Deadly buffs rele. Rele is treated as a dot.

@El_Borracho Sorry no, Relequen is considered dot damage. The specific issue you're talking about was fixed in a later patch. A similar issue happened where enchantments were considered direct melee damage helping to proc selenes and ravager too. This was fixed, now poison/absorb stamina/disease enchantments are only direct damage, not melee direct damage.

You could basically proc melee conditions with a bow from 28m away by using those enchants and Relequen before the fixes making the "melee" condition completely superfluous.

All things considered, Relequen is not melee damage because you can proc it on a target from above 5m away, it is not direct damage because it's not 1 instance of damage, it's multiple ticks over a duration of 5s. It's not infinite either because it's only infinite when you keep reapplying it with light attacks.

That would be like saying the bleeds applied from 2h/dw axes or Werewolf is direct damage because it can be infinite when you keep reapplying it. The main difference between them and Zaan is there is simply no cooldown, but they're all dots that just keep getting refreshed.

Some exceptions that come to mind for skills that may seem like dot damage, but are instead direct damage are Toxic Barrage (multiple bow hits that apply a poison, 4s channel) Bound Armaments (4x daggers shot at 0.3s apart), Flurry (5 hits over 0.6s) and (Puncturing Strikes 4 hits over 1s). This shows how ZOS views channels as direct damage because although they have a set time to deal damage, it's more about multiple instances of direct damage with short cooldowns in between rather than something applied for 2000 over 10s or 200 every 1s for 10s, those 2 examples show different wording, yet both are examples of dot damage tooltips in the game.

Flurry and Puncturing Strikes are also considered direct melee channels that were solidified as such only last year, they use to have weird interactions with different sets. Sometimes being melee, sometimes not, sometimes being dot, sometimes not. Because of the clarification and fixes, those spammables started to be used well with sets like Advancing Yokeda which as a result, had a 0.5s CD for stacks introduced. Deadly Strikes was also updated to include not only a buff to dot damage, but channeled skills as well because ZOS clearly liked the set, buffing those attacks.

Edit: If you just viewed @SodanTok 's picture, you'd see he already tested it for OP, it's confirmed as dot damage, buffed by Deadly.