Damage over time changes

I seriously worry that this will make poison and bleed completely irrelevant, tbh. Especially to non-crit (because i get the feeling GGG's gonna let crit mult scale poison/bleed/ignite, even though that'd be completely inconsistent with attack/spell damage not scaling them)


Like, if attack/spell damage passives and supports are no longer able to boost poison damage, how exactly is the poison gonna stay relevant? Passives in the tree? Better hope those passives can provide around 1000% inc damage to poison without going out of your way, cuz that's how much it's gonna take just to have the poison support not get beat by EVERY other dps support gem out there.

Really, I'm glad you're trying to get rid of double-dipping, but this sounds rather poorly thought out. Since attack and spell damage and the like will no longer even 'single-dip' for poison/bleed, for anything that can't scale both the hit and poison/bleed simultaneously you're basically making poison into a '32% increased damage' mod that you can scale up with *other* mods that won't affect your hits (and bleed into something similar), which is going to be completely and utterly irrelevant and/or inefficient.

(this is as opposed to right now, where for those types poison is basically a '16% MORE damage' that you can scale with other mods that don't affect your hits... it's actually fairly balanced without double-dipping).


It just reeks of bad foresight, tbh. I realize there's more info to come, but I sincerely doubt there's any gamechanger out there that's gonna make up for these fundamental flaws. Hooray, we're gonna get rid of double-dipping, and instead we're gonna be left with a system where the only ones that can use poison/bleed/ignite are the builds that can scale both the hit and the DoT simultaneously... which from a build variety standpoint is EXACTLY LIKE DOUBLE-DIPPING!

Personally I preferred double dip being in the game, but with less access to double dipping modifiers. However that is not very realistic and hard to change as even if they can change tree so that things like projectile damage nodes become projectile attack and spell or something, they would still have to review a lot of items.

Also I think you missed the part where they were increasing both the effectiveness of 'dot only' nodes and allegedly doubling the base damage of a lot of dots, and that most existing nodes/modifiers will also still apply to the damage over time.

"

Hooray, we're gonna get rid of double-dipping, and instead we're gonna be left with a system where the only ones that can use poison/bleed/ignite are the builds that can scale both the hit and the DoT simultaneously... which from a build variety standpoint is EXACTLY LIKE DOUBLE-DIPPING!

double dipping was exponential and this is no longer the case though. At most having dots will only grant like 'base dot dps %' (for example poison will be 16%) more damage if only get modifiers that apply to both, if you have about equal modifiers to dot and hits (the new 'double dip'). To get get a ratio of more than 16% you must have more dot exclusive modifiers than hit modifiers. In the end the identity of hit applied dots as a primary thing or just a thing everybody slaps on for more damage may depend on accessibility and efficiency of dot only modifiers.

I really just wish they removed all modifiers that applied to both dot and hits though, and introduce powerful dot only modifiers and reduce base damage of dots to make it a more build defining thing, making you invest in dot only notes and have a very weak impact damage but still put out powerful dots. But then they gotta balance for pure dot stuff like scorching ray, rf, etc...

But i think your worries are fair. After all poe just has too much stuff in it and balancing is just a nightmare for ggg

One of the problems we will may see is that they forget to adjust like 100 item modifiers or items just like the aoe changes, where previously maybe 20% burning damage was fair, now the standard maybe like 35%, and yet searing touch still gonna sit at 50-70% instead of scaling up.

Actually one of the things I hope for is that you won't want to scale both hit and dot, just the dot, or rather you won't get a very effective dot if you focus on hits, if you are a dot based build.

This means dots don't become an overpowered damage tool to compliment powerful hits. Dot builds shouldn't be getting that much leech and leech is a hit damage exclusive thing!

"

biyte wrote:

Also I think you missed the part where they were increasing both the effectiveness of 'dot only' nodes and allegedly doubling the base damage of a lot of dots, and that most existing nodes/modifiers will also still apply to the damage over time.

I didn't miss that in the least, however I'm almost certain they won't buff them anywhere near enough for it to matter... like i said, with attack/spell/etc damage no longer impacting poison/bleed/ignite damage even ONCE, the modifiers to poison/burning/bleed damage are going to have to be off the charts to keep them relevant damage amps... we're not talking changing all existing modifiers by a factor or 1.5 or 2, we're talking about making them like 10x as strong.

