This might be a confusing questions, but I’d like to hear opinions about DOT playstyles.
From what I’ve seen, DOT damage can be applied through these means:
1.Direct attacks, melee or ranged depending on weapon
2.Skills (from masteries, gears or devotions) that is applied by instant cast on enemy, or through aoe, or through fire and forget mechanism (such as devastation), or through reflection/on enemy hitting player
3.Pet attacks/skills
My question is, based on those means to apply DOT, and through understanding which sources of DOT can stacks (and which ones can’t);
how many types of DOT playstyles that are viable out there?
I can roughly assume there are 3 types:
Direct default weapon attack builds (melee or ranged) that uses instant damage and DOT simultaneously. Might be supplemented by fire and forget skills
Piano caster builds that uses combos of DOT skills (and non-DOT skills) that also kites heavily for defense. Might be supplemented by fire and forget skills
Pet builds that uses DOT and instant damage in its pet attacks. Player kites heavily while supporting pets through buffs, debuffs and fire and forget skills.
I’d like to hear forum’s thoughts on this.
DOT’s are like semi summons to me.
You apply them through a fast attack/skills, then they damage enemies on their own for a while and gives you some time and space to do other things.
As Wayne June, the Darkest Dungeon narrator once said:
Imo, it’s best to kite with DoT builds as you usually (or sometimes, depends on the player) don’t have any back-up damage. If you go bleed, you either have a touch of physical or vitality damage, but you lack the appropriate RR. It’s easier for elemental DoTs and poison/acid, but in general they also lack (or don’t have as much) flat damage (although from what I’ve seen, it’s easy to stack up fire and burn damage at the same level or pretty close range).
In general, DoT builds also tend to be very squishy, so tanking might not be a wonderful idea.
But you wouldn’t generally chase down appropriate RR in the devotion tree, or really stack huge %flat damage modifiers, so your non-dot tends to be a bit anemic initially then have a smaller RR multiplyer. With things like the elemental dots or vitality you get dot and flat damage support, take fire for instance almost always supports burn and vice versa. For example this fire build will still stack up in excess of 1000 flat burn/sec (Octavious, as a near pure IT dot build generally comes in just under 2000 flat IT/sec for reference) and sense fire RR and burn RR are literally the same thing you get a fire build that has noticeable dot presence if you need to kite.
But bleed items and devotions tend to be bleed specific, or at least bleed centric. Even a blood rager with a guillotine will find themselves with greatly diminished physical damage both through reduced phys damage on the weapon itself and items/devotions having far smaller amounts of physical % than bleed %. So their direct physical contribution will be greatly diminished. I suspect this is why so many bleed items have such large % ADcTH modifiers, to let them sustain somewhat in melee despite having smaller amounts of leechable life.
I disagree. Dot builds can kite when they need it, but should normally not. The one exception is probably witch hunter cause they’re squishy af unless you wanna sacrifice a lot of damage but most other dot builds have a good way to tank hits. While kiting seems to be the ideal way, the reality is that most good dot skills require you to be stationary for a good amount of time to be moat effective.
Let’s examine 2 builds: (transmuted) BWC sorc and Bleed witchblade. On the first case, you want to put down bwc, CT (inferno) then let the enemy stand in your bwc pool (and mines) in order to constantly refresh dot duration and get a higher chance of highrolling your dot damage (remember highest dot overrides all other instances) This means kiting is not optimal. Fortunately, sorc has mirror+maiven+bs, allowing it to take a good amount of damage before it must resort to kiting. The second one, bleed witchblade has an easier time kiting than the sorc, but one of its primary skills is counter-strike, where you need to be hit for it to work, meaning kiting is still not optimal and you need to rely on your shield + massive lifesteal to live.
Imo, this is a big reason why dot builds have been considered Op by some people in the past. The decent dot build will play just like your non-dot build, but wuen shit hits the fan, you can just run away while still dealing damage.
Hey, guy was asking an honest question and he’s got a point. No need to answer him like that. Silben already got the answer we need tho.
I’ve always found this one weird, but I think you’ve nailed it.
No hard feeling bro <3 I know what you meant, I just wanted to point out that some sources of bleed RR also favors direct damage types such as physical and/or vitality.
There are also other sources of heal, such as Wendigo Totem + Blood pact for Shaman based bleed builds, and Siphon Souls/Sigil of Consumption for Necro/occultist based bleed builds. One could also get Assassin’s blade for phys/pierce RR for Pierce/bleed builds like Nightblades and you want those purple affinities for Huntress and Wolf the Mogdrogen anyway (at least that is what I did with my bleed Trickster)
This means the most efficient DOT’s are the one where you can stack DOT’s from different sources while having the necessary defenses like ereoctes/maiven/blast shield to stand ground and spam DOT skills. And it can kite when needed but can still put respectable DOT when kiting.
Does that mean in the current meta, DOT caster builds performs better than direct damage builds?
Though I myself find playing DOT build with the mindset of a hybrid caster/summoner is most enjoyable. Cast some DOT skills then hit them with heavy damage but long cd nuke, repeat while kiting in process. It keeps momentum going. Make battles feel less stale.
I do understand that some people prefer DOT spam builds that makes enemy health bar drops faster and faster due to stacks upon stacks of DOT. That’s exciting to play too.
What x1 said. But dot caster builds do tend to be easier to get from a point of ‘I just installed and have no gear whatsoever’ to ‘all ultimate roguelikes done!’ At least relative to something like a pierce BM - after all if you don’t have to tank your opponent there is a good deal more leeway on your defenses.
