14 seconds means someone can do a dot only build inefficiently (less than 1 skill a second) and still be fine
players who are hitting 1 skill per second have room for extras spammables

so what you will see if ok player casts 8 dots and 2 spammables
a good players gets 8 dots and 4 spammables
great players get 8 dots and 6 spammables

this way it's easy to see and identify what's going on with someone's rotation, it's forgiving a the low end, the dots are the most important part as they do the equivalent of 16 spammables, then you're looking at 18, 20 to 22 "spammables" of damage depending on how fast you are.

As long as the durations are standardised then things should line up nicely. You can try this on live right now with blockade, degen (to an extent, it will expire slightly early), trap and liquid lightning. it even lines up with prey nicely. if you cast prey as your first front bar skill it will explode in time for it to be reapplied before the bar swap and will go again as your bar swap back to the front.

It's significantly more interesting than the 20s durations on PTS but it's also significantly less dps than the 10 morphs we currently use on live. I would use the 14 second skills if it wasn't such a huge dps loss.

12 and 24, fits majority of the semi-slammables nicely.

Dots should be impactful in all encounters, not just slightly better than spammables in long single target fights. Imho, they should have buffed their damage a little bit and leave duration as it is. In pts iteration dots simply not worth slotting for most fights and they become even more useless in pvp, where they already too weak.

I like DoTs that we have on live.
Some are 10s - 12s
Some 14s - 16s
And some 18s

For me thats a good balance.

It depends on the DoT. I do not think that all DoT's should have the same CD anyway. We need more short dots that last 6 seconds or so but tick harder, allowing the to be good choices in PVP or for people that want a DoT based DPS alternative. Could even get away with a 3 second DoT if its numbers were right for it.

It should be as much damage per tick as possible and I'm saying that as a healer.

I'm going to be bored out of my mind next patch with how little pressure there will be.

6-8s

I think it's a misconception that long durations are easier to manage. When I played Sorc back in 2016-2017 the DoTs were short and rotations could be:

DoT 1, DoT 2, DoT 3, 3X spammables, repeat.

Literally anyone can execute that without needing timers or addons. If the target moved, no problem you were going to recast in a few seconds anyway. Back in those days the game was more friendly to new players. They could cast 1 or 2 ground DoTs and deal pretty competitive damage (things ticked fairly hard, and you didn't have to layer 6 of them to kill enemies). Many players just cast a few DoTs then held LMB for a couple lightning staff heavies (which were also strong). There were also better spammables, especially for AoE with pre-nerf Impulse and Steel Tornado. There was much less of a skill gap.

I also play Sorc but for DoTs my favourites are the DK 14-15 second ones.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

6-8s

I think it's a misconception that long durations are easier to manage. When I played Sorc back in 2016-2017 the DoTs were short and rotations could be:

DoT 1, DoT 2, DoT 3, 3X spammables, repeat.

Literally anyone can execute that without needing timers or addons. If the target moved, no problem you were going to recast in a few seconds anyway. Back in those days the game was more friendly to new players. They could cast 1 or 2 ground DoTs and deal pretty competitive damage (things ticked fairly hard, and you didn't have to layer 6 of them to kill enemies). Many players just cast a few DoTs then held LMB for a couple lightning staff heavies (which were also strong). There were also better spammables, especially for AoE with pre-nerf Impulse and Steel Tornado. There was much less of a skill gap.

Yep to your comment about the gap because aoe dots were incredibly strong back then, but, it's personally what drove me to stamina because they had longer, 12s rotations.

8s rotations fealt ridiculously short and most of your bars weren't even being used.. What you described is from when basically every build double slotted inner light.

My Mag Sorc from the time had Inner Light and Bound Aegis on both bars. Mages Wrath, Crystal Frag, Force Pulse front. Blockade, Liquid Lightning and a flex spot back bar. My entire cleave was handled by basically 2 skills and it fealt strong still.

I fully understand why ZOS moved away from skills passively being more beneficial than active skills. We already have limited bar space so it's odd to further dumb down combat by making that the best direction for a build. 8s rotations supported that idea because you didn't have enough time to get through the 10s required of each skill slot anyway.

So I mean yeah, the skill gap has increased because we're expected to use the skill slots given to us and some people won't, but it's for a logical reason at least.

The balance difference between 10 and 14 (15 now) is probably my favourite. You can choose to not slot passive skills and utilize each slot actively or slot passive skills for an easier time.

The whole 10 - 15s, but also 20 - 30s sticky dots doesn't feel right because not only are they weaker, but you can no longer do a static rotation of refreshing everything all at once, you need to refresh only half of the skills every other 10-15s.

Mine would be 0.

I am a pvper i dont really like dots so much. Direct dmg is enough. In high end pvp you need dots maybe only to trigger some other things but u cant kill or harm a good and experienced player with dots.

12 seconds is perfect for blast bones/shalks rotation.

12 second dots gives you enough time to run all dots if you wanted to. That would be 10 dots being recasted 1-2 seconds early.
This also gives you the option to apply 9 dots back to back and then cast 3 spammables at the end before reapplying dots.
This 12 second duration also works nicely with blast bones/shalks as you need to cast those abilities every 3 seconds. 12 being a multiple of 3 makes this work out with no more than 2 seconds at a time on your back bar and every 3rd second coming back to your front bar allowing you to keep up short duration buffs like AY or Kinras.

Overall I would say 12 seconds is the perfect dot duration.