What does the Poison Weapon rogue feat do?

Question

Here is the feat, emphasis mine:

Poison Weapon ->
Requirements: You are wielding a piercing or slashing weapon and have a free hand

You apply a poison to the required weapon. If your next attack with that weapon before the end of your next turn hits and deals damage, it applies the effects of the poison, provided that poison can be delivered by contact or injury. If you critically fail the attack roll, the poison is wasted as normal.

(It also allows you to create simple poisons, which are not part of my question.)

The rules for injury poisons are as follows:

Injury: An injury poison is activated by applying it to a weapon, and it affects the target of the first Strike made using the poisoned weapon. If that Strike is a success and deals piercing or slashing damage, the target must attempt a saving throw against the poison. On a failed Strike, the target is unaffected, but the poison remains on the weapon and you can try again. On a critical failure, or if the Strike fails to deal slashing or piercing damage for some other reason, the poison is spent but the target is unaffected.

Without the feat, using poison seems pretty straightforward: you spend the listed number of actions to apply a poison, and it lasts seemingly indefinitely until you make a Strike and deal piercing or slashing damage (or critically fail a Strike).

But the rogue feat confuses me, specifically the italicized sentence. What happens if you fail to Strike someone by the end of your next turn? Is the poison wasted? Wouldn't that make someone who uses this feat worse at delivering poisons than someone who doesn't?

Answer 1

You apply it quicker and better, but less accurate

Applying poison to a weapon will last until you either you hit a target, or critically fail with that weapon, but the rogue ability allows you to quickly apply a poison using a single action, regardless of how many actions it would take to apply the poison normally, that lasts for one round (effectively a round and half).

Why is that single action important: Because there are several poisons that normally require three actions to be applied. Most of them to be exact.

Also, you may apply Contact Poison without the risk of poisoning yourself, which is normally impossible to anyone else:

Contact poisons are infeasible to apply to a creature via a weapon attack due to the logistics of delivering them without poisoning yourself.

Finally, they also gain a couple of simple poison dosages to use each day. So, to offset all these advantages, they cannot apply the poison to use later using this action, the poison dosage won't last. However, they may still apply the poison out of combat (3 actions) and have her blade already be poisoned during combat. Later on, the poison won't be wasted on a critical failure (Improved Poison Weapon) either, so it will last until you hit something or until the end of your next turn.

Answer 2

There's a couple of benefits.

Poison Weapon states:

Requirements You are wielding a piercing or slashing weapon and have a free hand.

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You apply a poison to the required weapon. If your next attack with that weapon before the end of your next turn hits and deals damage, it applies the effects of the poison, provided that poison can be delivered by contact or injury. If you critically fail the attack roll, the poison is wasted as normal.

Special During your daily preparations, you can prepare a number of simple injury poisons equal to your rogue level. These poisons deal 1d4 poison damage. Only you can apply these poisons properly, and they expire the next time you prepare.

The first benefit is obvious, you get a stock of free poisons each day equal to your rogue level. That's some money saved there.

Now let's look at the rules for Alchemical Poisons, they state:

Applying alchemical poisons uses Interact actions. A poison typically requires one hand to pour into food or scatter in the air. Applying a poison to a weapon or another item requires two hands, with one hand holding the weapon or item. The Usage entry for a poison indicates the number of hands needed for a typical means of application, but the GM might determine that using poisons in other ways functions differently.

If we look at Black Adder Venom, we see:

Usage held in 2 hands; Bulk L

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Adder venom is a simple but effective way to enhance a weapon.

Saving Throw DC 18 Fortitude; Maximum Duration 3 rounds; Stage 1 1d8 poison damage (1 round); Stage 2 1d10 poison damage (1 round); Stage 3 2d6 poison damage (1 round)

Activate Interact

This means that in order to apply black adder venom normally takes 3 actions.

Poison Weapon instead allows you to apply a poison in a single action. This is a big improvement when using poison in combat, as it allows you to efficiently reapply poison while fighting.

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Therefore the benefits of Poison Weapon (as far as I can tell) are:

1. It provides you with a daily pool of free injury poison.
2. It allows you to apply poisons as a single action.

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On the subject of the questioned line.

If your next attack with that weapon before the end of your next turn hits and deals damage, it applies the effects of the poison, provided that poison can be delivered by contact or injury.

There is no difference in the results of an attack between poison applied using the Poison Weapon feat, and poison applied normally.