I was reminded by Ceno’s post, Drain Essence Needs… Something, about something that has bothered me for a long time and I always forget to ask.
Why do channeling skills have damage over time component to their damage? Since the nature of those skills is to stand your ground and do continuous damage, I simply don’t understand why they have that part. It kind of seem like a loss of dps during channeling and kind of redundant. I mean, isn’t their tick rate damage the actual damage over time in and of itself?
AAR has electrocute over 2 seconds, but during the channeling is down to 1 or, what ever the tick rate is, I guess. How does increased electrocute damage duration effect impacting the skill during the channel when dot is constantly refreshed and doesn’t do its full over time damage?
DE has vitality decay over 2 seconds, but in practice it is the same as above. How does increased vitality decay duration effect benefiting the skill that doesn’t allow the totality of duration during the channeling?
FoI has burn and electrocute damage over 3 seconds. How does that constantly refreshing damage benefit the channeling skill? How does FoI benefit from increased burn and electrocute duration?
I could understand damage over time component if these skills were supposed to have a longer cooldown, like forcewave, to allow you to kite and damage the enemies while moving and waiting for cooldown to finish to cast the skill again. But these skills require you to stand still to do damage, and even leech life. You can’t leech from dot part.
So, why do these skills have dot components? Why do some of them have this increased dot duration on them when the benefit doesn’t seem to be of great significance?
Sure, 1.2.0.0 seems to be pushing us to kite more rather than tank, so I could see a tiny benefit of these dots. But such playstile isn’t compatible with the nature of these skills that require us to stand and channel. And in that moment what matters is the flat damage that they provide (and some debuffs if they have it) to kill and sustain the characters.
Since I opened the post with reference to Ceno’s post, I should probably close with it, as well. What do you think, should the dot damage be transferred to the flat one? It definitely would help Drain Essence during the first few levels by allowing it more flat damage, which would consequently allow more sustain too.