SangoProduction
2021-01-04, 01:39 AM
And here's the other part of the Alchemy sphere. Not but 1 day later. The Poison package of Alchemy is so weirdly put into the Alchemy sphere. Like, sure. Poisons can be made with Craft (Alchemy), but there's almost no interaction between the two packages, and there's not really much thematic similarity, even in playstyle. Poisons are essentially spontaneous. Formulae are painstakingly prepared. (Although I've got some homebrew talents (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?590131-(Spheres-of-Might)-Bonus-Alchemy-Talents-PEACH&p=23969014) that do have interaction with both.) At least they both scale (with) Craft(Alchemy) ranks.
With the obligatory intro paragraph done, onto the review!
Post-Review Analysis: OK, there are actually a few talents that are shared between the two packages. Not many, but more than I gave credit for. Surprisingly, the supporting, general Alchemy talents were exceptional bumps in power, while the toxins were just...there. Most of them are not really note worthy. Which is sad. But there were some exceptional "killer apps" like Mind Venom.
Flexibility: Oh yeah. This is a sphere that's plenty good for flexing into. For the most part the toxins are very self-contained. Sure they have plenty of support talents that they would love, but it's not all that necessary. So long as you have ranks in Craft (Alchemy), they will work fine.
Ranking system:
(S) Superb: You always want this. It's awesome.
(G) Good: You would certainly not complain about having this, especially in the right builds / situations.
(B) Bad: While perhaps better than nothing, you are giving up something for it, so probably shouldn't without a good reason.
(N) No.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
- Special Ratings:
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
(I) Impossible: Can't be rated because it is just not defined enough to give a meaningful rating - it depends too much on DM ruling, or personal use. I'll just place it where I guess the average result would put it.
(F) Flavor: This indicates that the main draw to the talent is going to be its inherent fluff or flavor, rather than raw power or utility.
Mechanics
Creating Poisons: You may create either the base poison, or another (toxin) talent you know as a standard action - or move action with an alchemist's kit.
These poisons may be produced as contact, ingested, inhaled, or injury - your choice on creation.
Using Poisons: After being created, you may try to use it, depending on what form you made it as. For contact or injury poisons (presumably), you can apply the poison to a weapon as part of the same action of creating it. (Note that using a poison on a weapon wipes the poison away, as implied by a talent. Probably same for normal poisons.)
You may make a melee touch attack against a target as a standard action, if using a contact poison.
You may also throw inhaled poisons as splash weapons, with a 10ft range increment that fills a 10ft cube on use. AoE poison > single target poison (of the same effect), almost all the time.
Poison Potency: Poisons remain potent for 1 round +1 / 4 Craft(Alchemy) ranks... After it's been made, not after it's been used. There are talents for the latter... This is not made clear in the base rules. So poison gas doesn't stick around, and they don't need to scrape off contact poison.
Special Save DC Rules: Unlike normal poisons, Poison package toxins do not increase in DC with multiple exposures. Poisons, like formulae, uses your ranks in Craft(Alchemy), rather than BAB to determine the DC.
Base Poison: Force an opponent to make a fort save or become fatigued for 1 minute. Presumably on exposure to the poison, but it makes no mention of that - and it does specify opponents, not simply anyone exposed to it, which is odd. The implications of having all this text is that it's meant to do something...
Regardless, I do find it funny to imagine a sommelier who offers a shared bottle of wine to poison an enemy to death.
Toxin talents: Toxin talents change the effects of the base poison, but otherwise abide by the same rules (or lack of rules, if you want to read it obtusely). Including duration...when toxin talents don't mention their duration. Even though some do mention the duration, and have it be the same duration as the... I think. IT'S NOT CLEAR!
-
Base Poison (B): Fatigue is one of the less powerful debuffs you could apply, unless you can escalate to exhausted. Having no innate means of escalating, this is a sub par use of your action and investment.
-
Lingering Poison (S+): This is essentially required if you want to effectively use poison coating on weapons. The martial focus abilities are all kinds of win. Although inhaled, once again, wins out.
