Currently Damage Over Time in the game scales with number of hits and things like effect power. This forces any build trying to maximise damage over time type combat having to go with as many number of hits they can go with. I find this counter intuitive. Personally I would have preffered that such mechanics to favor slow attack/cast speeds.
I wonder what the community and the developers think about that or if they would, how they would change it.
I kinda like that dots are different in this game, but there are definitely issues with balance. PoE is an example of favouring slower hits & that can still have issues.
I experimented with ailment and DoT build recently a bit and while i donât find it âcounter-intutiveâ i still would see different ways of scaling DoT build. Since crit does not scale DoT you only can scale it with % increase damage or as you mentioned applying as many DoT as possible.
I would like to see a second way of scaling which you also suggested. The hit that applied the DoT should scale the DoT, so if you have a heavy hitting ability the DoT it applies is stronger, or maybe increase the Chance/amount of stacks applied even futher.
Thatâs said all my DoT/ailment build i tried are not really super uber endgame, sicne i generally donât liek the playstyle as much as other playstyles.
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I like that dot stacking is a thing. I think that Poison doing increased damage for every poison applied is too much. I think they need to get rid of that completely. They should change all dots to be the same, just of different damage types. Then in addition to the damage they do, each tick of a dot reduces protection of said damage type. This would increase the damage that each consecutive dot tick does while not being grossly overpowered like poison is now. This would also balance the various types of dots.
Not to mention that would make it so normal attacks of the same damage type and protection shredding are more impactful.
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My biggest concerns with DoTs in this game are the seemingly underwhelming +bleed damage in comparison to +bleed chance. Every game has to either choose attacks per second, damage per attack, or a combination of both as the framework for the damage.
Last Epoch seems to use both, but with a big imbalance between the two. The problem this brings is that it currently works better to stack as many different DoTâs as possible⌠kind of removing the âpoisonâ build, or the âburningâ build - I know poison is the exception to this, but the favoritism towards only a single damage type is a different issue.
My other concern is that, and please tell me if I am wrong, but I have not seen anything that influences the speed at which DoT (or Healing over time - which worries me) can do damage. Everything is ticking once per second. If I make a build with a strong focus on healing, its only effective if the heals in each 1 second window are strong enough to overcome the damage I am receiving before the next 1 second tick. In many cases I am receiving damage from multiple enemies and the times I get hit within 1 second, before the next healing tick is often overwhelming⌠no matter how strong my heals may be. This points out, in my opinion, major flaws going into a multiplayer based system.
Damage per secon (or heal per second) seems to only tick once per second⌠not spread out between the seconds. A second can be a long time in games.
But that would be boring.
Except thatâs effectively what poison does now, subsequent ticks do more damage due to the number of stacks.
But that would be boring.
Boring is what exists now. The only dot that people actually build for is poison because it is broken. The others are just around as a consequence of skills people like.
Except thatâs effectively what poison does now, subsequent ticks do more damage due to the number of stacks.
It is not what poison does. Poison adds a flat % increased damage which scales insanely fast. Poison can be scaled within a few seconds to be doing 1000+ damage/tick. If poison shredded protection instead, it would take much much longer (maybe even impossible) to get to that same level.
Yes, i think something like how ignite works in poe is really cool. Also PoE created a perfect example of how good their DoT mechanic is when you compare skills like toxic rain and caustic arrow. Toxic rain being a short duration, low dmg stackable DoT that gets insanely powerful with scaling high attspeed, and caustic arrow being a non stackable, long duration big hitting DoT. Some real mechanics in my opinion over there.
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I think the more important thing about this is that poison is, in part, over powered simply because any build can easily use it. You donât necessarily have to be a poison/DoT build to take advantage of the current poison balance.
If a player wants to be a DoT build, they should need to invest in DoT scaling passives and gear to make it viable. And players focused on hit damage builds should not have easy access to effective DoTs without sacrificing the effectiveness of their current hit build. Once this is better developed it will make it easier to scale/balance things so they are all equivalently powerful.
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Case in point is Boardmans completely Void based build that still uses a Plague Bearerâs Staff to stack poison dots. Poison stacking is WAY too powerful with the increase damage.
Dots should make the victim more vulnerable, not the aggressor more powerful. You donât hit someone harder just because they are bleeding, but your hit could hurt more because they are bleeding. Protection Shred just makes more sense than flat increased damage.
Perfect example yes. Build Variety is key here.
It might be hard to balance and something will always be âmore powerfulâ, but LE is still early on on itâs dev and i think there is no better time for EHG to try stuff like this out.
I always like if you can take any âbase mechanicâ of an ARPG and take into totally different direct with gear/skill choices.
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Sure, but you will never find an arpg game that is perfectly balanced. Especially when itâs an online arpg. Once meta (and i can not tell you enough how much i hate the word META) kicks in everyone is looking for the ââperfectââ build to play to be more efficient. Itâs sad because PoE is actually balanced very well in terms of defeating every endgame boss and content. You can do it with every skill in the game, some just take longer. Grim Dawn doesnât suffer with this meta/balance shit because itâs offline and everyone plays what they want to play! And thatâs imo the most valuable characteristic of an arpg.
