Timing: I said about a month and a half ago (see above) that I was going to look at it when I had time. I've been finally making some progress on my CF coding list the last two weeks or so and yesterday I finally got to it.

Reason:

1) 40-50 ticks, IMHO, is too long.

2) I realized that I had been inadvertantly jacking up the durations on these poisons without meaning to, and once I understood that I wanted to correct for it.

When I first started tinkering with poisoner thieves, one of the common complaints by people who had played them that I thought was pretty valid was that the timers on the poisons/antidotes they concoct were too short -- you'd have to concoct and use the poison almost immediately or it'd evaporate. I think I also gave poisoners an edge to jack the poison vial's decay timer up even further if they wanted to.

It turns out, and I did not know until yesterday, that for some bizarre reason the affect duration on the weapon based poisons was directly proportional to how much decay time was left on the vial, so if you did concoct and use right away it'd be crazy long, and if you didn't it could be really short.

I didn't think that was good design and didn't like the implications of it, so it's now proportional to the strength of the poison instead. That will probably remain true through future tweaking.