Specialized Venom (<S+>): Running into undead and constructs and outsiders and elementals and... (poison-immune creatures)... and (dwarves)... more than you were first expecting? Well, here you go! Hope ignoring one enemy's immunities is enough... Might want to just splash something else.
Cluster Toss (S): 2x the inhaled poison going down range is nice, even at 90% efficacy. Useful if you already use your swift action, like with Focusing Poisoning.
Focusing Poisoning (S): Poison people? Profit! Are you going to poison people, having taken the poison package? Cool!
Lasting Application (G-S): If you want to poison your weapons, this is a must-have. Kind of a tax for a certain play style, on top of the tax to have it actually last for any notable amount of time. But still. Meanwhile the AoE version gets multiple hits just for existing.
Billowing Poison (G-S): You like applying your poisons in gaseous form? You have wide-open battlefields? Well, baby, this just doubled your base radius from level 1. (Which makes it sound a lot more impressive than just saying its radius increased by 5 ft.)
Incurable (<G-S>): Enemies noticed that the party is using more noxious fumes than all WWII combined, and actually did something about it? Well, give your poisons Spell Resistance! Buy now, and it comes packaged with anti-antivenom!
Noxious Breath (G-S): It's like Shaped Chemistry, but you're not needing 3 Skill Focus feats and 1 rank just to compensate for the difficulty of changing the shape of your AoE. So that's good.
Snap Toss (G): So long as you don't need your swift action, and have a way to regenerate your martial focus, then this is just a free extra toxin down range, every turn. But the featured way of regaining martial focus is by use of immediate (aka swift) action. So unless you're using another method, this is less good than normal.
Dynamite Throwing Form (G): I actually find this more viable for poisons than formulae, because poisons can be more easily slotted into unarmed builds. You're still making ranged attacks with an unarmed build, for some reason, but they are at least touch attacks.
Risky Business (G): Considering you can make yourself immune with another talent, this is basically a scaling Sphere Focus feat, if you're up close and personal.
Skilled Applicator (G?): Sort of a confusing talent, as normally you can apply poison as soon as you make it, and there's a note saying that talents don't affect normal poisons. But I guess this allows you to use contact poison touch attack as a swift action. That's certainly unique. Unfortunately, your swift action is probably already spoken for by Focusing Poisoning.
Delayed Poison (F): Delay the effects of your poison. Let your foe drink deep of his demise. Then it hits, and he dies. Helps to evoke the poisoner feel, and provides a good chunk of "utility"...in that you get to do your thing before they recognize you're hostile.
Ingested Application (F): See Delayed Poison. But for specifically Ingested poison. (Also implies that normally, poison has a taste and an odor. With no given DC to detect it.)
Food Poisoning (F): The negative effects of your Ingested poisons last for 24 more hours, which can be increased even further. With each 24 hour forcing a save, potentially escalating the poison. Read Delayed Poison for the rest of the analysis.
Potent Poison (B-G): The duration of your poison is doubled. Awesome. Not entirely necessary, in actual combat, but it gives you a longer window to come back and check in on your poisoned enemy-to-be.
Habit Forming (F): Wanna be the scummy drug dealer? Well, there are talents for that!
Careful Poisoner (B): Cool at high levels, as it means you don't need anything else to keep from zoning your own team from areas. But, man is it stingy with the immunities. (It also implies that your poisons don't innately only target opponents.)
Controlled Rupture (B): Again, cool at high levels when your poisons are remaining potent. But only assist inhaled poison in that regard. But can also be used as a strategic funnel to essentially tell enemies "there's a certain way I want you to go." So it's not totally useless. It is also less stingy with how many squares you can make unaffected than Careful Poisoner is.
Disabling Poison (B): Battered condition is really minor. It lasts 1 round, conditionally. But it's just added on top of your other poisons. So, have fun.
Pill Popper (N-B): This is one of the least useful abilities I've seen yet. SPECIAL EXCEPTION: If you use the other package for formulae (note the 15 minute craft times) then this suddenly becomes...a complicated way to get a relatively small bonus. But a bonus none the less. And formulae love bonuses to craft checks.
