Since the upcoming Smoke Bomb nerf will destroy a portion of this exotic's functionality (not that anyone uses it anyway), and simply granting the exotic the old Smoke behavior does not properly address the issue, I wanted to propose a rework concept:
[b]Touch of Venom:
• Hold to consume your melee ability, which disorients nearby targets (6m) and grants Venom Touch for 10s
• While Venom Touch is active, unpowered melee attack have increased lunge distance (+1m), deal 5x combatant damage, and spread a corrosive poison effect over 3m on hit, which lasts for 4s
[i] • Passively grants 30% melee damage resistance while active
• 3s cooldown between poison applications after applying 2 stacks of Venom Touch
• Can refresh and extend the poison effect by an additional 4s when applying consecutive stacks to a target
• Melee and Poison damage multiplier can stack with other buffs such as Stylish Executioner[/i]
• After poisoning a target, gain 70% resistance to any incoming attacks while you are within 12m of targets, lasts 5s
• While Smoke Bomb is equipped, consuming a melee charge or standing in a Smoke cloud grants Invisibility (5s) and Truesight (3s), and Venom Touch hits apply Weaken (+15%)
•Touch of Venom incurs a 13s cooldown between uses, after the buff has expired [/b]
I don't know if this would necessarily be broken, but for sake of PvP balance, it could only grant a 50% melee increase, and the poison would tick 8 times total with 0.5s between each tick, each dealing 3-5 damage
Also, I know that you still would lose the melee regen part of this exotic, though you are getting much, much more out of your melee. I didn't run the numbers either, so this might utterly break the sandbox if it were allowed to stack with things like Combination Blow, but idk.
Anyway, I thought of adding this as well, though it may be dumb:
Exotic Interaction:
• Increases the duration / combatant damage of Le Monarque's poison effect by 50%
• Any kills secured by Le Monarque spread the Touch of Venom poison effect within 4m
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Just give it touch of venom the original perk. This isn’t the OG gauntlets. When it dropped and it didn’t have the crouch in place for invisibility I deleted it immediately and took to the forums to complain. This was my main exotic in D1 and I was livid when it wasn’t in vanilla D2.