inflicting Disease with a high chance, then? Scoundrels backstabbing usually deals so much damage that I can't see Disease actually having an impact, beyond a very slight chance of reducing the eventual healing possible on some big enemies?

I dunno. I'm actually curious to see the Dev's feedback on this one, other than the mass disease hydro spell I never really saw the point either as far as directly killing things goes.

Now, if I remember right I think disease also lowers grit... which is useful at indirectly killing things.

As Tactician touched on, CON reduction in itself is a great way to get huge vitality pools down because of the fractional reduction that it causes. Probably more importantly, though, Disease reduces Grit, which is relevant for obvious reasons.

Finger of Death's success rate is complicated, but its success is based on the target's relative CON and, secondarily, their Grit. As a result, any reduction to CON is a massive boon for Finger of Death's success.

You're right that the Disease on Venomous Strike might not cause much immediate damage due to max HP loss (at least in the case of non-massive bosses), but it is there mostly to add the utility of Disease to Scoundrel.


As for stacking CON reductions, there are the following (to the best of my memory):

- Disease
- Infect
- Attenuation
- Soulsap
- Soulfire (doesn't stack with soulsap)

The most interesting point here is probably Infect stacking with Disease, because Infect naturally becomes Disease when it spreads. This means that the target who is Infected is, for an instant, affected by both Infect and Disease, which results in a massive Vitality reduction for those at full health.

.....ahhh. That probably explains why I suddenly dropped to like 250 max HP at level 14 on my mage when Infect hit me. RIP. Re:Attenuation: I honestly don't understand how to use this ability properly. The only enemies that would actually live long enough for the debuff to stack up on them tend to just resist it outright in the first place >.<

As a side note, is there any possible way to change characters not getting EXP while dead? Unfortunately i assume that it's probably hardcoded, but it's annoying as hell. I just got Rebirth on my mage which I'm itching to try out- I'm just worried about the EXP penalty... :(

Attenuation is going to require both a long-living and Grit reduced target--so pretty much a boss that has been given something along the lines of Erosion and Soulsap/fire.

The EXP problem is, sadly, hardcoded.