Swift Toxicology (N-B): I don't see a good reason not to carry an Alchemist's Kit on you, so you don't tend to get the second effect. And you already want to do so many other things with your martial focus than use your swift action, which is already spoken for.
Mind Venom (S+): 50% chance for brutes to miss their turns. 75% chance for casters to miss their turns. Fort save. No need to escalate. Not mind-affecting.
Frightening Hallucinogen (G-S): Shaken's one of the golden standard debuff conditions. And frightened could end a fight. Panicked is generally overkill, but you can reach it, if so needed. You unfortunately need to deal with fear immunity now as well. And I've seen almost no DMs rule Specialized Venom works for that.
Nerve Venom (G): Again, sickened is a golden standard debuff. And Nauseated for 1 minute is essentially save or lose.
Three Wise Monkeys (G): I love the theming. And I think it's actually really well balanced, suffering a useless initial condition, but the proceeding ones (blind and silence) are really nice. Granted Silence only really matters for casters / bards (also a caster, don't @ me). But you don't need to go to 3 if you don't need it.
Drowsy Venom (<G>): Gives escalation and "effective kill" condition after 3 saves. If your DM rules that awaking an enemy removes even the exhaustion, and you have to start over again (just like how removing exhaustion removes fatigue, even if it was escalated from fatigue), then this goes in the dumpster.
Diseased Venom (G): I've analyzed each of the diseases here. Also acts to enable stat-killing with Degenerating Poison. I don't generally think stat-killing is particularly healthy way of ending encounters, but you do you. But now you need to dodge both poison and disease immunity. Reasonable DMs would allow Specialized Venom to work.
Talentless Poison (<G>): Comes with its own increased duration. Yay. Reducing skill check of people is generally...niche. But if you're playing political theatre, then have fun.
Catalyzed Poison (I): Obviously, you'd never use this if you didn't already have ready access to some magical, mysterious, non-alchemy sphere poison you can use. So... I assume it's good. I'm not going to go through and individually judge all the poisons out there just to see.
Haemophilic Venom (<B-G>): If you're using / partnered with a rapid-fire bleed build that uses a billion cuts of tiny, stacks of bleed...well, you made the build an extreme amount better. But that's generally not a good way to apply bleed, despite an entire sphere dedicated to bleed, with such a base ability.
Graceless Tincture (F): Loses points for being the the same sphere as Liquid Nice. But hey, a face poison. One that's much more friendly than most. And it comes packaged with its own increased duration.
Degenerating Poison (B-G): A stacking -2 penalty to any one stat, other than constitution. Penalties can't stat-kill, without reaching out to other sources of stat damage. So...is -2 to Strength going to make a larger difference than...say...sickened? No. Reducing caster stats might be useful.
Witchbane (B-G): Up to 50% spell failure. Nice! But...wait. Mind Venom has 75% of no spells after 1 save. Yikes. But maybe they're an omega mage, and you want to reduce that to a 17.5 ish percent chance of having them cast anything. Putting them to sleep might be more effective.
Performance Enhancer (B-G): Martials like this, and don't really care for the drawback. And unlike other performance enhancers, there's no apparent risk of losing any "members" of your party.
Psychotropic Hallucinogen (B-G): A single skill check gets +2 in the next minute. Works for formulae crafters. Pretty worthless otherwise.
Academic Enhancer (B-G): Pretty meh as a buff. But if you have casters who use the talents to bottle their spells, you can give this to them, let them lock in their bonus, wait a bit, and then move on without any downside. As a debuff, taking 2 points off con is nice. Nothing incredible. But nice. And you make them more adorable as you stab them to death and pump their lungs full of foul poisons. (Even for formulae, the sickened is more impactful than the bonus. But only takes up 10 / 15 minutes. Still gives you time to cool off while craftng. See if that passes with your gm. lol.)
Vulnerability Venom (B): Awesome. It's flexible energy resistance shred, which lasts for a minute. That's cool, if you need it. I just am having a really hard time imagining a situation where you both have taken this talent and actually need it. If you're a destruction sphere user, and you spent a talent on this, you could have just spent a talent on a different energy type. If you're a formulae user, you could have gotten another a different damaging formulae instead of this talent. And surely it can't be that your entire party is stuck on the same energy type, right? I'm keeping it as the sole B rank, because the effect is conceptually good. And if it weren't for the opportunity cost of taking the talent, it would be good. And that's the most fundamental definition of the B category.
