SilentSin wrote:What gives? Were the poison mechanics changed as some point for the wiki to be marked as outdated? Is the character sheet simply wrong?
I think you're reading the wiki page wrong, I don't see anything suggesting you should take the tooltip as a DPS reading. The ingame tooltip is correct though. It means 5K poison damage
over the duration. So that would be 5000 / 4.3 = 1163 DPS. The character sheet shows you the total damage you will do with one hit if you sit there and wait for the poison to wear out. So it's pretty useless as a DPS metric once poison gets involved.
If you install the latest D2stats version, on page 2 you can see your poison DPS pretty clearly along with physical and elemental damage per hit.
The character screen seems to get weird when you add other sources of differing lengths. Also it factors +Poison spell damage which only applies on melee hits, not missiles. Here are some test results I did with Plague on basic attack, no weapon:
Plague: 7.3k - 13k
Plague + TU4 Wormtongue: 16K - 28K (seems to be using 9.3 sec duration here which you get from totaling the separate sources)
Plague + TU4 Vilehand: 13K - 20K (seems to be using Plague's 4.3 duration instead of the 2.65 average)
Plague + TU4 Wormtongue + TU4 Vilehand = 13K - 20K (interestingly this seems more accurate than the above cases, since the belt really shouldn't add too much total damage)
Long story short: ignore the Lying Character Screen