Realistically with these changes, just to make poison support worth spending a gem link on (i.e. getting it to provide around ~30+% more dps, minimum), you'd likely need to get roughly 900% increased poison damage or more. And for it to REALLY be worth using, you'd have to not even go out of your way in the least to get that much, because why the hell would you go out of your way speccing extra points to make a support gem barely good enough when you could just use another support gem for a comparable dps amp without ANY other investment?


And that estimate is not even hyperbole. Say you've got about 500% increased attack damage of one sort or another and 50% more melee phys (from the melee phys gem, rounding up to keep numbers clean). Pretty typical for a non-crit melee, give or take a bit of inc damage. And let's say, to keep numbers clean, you do 100 base (physical) damage, meaning (with this system and the doubled poison magnitude) 32 base poison damage over the full duration.

Now, with those boosts to your attack damage, your final hit damage is going to be 900, while, with no bonuses specifically for poison, your poison damage will still be 32. In order to get that up to a worthwhile damage amp, worthy of taking up a support link, you'd want it to give you at least a 30ish% dps amp, so you'd want 270+ poison damage... meaning you'd need about 800% inc poison damage. Good luck getting that without going out of your way... hell, good luck getting that, period, cuz i really doubt GGG's gonna actually pump the numbers up that high.


And what that means is that using poison (and bleed, cuz that will be little different) will effectively be worthless to builds that aren't able to scale their hits and DoTs on the same mechanics... again, exactly the same as double-dipping currently tries to do. It still won't provide the same results as double-dipping, so hooray there, but now that's going to be the only thing that provides ANY results whatsoever. Everyone else that can't scale both simultaneously gets gutted, even compared to the current piss-poor strength of poison without scaling/double-dipping.

And really, if that's the case, then why bother even implementing a new system? Might as well just completely and utterly crush poison/ignite/bleed damage with the current system so that only double-dipping abusers can manage to do barely-passable damage while no one else does any... same result as this new system but with less work.

Yep, thats why i think it will depend on how efficient the dot only on nodes are, thats partially why I don't like that they boosted the base damage because that indicates that maybe they won't make the dot only nodes a very efficient scaling option.

Melee has always been sort of shit at applying dots though because most build use weapon nodes. But they did mention they will add some "additional bonuses" to weapon nodes

"

...and additional Poison and Bleeding bonuses have been added to some weapon clusters, on top of their existing stats.

. Who knows maybe it will end up being terrible.

Another thing is what if also want to 'balance' about popularity and 'noob traps' too, for example when they nerfed fatal toxins... why? If they attach all the poison and bleed scaling to be 'fair' on weapon nodes maybe it will look very appealing to an newer player and they get these nodes thinking it has 3 different stats all in the 15-20% values it must be good, where it is just mathematically fair.

These changes are going to be a buff to melee which never was able to truly abuse damage over time mechanics and a nerf to everything else. Good change honestly. Melee should expect a significant buff from this.

Really this new system they're making is just unnecessary, clunky, sure to be a nerf to everyone relative to now, and no less discriminatory than the current system.


If GGG wants to fix these mechs, it's really quite conceptually simple (maybe a little tougher in terms of coding, admittedly), and that is:

Keep the current 'ignite/bleed/poison base damage is determined by hit damage', but only allow the ignite/bleed/poison damage itself to be scaled up by two types of modifiers: damage over time modifiers, and the appropriate burning/bleed/poison modifiers. No scaling them on fire/elemental/physical/chaos, no scaling them on projectile/area/etc of course, no scaling them even on generic 'damage' modifiers. And have them completely ignore resistances.


With that, double-dipping would be completely eradicated, the only way to directly scale up their damage would be to go out of your way to acquire modifiers that CANNOT help out the hits. This means that, for example, poison would effectively be a variable 'more' modifier, whose percentage is determined by how much you go out of the way to get 'increased/more damage over time' or 'increased/more poison damage' mechs.

And even with that system, extra poison/bleed damage splashed around on weapon clusters would be fine, although i'd say no doubling poison and bleed magnitude... maybe with ignite, that's a bit murkier.

"

Shppy wrote:

Really this new system they're making is just unnecessary, clunky, sure to be a nerf to everyone relative to now, and no less discriminatory than the current system.