Concentration Aid (N-B): I mean...if you have a caster that took some concentration-requiring drawback, and is demanding you give them drugs to help them... they might have some issues. Otherwise, I don't really see a good use for lesser-Combat Casting.Also the downtime is 59/60 minutes. Really have to time that well.
Anesthetic Dosage (N-B): 2 damage / level converted to nonlethal. It's not even temporary hit points. That's...pretty poor. But man, imagine if we had this kind of anesthetic in real life. No more deaths in surgery. Just pump 'em to the brim with this. Maybe massive damage still applies. But still!
Slowing Poison (N-B): Move speed generally doesn't matter. And the escalation basically does nothing beyond the first, in "true" effect. Compare it to Drowsy, which knocks someone out on the third failed save. This, they fail 3 times, and they can still 5ft step, still attack, still do basically everything unless you just book it. Don't get me wrong, that is a bit of utility that's missing from a lot of classes, but this is in the same sphere as Instant Foam, which will probably let your run for 1-2 (or more) additional rounds than your opponent. That would probably be enough. Doesn't help with flying creatures. But are you really hoping to be able to run from a dragon, let alone have it fail multiple times so you can out speed it?
Disorientating Venom (N): So, if you are specifically facing an SoM build that needs to refresh their Martial Focus, reliably... you give them a fort save, and if they fail, for the next minute (I think), they get a will save on their turn, or else they can't regain it that turn. Wow. That's so specialized. And not a true shut down of its specialized target. That's like if Specialized Venom gave a will save to still ignore the poison effects, every round. Granted, this would be a pain in the backside to see as a player. So, I would have simply never even printed this. There's no way to make it useful at its job, and not make every SoM player hate the DM who used this.
Painful Venin (N-): What an absolutely trivial amount of damage. Originally, it could be argued that it stacked on anything that simply replaced the fatigue with some other effect (granted, was basically all of them). Now you must take 2 talents to get such a treat. Which means even to get use out of this on escalating Drowsy Venom, you need 2 talents in this. For 1/2 level damage! Wow! That goes above and beyond to scream "NO! Don't even think about it! You're thinking about it, aren't you!"
With the obligatory intro paragraph done, onto the review!
Post-Review Analysis: OK, there are actually a few talents that are shared between the two packages. Not many, but more than I gave credit for. Surprisingly, the supporting, general Alchemy talents were exceptional bumps in power, while the toxins were just...there. Most of them are not really note worthy. Which is sad. But there were some exceptional "killer apps" like Mind Venom.
Flexibility: Oh yeah. This is a sphere that's plenty good for flexing into. For the most part the toxins are very self-contained. Sure they have plenty of support talents that they would love, but it's not all that necessary. So long as you have ranks in Craft (Alchemy), they will work fine.
Ranking system:
(S) Superb: You always want this. It's awesome.
(G) Good: You would certainly not complain about having this, especially in the right builds / situations.
(B) Bad: While perhaps better than nothing, you are giving up something for it, so probably shouldn't without a good reason.
(N) No.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
- Special Ratings:
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
(I) Impossible: Can't be rated because it is just not defined enough to give a meaningful rating - it depends too much on DM ruling, or personal use. I'll just place it where I guess the average result would put it.
(F) Flavor: This indicates that the main draw to the talent is going to be its inherent fluff or flavor, rather than raw power or utility.
Mechanics
Creating Poisons: You may create either the base poison, or another (toxin) talent you know as a standard action - or move action with an alchemist's kit.
These poisons may be produced as contact, ingested, inhaled, or injury - your choice on creation.
Using Poisons: After being created, you may try to use it, depending on what form you made it as. For contact or injury poisons (presumably), you can apply the poison to a weapon as part of the same action of creating it. (Note that using a poison on a weapon wipes the poison away, as implied by a talent. Probably same for normal poisons.)
You may make a melee touch attack against a target as a standard action, if using a contact poison.
