The current meta for DoTs (if such a thing exists) is that they require the fastest hitting skills to be most effective because that’s how you stack damage, lots of hits in as short a time frame as possible with as much proc chance as possible. It’s why they’re so effective from pet builds, more entities to hit thereby more stacks in a given time frame. Slow &/or high cost skills are therefore less effective to proc ailments because they don’t get as many hits in so fewer stacks.
What if those slower hitting/more expensive skills had a modifier that increased the damage of any ailments that they proc’d? Then you’d have a choice between a fast/cheap skill procing more, lower damage ailments or a slow/expensive skill procing fewer, higher damage ailments.
For example, if Rive has 3 times as many hits per second (averaged over a decent amount of time) compared to Erasing Strike, then Erasing Strike would get a 3x modifier for any ailments it proc’d resulting in the same amount of damage from the DoTs (apart from poison which would still do more from the faster hitting skill due to more stacks) as from Rive. But Erasing Strike would do a few big damage ingites (for arguments sake) compared to Rive’s lots of lower damage ignites.
Would it be a good idea? Would it remove some of the “identity” of DoT builds (them requiring fast attacks)? Would “everyone” just chuck in some chance to proc a damaging ailment to any build? Would that be a bad thing?
I think that “more effecient” proc rate could be somehow linked to damage effectiveness? (In most cases at least)
Because damage effectiveness already tries to do the same thing with flat added damage types.
EDIT: Same applies to negative(less ailment application), for skills or skill spec tree nodes that make a skill particularly often hit. There are already things in this game that do kinda that.
Yeah, that’d be one way to deal with it that wouldn’t require as much extra stuff to be added & the bigger hitting skills tend to have higher added damage effectiveness.
Another way I thought of is to base it on the mana cost. Maybe take the mana cost of a skill /10 & use that (but use 0.5 as the modifier for zero cost skills).
It might work if the base flat damage on a weapon (and any flat damage modifiers it has) was used to calculate the base damage of a particular DoT, instead of having a fixed base value. For example, ignite = 30% of weapon damage, poison = 20%, frostbite = 20% etc.
This would mean faster, lower base damage weapons would deal smaller dots more often and slower, higher base damage weapons would deal larger dots less often and maybe this would help balance out the differences?
It would make the base DoT damage independent of skills and the same for every build (like it is now) but still allow skills, passives etc to modify it as they do currently with increases to damage. It could also make some more interesting affix decisions where added flat damage on a weapon would now affect the DoT damage.
Not sure if the base weapon should have to do anything with this.
The base damage of all those damaging ailments is fine i think.
OP just wanted to give expensive/slower/cooldown active skills a little bit more chances to compete with ones that are inherently hit very often or can be “spammed” more easily.
I was doing the same thing, but shifting the emphasis towards weapon rather than a skill, as the reduction in DoT procs is very noticeable with a slow 2-h weapon, rather than having a slow skill.
A slow 2-h weapon has bigger base damage than a 1-h but also attacks slower, evening out the damage. Maybe they should have bigger DoT procs too to even out the damage?
This would have, I believe, the same effect as @Llama8 is talking about (maybe not?) but making it completely independent of character and skill, as it is now.
Your suggestion of course would help alot of melee builds.
But i personaly would have the focus more on the skill itself, the weapon could of course play into it too.
But your suggestion would leave expensive/cooldown skills like meteor without any change.
Also skills like erasing strike(which Llama did mention) would not be effected that much. While Erasing Strike does scale with weapon attack speed, it is one of the skills that is very expensive and does enourmous dmg per hit, which is very good and feels impcatful.
Using it “faster”, because your weapon is faster does not contribute much to it’s power overall.
Not all Dots are triggered by “hits” either, so linking them to hits like I said earlier would be the wrong way to go.
Maybe each skill should just be balanced for ailments as well. The big expensive skills could have an added ailment effectiveness or gain a higher % chance to apply ailment. Since procs for ailments application can go above 100% chance to apply more than 1 stack at a time, that seems a simply solution.
On the side of weapons, maybe that is just another tradeoff for having higher base damage. Usually the balance is Slow High Damage vs Fast Low Damage. Adding in flat damage ailment procs imbalances that simple weapon comparison. Maybe the slow high damage weapons could just have higher damage to make up for it? Maybe they could have better implicit mods? Maybe there could even be a big 2-h weapon with an implicit that multiplies ailment proc chance by a percentage.
