I never see any DoT build except for Occultist’s evil eye with cooldown.
What’s the point of DoTs if you have spammable direct damage skill?
There are plenty of skills that increase the duration of DoT but never reduce timing in the DoT itself so it does same damage but at longer duration. It’s pointless when you will use same DoT and it will refresh the duration anyway. Maybe what I say is wrong, but don’t you hate to wait until mobs die with your DoTs? DoTs also don’t scale with elemental type bonus like +lightning, +fire, +ice, etc, only electrolyte, frost burn, and burn. I’m not sure what to do when waiting for DoTs to kill mobs - run around or autoattack with other skill. There are some high bleed damage skills that can be built around bleed damage itself which is nice, but same result with other DoTs.
Elemental DOTs are awful and should be avoided. I’d love to see Elemental DOTs moved off of their unique damage type onto the parent damage type, e.g. Burn DOTs getting bonuses from +fire damage, but that’s not the case today.
With that said, Poison and Bleed builds are popular, strong, and well documented. If you’re interested in a DOT build that’s where you should look.
The only pointless DOT is Vit Decay, elemental DOTs & trauma generally add only a small amount of damage, bleed is very good but suffers against some enemies and poison is the top dog with reflect being a minor annoyance during your journey
I have a DEE Warlock and I can tell you that DoT is extremely useful in Crucible mode. At lower levels it’s literally “fire and forget” - you cast Curse of Frailty (with Vulnerability) at a crowd, fire a couple of shots in their midst and they melt away while you focus on the next crowd. Makes the tedium of getting to the higher challenge levels more bearable as you blitz throught the trashmobs and ordinary heroes like at an amazing speed.
Increased Duration is actually very useful! Increasing the duration does increase the overall damage as well. It can get a little confusing as some things might say 300 OVER 3 seconds, which is the same as 100 FOR 3 seconds. DoT’s tick every second, so if something says OVER, you just need to divide the damage by the time to figure out the per second rate. You can then seen the affects of increased duration by multiplying the rate by the increased duration. For example, 300 damage OVER 3 seconds is the same as 100 FOR 3 seconds for a total of 300. If you have 50% increased duration it will do 100 damage for 4.5 seconds, or 450 OVER 4.5 seconds for a total for 450.
A dot from the SAME source will only be over road if the new hit results in higher damage. If it is the same, it is refreshed. However, if it is less, it will not be refreshed. If you crit with your dot, you want it applied as long as possible. As each crit can vary in amplitude and you won’t always crit, you’re not going to be refreshing it with every hit. Also, as a DoT build involves stacking many different sources, with some on cool downs greater than 3 seconds, you want to increase the duration so they continue as you stack others and/or wait on the cool down.
In a proper poison/bleed DoT, you’ll be stacking enough DoTs to bring down things pretty quickly. My bleed warder stacks 200-300K DoTs on Fab (depending on crits…well might be a little lower now haven’t tested him since 1.0.0.5…clean sweep’s crit damage was lowered, but cadence might make up some…) and can still reach 130-180k Dots on Log… There really is not much waiting…just stacking more DoTs…