You may also throw inhaled poisons as splash weapons, with a 10ft range increment that fills a 10ft cube on use. AoE poison > single target poison (of the same effect), almost all the time.
Poison Potency: Poisons remain potent for 1 round +1 / 4 Craft(Alchemy) ranks... After it's been made, not after it's been used. There are talents for the latter... This is not made clear in the base rules. So poison gas doesn't stick around, and they don't need to scrape off contact poison.
Special Save DC Rules: Unlike normal poisons, Poison package toxins do not increase in DC with multiple exposures. Poisons, like formulae, uses your ranks in Craft(Alchemy), rather than BAB to determine the DC.
Base Poison: Force an opponent to make a fort save or become fatigued for 1 minute. Presumably on exposure to the poison, but it makes no mention of that - and it does specify opponents, not simply anyone exposed to it, which is odd. The implications of having all this text is that it's meant to do something...
Regardless, I do find it funny to imagine a sommelier who offers a shared bottle of wine to poison an enemy to death.
Toxin talents: Toxin talents change the effects of the base poison, but otherwise abide by the same rules (or lack of rules, if you want to read it obtusely). Including duration...when toxin talents don't mention their duration. Even though some do mention the duration, and have it be the same duration as the... I think. IT'S NOT CLEAR!
-
Base Poison (B): Fatigue is one of the less powerful debuffs you could apply, unless you can escalate to exhausted. Having no innate means of escalating, this is a sub par use of your action and investment.
-
Lingering Poison (S+): This is essentially required if you want to effectively use poison coating on weapons. The martial focus abilities are all kinds of win. Although inhaled, once again, wins out.
Specialized Venom (<S+>): Running into undead and constructs and outsiders and elementals and... (poison-immune creatures)... and (dwarves)... more than you were first expecting? Well, here you go! Hope ignoring one enemy's immunities is enough... Might want to just splash something else.
Cluster Toss (S): 2x the inhaled poison going down range is nice, even at 90% efficacy. Useful if you already use your swift action, like with Focusing Poisoning.
Focusing Poisoning (S): Poison people? Profit! Are you going to poison people, having taken the poison package? Cool!
Lasting Application (G-S): If you want to poison your weapons, this is a must-have. Kind of a tax for a certain play style, on top of the tax to have it actually last for any notable amount of time. But still. Meanwhile the AoE version gets multiple hits just for existing.
Billowing Poison (G-S): You like applying your poisons in gaseous form? You have wide-open battlefields? Well, baby, this just doubled your base radius from level 1. (Which makes it sound a lot more impressive than just saying its radius increased by 5 ft.)
Incurable (<G-S>): Enemies noticed that the party is using more noxious fumes than all WWII combined, and actually did something about it? Well, give your poisons Spell Resistance! Buy now, and it comes packaged with anti-antivenom!
Noxious Breath (G-S): It's like Shaped Chemistry, but you're not needing 3 Skill Focus feats and 1 rank just to compensate for the difficulty of changing the shape of your AoE. So that's good.
Snap Toss (G): So long as you don't need your swift action, and have a way to regenerate your martial focus, then this is just a free extra toxin down range, every turn. But the featured way of regaining martial focus is by use of immediate (aka swift) action. So unless you're using another method, this is less good than normal.
Dynamite Throwing Form (G): I actually find this more viable for poisons than formulae, because poisons can be more easily slotted into unarmed builds. You're still making ranged attacks with an unarmed build, for some reason, but they are at least touch attacks.
Risky Business (G): Considering you can make yourself immune with another talent, this is basically a scaling Sphere Focus feat, if you're up close and personal.
Skilled Applicator (G?): Sort of a confusing talent, as normally you can apply poison as soon as you make it, and there's a note saying that talents don't affect normal poisons. But I guess this allows you to use contact poison touch attack as a swift action. That's certainly unique. Unfortunately, your swift action is probably already spoken for by Focusing Poisoning.
Delayed Poison (F): Delay the effects of your poison. Let your foe drink deep of his demise. Then it hits, and he dies. Helps to evoke the poisoner feel, and provides a good chunk of "utility"...in that you get to do your thing before they recognize you're hostile.
