One thing that bugged me in Grim Dawn was that OFF was applying a different kind of DoT. It deals damage over time IF the enemy gets hit and effected by the initial damage (-> enemy gets freezed).
Are there any other skills or mechanism like this in the game? Does +electrecute/burn/frostburn% dmg boost these kind of DoT skills or not since they aren’t technically real DoT at all?
What you are atlking about is NOT a DoT, and not a hidden DoT either. It’s an effect that is applied and that effect deals damage every second. This is different from DoTs always last for their stated durationand are not tied to anything else. Since this is a damage instance that repeats every second instead of a DoT that ticks down over their duration, it can also activate "“on hit” procs, which DoTs cannot.
For example OFF reads as “xx Cold damage”, not “xx Frostburn damage over x seconds”. This also means that it scales with %Cold, not % Frostburn. If it was a DoT, it couldn’t possibly be Cold damage, Frostburn is the DoT equivalent of Cold.
OFF without absolute zero?
I see, calling this kind of damage a DoT is wrong. Does every damage spell w/ a set duration behave like this or does it vary from spell to spell?
Yes.
It varies. Sadly, tooltips sometimes poorly reflect what that “damage” really does (is it one-time damage, damage each second for skill duration, or it’s a buff, that adds weapon damage to recipient.
I’ve found that if a spell has a normal type of damage that isn’t a dot and also has a duration, then it ticks every second. OFF is special because the damage done depends on the time frozen, unlike other things like aetherfire.