If GGG wants to fix these mechs, it's really quite conceptually simple (maybe a little tougher in terms of coding, admittedly), and that is:

Keep the current 'ignite/bleed/poison base damage is determined by hit damage', but only allow the ignite/bleed/poison damage itself to be scaled up by two types of modifiers: damage over time modifiers, and the appropriate burning/bleed/poison modifiers. No scaling them on fire/elemental/physical/chaos, no scaling them on projectile/area/etc of course, no scaling them even on generic 'damage' modifiers. And have them completely ignore resistances.


With that, double-dipping would be completely eradicated, the only way to directly scale up their damage would be to go out of your way to acquire modifiers that CANNOT help out the hits. This means that, for example, poison would effectively be a variable 'more' modifier, whose percentage is determined by how much you go out of the way to get 'increased/more damage over time' or 'increased/more poison damage' mechs.

I had hoped they would change damage over time mechanics to this initially. Since they chose something else I just hope it works.

"

Kahirn wrote:

These changes are going to be a buff to melee which never was able to truly abuse damage over time mechanics and a nerf to everything else. Good change honestly. Melee should expect a significant buff from this.

I can practically guarantee you you're wrong there. Just the slightest bit of theorycrafting will debunk that unless the increased poison/bleed/burning damage numbers are ungodly high (again, we're taking approaching 1000% inc poison damage for an RT build). Without poison damage being based on hit damage, all the scaling a melee can will put into their hits will do absolutely nothing for poison with these changes, while at least it does *something* for poison currently.


I've made plenty of melee builds that used poison without exploiting double-dipping (i.e. i went and specced for damage over time and poison clusters, got myself to the shadow area, etc). The returns I got from it were pretty decent, although they definitely went down when GGG misguidedly nerfed Fatal Toxins and the poison gem, and nerfed poison's base damage to combat abuse while collaterally hurting non-abusers. Even after all that collateral damage, it was still decent, and I can tell you that translating those builds into this system will completely destroy their use of poison unless about 700% extra inc poison/DoT damage happens to be sprinkled into the tree and gear... forgive me if i find that unlikely.

(for the record, if you wanna see one of those builds, my Cursed_King_Shppy build is just that).

"

Shppy wrote:

"

Kahirn wrote:

These changes are going to be a buff to melee which never was able to truly abuse damage over time mechanics and a nerf to everything else. Good change honestly. Melee should expect a significant buff from this.

I can practically guarantee you you're wrong if you think that. Just the slightest bit of theorycrafting will debunk that unless the increased poison/bleed/burning damage numbers are ungodly high (again, we're taking approaching 1000% inc poison damage for an RT build). Without poison damage being based on hit damage, all the scaling a melee can will put into their hits will do absolutely nothing for poison with these changes, while at least it does *something* for poison currently.

It depends, you're looking at it from the standpoint that for builds that use weapons and convert damage to poison or fire that the new system will only use the base weapon damage for the conversion. I doubt this is the case. They mentioned that fire skills would use the base damage but for conversion attack builds this would make no sense. Pretty sure attack builds will still have the base damage come from the full attack damage of the skill. Otherwise they would be nerfed into the ground.

"

Kahirn wrote:

It depends, you're looking at it from the standpoint that for builds that use weapons and convert damage to poison or fire that the new system will only use the base weapon damage for the conversion. I doubt this is the case. They mentioned that fire skills would use the base damage but for conversion attack builds this would make no sense. Pretty sure attack builds will still have the base damage come from the full attack damage of the skill. Otherwise they would be nerfed into the ground.

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the system, but based on what Rory wrote, it is the base damage + added damage of the skill, i.e. the damage prior to 'inc/more damage' mods being taken into account. And that attack and spell damage and the like would not influence ignite/bleed/poison damage at all.

"

Rory wrote:

As an example, Ignite can be modified by modifiers to Burning Damage, Fire Damage, Damage Over Time, general damage modifiers, and resistances. This means that Increased Spell, Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer influence your Ignite, Poison or Bleed damage at all. It also means that while modifiers to Fire Damage will still apply both to a hit and to the Ignite it causes, since the Ignite’s base damage is the same as the hit’s, rather than being the damage the enemy took from the hit, there is no cumulative effect - the modifier applying to the hit has no effect at all on the Ignite - the two are entirely separate.

And that would imply that, if my base attack damage prior to passives/supports is 100, it doesn't matter if i have 0% inc attack damage or 1000% inc attack damage, either way the poison damage will be the same. Which yes, as you said, is completely and utterly a nerf into the ground.