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Totally agree, PoE has a phenomen when they ânerfâ a skill from league to league for like 2% and everybody goes like âOH NO SKILL XY is no longer playableâ and nobody plays that skill anymore, while itâs still âfineâ
Some fun fact if you care: I once played a PoE Glacial Hammer Build, just because Glacial Hammer literally had 0% usage on PoE.Ninja (i guess it was rounded off) and it was totally fine, felt awesome to use very good dps, everything was fine but because no major âInfluencerâ made a build for mit(at that time) nobody was playing it
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Agree, i also donât get the playerbase. Just look at poeninja again. 45% guardian, blight league 50% necro, legion league 50% cyclone. Why? 
Haha i know exactly what you mean with your glacial hammer build. I tried a burning arrow chieftain one league before metamorph i guess when they buffed bow builds and it was extremly strong. Played it in metamorph again and destroyed everything but yeah it was sooooo bad before because no one played it 
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PoE is a game that has been around for years, and it is probably not the best parameter to use when comparing things like skill depth/complexity just because it has had so much time to change and evolve. But, the idea that anything can be viable (with a few exceptions) is something that should be valued about PoE.
In my experience playing PoE over the years, almost everyone that cries about things being nerfed and therefor ânot viableâ are just players throwing temper-tantrums on the interweb because they can. It happens every league. This is probably a condition that the current atmosphere of PoE is what is more along the lines of âwhat is the flavour of the month OP build that can 1 button insta-kill everything and not take any damageâ.
If you actually look at almost every âOH NO SKILL XY is no longer playableâ situation, you will find that players can still very easily clear everything with it. Just look at the current league, the herald stacking builds that were ânerfed into the ground and i want my money backâ nonsence⌠those builds is still currently facerolling absolutely everything in the game.
So the important thing to take from games like PoE is that just about every skill IS viable. I have many friends that specifically play that game to use the skills and builds that people say âdonât workâ. And they do so successfully. It is actually pretty funny watching them pick the worst skills for each other to start the league with.
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Which is why Iâd like to see the other dots gain some buffs to do something mechanically different from each other.
I kinda do like the idea of dots giving protection reduction for their element per stack, that way you could use dots as a support to your main damage dealer. Though shred at the moment isnât particularly useful/effective.
But thatâs what poison does at the moment, youâre not hitting harder, theyâre taking more damage (though there isnât really a difference in practice between the two).
Protection shred would need a rework to make that work.
Each stack of poison increases poison damage taken. This means that if you hit something with a poison damage attack, the attack hits harder. Poison shred reduces someones resistance to poison damage. So while functionally the same, they are thematically much different.
I donât really know how shred works. I understand that protection numbers on monsters is quite high and maybe the numbers on shred are low, but I donât know if shred stacks have a time limit or the calculations when protections get near zero or if they can go negative.
I would hope that shred stacks lasted on monsters until they die.
DoTs could also still have unique features. It seems pretty easy too.
If something is on fire, it would be easy to spread, so ignited enemies spread ignite around.
Poisoned enemies are made sick, so maybe poison could add other status effects like confusion.
Bleeding enemies could be having internal issues, making them more likely to be critically hit.
Void dots could maybe blind because they are being consumed by darkness.
Lots of effects that could be beneficial while not broken due to stacking.
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I agree completely. There really needs to be a distinct advantage to using DoTâs (of specific damage types) over others. More importantly, there needs to be a very big difference between DoTs and Burst damage period. Unfortunately, not very many of the protection reducing effects in this game are quite ready - they arenât particularly useful when compared to alternative ways of increasing damage.
This is a big distinction that seems to be overlooked a lot. DoT by definition is something that spreads the damage out and shouldnât be high upfront damage. DoTs should âramp upâ the dps as it is applied until it competes with the alternative damage types that do damage in bursts up front. The current system hasnât quite tuned all that in yet though.
I personally feel like DoTs in general need a pretty big overhaul. Not that I dislike the ones in game, I just think the the current implementation isnât quite aligned with what they are shooting for. It kind of feels like the DoT mechanic is still just in the early stages of what they actually have planned for it. I look forward to hearing feedback from devs about DoTs because I personally love DoT builds - almost as much as I love dedicated healing builds/roles.
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100% agree with you, i my self am a PoE Player(if i play, not so latlely) that tries things that are ânon-metaâ.
My Statement was not that the game is unbalanced, i just made an observation about a LARGE part of the PoE community.
There are SOOOOO many people JUST playing build guides, because PoE is very overwhelming. They donât even try experiment themselves because they feel like making errors lessens the âfunâ, but the more you Experiment and try to make builds yourself, the better you get at the game.
I feel like LE has a better âstartingâ ground for newer player as most of the more complex stuff comes over time, while in PoE as soon as you hit lvl 2 and open the passive tree, you feel like you wanna quit the game 
Well this is getting a bit off-topic now, but feel free to pm me if you wanna discuss more
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Uhm⌠any damage scales with number of hits.
I mean, gaining additional fireballs (for example) increases ALL your fireball damage - direct and DoT.
Yeah, poison is stronger than other DoTs. You just need 2 stacks to make it more damaging than Ignite and 4 stacks to make it more damaging than Bleed.