Damage Per Second

merpins · August 2022

Why lower the damage for dots? All that does is make it so players don't use those skills. It's damage per second that matters, so unless your dot has an added effect that is essential to you or your group, no DPS is going to use sticky dots with the change. This doesn't increases accessibility when it comes to skills and learning rotation. You lowered the damage and tic frequency of dots because you don't want the damage to be more over the new duration, but want the damage to be the same per cast? We don't care about per cast, we care about Damage Per Second. If you wanted to increase the timer of dots and ruin people's rotations, you should have left the tic frequency and damage and just increased the cost by a ton.

baltic1284 · August 2022

The problem with DPS in any game for the most part but not always is the fact that usually what happens is 2 or 4 players with good DPS then dominate the whole battlefield and no other can do anything making game play boring for others. It also denies access to other builds of the game that can be used and eventually leads to DPS only builds for most of the game.
It also makes entry into the game much harder for those that don't DPS and will and potentially can drive more customers away from the game making the game have an even smaller community.

Nerfing DPS as they did which isn't as bad i have seen some games do can be ok and make the game more open for other builds and races to participate in PvP or even PVE game overall. This can attract more potential customers to the game and grow the community even more making the game more inviting and better balanced for all classes at the moment. Doesn't mean the players won't find a way around it just helps allow difference in the game overall.

Necrotech_Master · August 2022

if your running a dps class, your going to be using as many dots as you can aside from 1 spammable

the longer duration dots help make it a lot easier to keep up more dots

some of the dps people ive run trials with say after patch they are using 7-9 dots and 1 spammable (only 7 if they need to include shield and/or heal)

Ratzkifal · August 2022

merpins wrote: »

Why lower the damage for dots? All that does is make it so players don't use those skills. It's damage per second that matters, so unless your dot has an added effect that is essential to you or your group, no DPS is going to use sticky dots with the change. This doesn't increases accessibility when it comes to skills and learning rotation. You lowered the damage and tic frequency of dots because you don't want the damage to be more over the new duration, but want the damage to be the same per cast? We don't care about per cast, we care about Damage Per Second. If you wanted to increase the timer of dots and ruin people's rotations, you should have left the tic frequency and damage and just increased the cost by a ton.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Lowering the dps of dots but increasing their durations isn't lowering player dps.
If you have longer durations you can have more dots active at the same time than before. That increases dps. But that also makes rotations more complicated and when enemies walk out of your ground-based abilities or you move on to the next target it will affect your dps negatively. That's why this update feels so much worse to play.

Had they buffed main spammable damage instead of adjusting the dots people would maintain fewer dots at the same time, which would have actually simplified rotations. At least that's my understanding of things.

Amottica · August 2022

merpins wrote: »

It's damage per second that matters,

This is a misconception. It is Damage per action that matters. We focus on the end product which is DPS but the foundation is the results per action. This is the case with DPS for every MMORPG. It is why refreshing a DoT should occur right after the last tick happens vs a GCD earlier or later.

As such Zenimax decreased the damage per tick for DoTs since they extended the duration. If they had kept the damage per tick with the extended duration it would have been a major buff to DoTs.

I am not advocating for or justifying the changes that were made but just pointing this out concerning the question being asked.

Necrotech_Master · August 2022

Amottica wrote: »

merpins wrote: »

It's damage per second that matters,

This is a misconception. It is Damage per action that matters. We focus on the end product which is DPS but the foundation is the results per action. This is the case with DPS for every MMORPG. It is why refreshing a DoT should occur right after the last tick happens vs a GCD earlier or later.

As such Zenimax decreased the damage per tick for DoTs since they extended the duration. If they had kept the damage per tick with the extended duration it would have been a major buff to DoTs.

I am not advocating for or justifying the changes that were made but just pointing this out concerning the question being asked.

i would have rather had the major buffs to dots, than needing twice as many skills to get the same effective dps lol, and the buff to dots of just having longer duration would have been nice palate cleanser for all the other nerfs, instead we just got a nice big nerf sandwich

FluffWit · August 2022

I can't be bothered reading all the patch notes, did they at least go easier on dk sticky dots?

A couple years back when sticky dots got a (much needed) nerf, DKs got a lesser nerf because it was accepted by the combat team that sticky dots are their classes identity.

Artim_X · August 2022

It's more of an issue for PvP where sticky DoTs that last a long time aren't worthwhile compared to building more for burst, but in PvE a new rotation that accounts for the DoT change should still be able to perform well with more opportunities to incorporate more skills/actions into a rotation due to the longer duration. Definitely my least favorite aspect of the patch.

dmnqwk · August 2022

I would rather they backend the damage of dots if they struggle to realise why they're not in a good position.

Right now we're got dots doing 18k over 20 seconds, whereas before they did 16k over 10.

This means every 20 seconds you've lost 5k damage.

Why 5k? Well, as was pointed out it's damage per action and currently you use a dot once per 20 seconds, and fill in the gap with your spammable that does 9k. So it's 18k + 9k = 27k vs 16k*2 = 32k.

Since healing vastly outweights dot strength in terms of countering this, it's not an effective pvp change as nobody, nowhere, is dying from attrition (For death to attrition see the original Guild Wars and my hilariously fun Ranger/Elementalist degen build with a longbow that put -10 degen on players and watched them die to it with nothing they could do

) thus making it a change for pve sense.

What they should've done, if they'd realised, is make it so the dot deals 30k over 20 seconds, but is skewed so the first 10 seconds only sees 33% of the damage, while the final 10 seconds gets the remaining 67%. This would've made it so piling on the dots then pew pewing someone means you wanna time your burst towards the end of the dots... but also in pve it would've kept damage high from dots (making them strong and worthwhile) but also achieving their goal of making it easier for the rotation (in another post I explain how my Stamden has timers of 9, 10, 12, 15, 20, 22, 25, 32 and 60 to enjoy)