Ingested Application (F): See Delayed Poison. But for specifically Ingested poison. (Also implies that normally, poison has a taste and an odor. With no given DC to detect it.)
Food Poisoning (F): The negative effects of your Ingested poisons last for 24 more hours, which can be increased even further. With each 24 hour forcing a save, potentially escalating the poison. Read Delayed Poison for the rest of the analysis.
Potent Poison (B-G): The duration of your poison is doubled. Awesome. Not entirely necessary, in actual combat, but it gives you a longer window to come back and check in on your poisoned enemy-to-be.
Habit Forming (F): Wanna be the scummy drug dealer? Well, there are talents for that!
Careful Poisoner (B): Cool at high levels, as it means you don't need anything else to keep from zoning your own team from areas. But, man is it stingy with the immunities. (It also implies that your poisons don't innately only target opponents.)
Controlled Rupture (B): Again, cool at high levels when your poisons are remaining potent. But only assist inhaled poison in that regard. But can also be used as a strategic funnel to essentially tell enemies "there's a certain way I want you to go." So it's not totally useless. It is also less stingy with how many squares you can make unaffected than Careful Poisoner is.
Disabling Poison (B): Battered condition is really minor. It lasts 1 round, conditionally. But it's just added on top of your other poisons. So, have fun.
Pill Popper (N-B): This is one of the least useful abilities I've seen yet. SPECIAL EXCEPTION: If you use the other package for formulae (note the 15 minute craft times) then this suddenly becomes...a complicated way to get a relatively small bonus. But a bonus none the less. And formulae love bonuses to craft checks.
Swift Toxicology (N-B): I don't see a good reason not to carry an Alchemist's Kit on you, so you don't tend to get the second effect. And you already want to do so many other things with your martial focus than use your swift action, which is already spoken for.
Mind Venom (S+): 50% chance for brutes to miss their turns. 75% chance for casters to miss their turns. Fort save. No need to escalate. Not mind-affecting.
Frightening Hallucinogen (G-S): Shaken's one of the golden standard debuff conditions. And frightened could end a fight. Panicked is generally overkill, but you can reach it, if so needed. You unfortunately need to deal with fear immunity now as well. And I've seen almost no DMs rule Specialized Venom works for that.
Nerve Venom (G): Again, sickened is a golden standard debuff. And Nauseated for 1 minute is essentially save or lose.
Three Wise Monkeys (G): I love the theming. And I think it's actually really well balanced, suffering a useless initial condition, but the proceeding ones (blind and silence) are really nice. Granted Silence only really matters for casters / bards (also a caster, don't @ me). But you don't need to go to 3 if you don't need it.
Drowsy Venom (<G>): Gives escalation and "effective kill" condition after 3 saves. If your DM rules that awaking an enemy removes even the exhaustion, and you have to start over again (just like how removing exhaustion removes fatigue, even if it was escalated from fatigue), then this goes in the dumpster.
Diseased Venom (G): I've analyzed each of the diseases here. Also acts to enable stat-killing with Degenerating Poison. I don't generally think stat-killing is particularly healthy way of ending encounters, but you do you. But now you need to dodge both poison and disease immunity. Reasonable DMs would allow Specialized Venom to work.
Talentless Poison (<G>): Comes with its own increased duration. Yay. Reducing skill check of people is generally...niche. But if you're playing political theatre, then have fun.
Catalyzed Poison (I): Obviously, you'd never use this if you didn't already have ready access to some magical, mysterious, non-alchemy sphere poison you can use. So... I assume it's good. I'm not going to go through and individually judge all the poisons out there just to see.
Haemophilic Venom (<B-G>): If you're using / partnered with a rapid-fire bleed build that uses a billion cuts of tiny, stacks of bleed...well, you made the build an extreme amount better. But that's generally not a good way to apply bleed, despite an entire sphere dedicated to bleed, with such a base ability.
Graceless Tincture (F): Loses points for being the the same sphere as Liquid Nice. But hey, a face poison. One that's much more friendly than most. And it comes packaged with its own increased duration.
