So I noticed a few bugs with the newts in the swamp area.
First of all I was running an arrow build and the spikes they create apparently still affect arrows for some reason.
Second and kinda unrelated to newts but rather to the vampirism gem, but since the vampirism damage counts as a second attack you get hit by their spikes twice when attacking, lost a run because of that one... and just realized that this may have been why my arrows where procing the spikes as well because I had a vamp gem that run too.