I don’t understand how ailment duration is a damage multiplier.
The damage should remain the same but occur for a longer duration.
That means that this mod is one of the worst DPS affixes you can have unless one of the following situations applies to you:
- Your ailment chance is lower than 90%
- Your ailment-inflicting ability has a cooldown/slow attack speed
- Your ailment has a very short duration
Here’s a good website to refer to for ailment durations.
Bleed deals 48 base damage over 4 seconds.
With 26% duration, it now deals the same damage over 5.04 seconds. This enables you to stack a few more bleeds that overlap before the oldest instances end.
The question about damage in this case should be answered by knowing how many bleed stacks you can inflict per attack/spell per second.
For example, 1 bleed (100% chance) per attack with 1.5 attacks per second still equals 1 bleed applied. At 2 seconds, this would mean 3 attacks were made and 3 bleeds were applied to the target. The problem is that at 4 seconds (6 attacks or 6 bleeds), your bleed stacks fall almost immediately to 5, followed by 4.
Adding 1 second to the duration of your bleed stack would improve the outcome of my example by allowing all 6 stacks to overlap after 4 seconds of attacking with 1.5 attacks per second.
However, is taking ailment duration better than improving attack/cast speed?
What if you had 200% chance to apply bleed per hit? With 1.5 aps, that equals to 2 bleeds per attack or 6 bleeds every 2 seconds (every 3 attacks). Now imagine if you had a faster attack/cast speed and were able to reach the next breakpoint for attack speed, reaching 2 attacks per second. With 200% bleed chance, that means you are applying 8 bleeds every 2 seconds or 4 bleeds per second.
Anyway, personally, I would stay away from this stat for bleed. If your attack speed, base damage, and ailment chance is still low, why take ailment duration?
This should be even more true for bleed damage!
You want that damage to be inflicted faster, not slower. Like I said already, your bleed damage doesn’t change… it deals the same damage over a longer period.
Unless you’re using number of ailments on an enemy as a damage multiplier for a particular skill or passive, bleed duration is a trash affix.
For example, Death Seal has the Curdled Flesh passive that increases wave of death hit damage per stack of poison on the enemy. Poison base duration is 3 seconds. To get the maximum value of Curdled Flesh (60%, which is 3% dmg per poison stack on an enemy), I would need to apply 20 stacks UNDER 3 seconds. With 26% increased ailment duration, the length of poison goes up by a measly 0.78 seconds. I would still need a 700% chance to inflict poison (if only 1 spell/attack inflicted poison), or 200-300% chance (with 2-3 attacks/spells), if I want to get maximum stacks on an enemy every time in the shortest amount of time, especially when clearing maps.