Degenerating Poison (B-G): A stacking -2 penalty to any one stat, other than constitution. Penalties can't stat-kill, without reaching out to other sources of stat damage. So...is -2 to Strength going to make a larger difference than...say...sickened? No. Reducing caster stats might be useful.
Witchbane (B-G): Up to 50% spell failure. Nice! But...wait. Mind Venom has 75% of no spells after 1 save. Yikes. But maybe they're an omega mage, and you want to reduce that to a 17.5 ish percent chance of having them cast anything. Putting them to sleep might be more effective.
Performance Enhancer (B-G): Martials like this, and don't really care for the drawback. And unlike other performance enhancers, there's no apparent risk of losing any "members" of your party.
Psychotropic Hallucinogen (B-G): A single skill check gets +2 in the next minute. Works for formulae crafters. Pretty worthless otherwise.
Academic Enhancer (B-G): Pretty meh as a buff. But if you have casters who use the talents to bottle their spells, you can give this to them, let them lock in their bonus, wait a bit, and then move on without any downside. As a debuff, taking 2 points off con is nice. Nothing incredible. But nice. And you make them more adorable as you stab them to death and pump their lungs full of foul poisons. (Even for formulae, the sickened is more impactful than the bonus. But only takes up 10 / 15 minutes. Still gives you time to cool off while craftng. See if that passes with your gm. lol.)
Vulnerability Venom (B): Awesome. It's flexible energy resistance shred, which lasts for a minute. That's cool, if you need it. I just am having a really hard time imagining a situation where you both have taken this talent and actually need it. If you're a destruction sphere user, and you spent a talent on this, you could have just spent a talent on a different energy type. If you're a formulae user, you could have gotten another a different damaging formulae instead of this talent. And surely it can't be that your entire party is stuck on the same energy type, right? I'm keeping it as the sole B rank, because the effect is conceptually good. And if it weren't for the opportunity cost of taking the talent, it would be good. And that's the most fundamental definition of the B category.
Concentration Aid (N-B): I mean...if you have a caster that took some concentration-requiring drawback, and is demanding you give them drugs to help them... they might have some issues. Otherwise, I don't really see a good use for lesser-Combat Casting.Also the downtime is 59/60 minutes. Really have to time that well.
Anesthetic Dosage (N-B): 2 damage / level converted to nonlethal. It's not even temporary hit points. That's...pretty poor. But man, imagine if we had this kind of anesthetic in real life. No more deaths in surgery. Just pump 'em to the brim with this. Maybe massive damage still applies. But still!
Slowing Poison (N-B): Move speed generally doesn't matter. And the escalation basically does nothing beyond the first, in "true" effect. Compare it to Drowsy, which knocks someone out on the third failed save. This, they fail 3 times, and they can still 5ft step, still attack, still do basically everything unless you just book it. Don't get me wrong, that is a bit of utility that's missing from a lot of classes, but this is in the same sphere as Instant Foam, which will probably let your run for 1-2 (or more) additional rounds than your opponent. That would probably be enough. Doesn't help with flying creatures. But are you really hoping to be able to run from a dragon, let alone have it fail multiple times so you can out speed it?
Disorientating Venom (N): So, if you are specifically facing an SoM build that needs to refresh their Martial Focus, reliably... you give them a fort save, and if they fail, for the next minute (I think), they get a will save on their turn, or else they can't regain it that turn. Wow. That's so specialized. And not a true shut down of its specialized target. That's like if Specialized Venom gave a will save to still ignore the poison effects, every round. Granted, this would be a pain in the backside to see as a player. So, I would have simply never even printed this. There's no way to make it useful at its job, and not make every SoM player hate the DM who used this.
Painful Venin (N-): What an absolutely trivial amount of damage. Originally, it could be argued that it stacked on anything that simply replaced the fatigue with some other effect (granted, was basically all of them). Now you must take 2 talents to get such a treat. Which means even to get use out of this on escalating Drowsy Venom, you need 2 talents in this. For 1/2 level damage! Wow! That goes above and beyond to scream "NO! Don't even think about it! You're thinking about it, aren't you!"