Hello all.
I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around tornado. It’s a physical spell that deals damage over time.
So what exactly is the best way to scale this physical spell?
How does the calculation work?
It doesn’t have “stacks” like other DoT damages, i.e: ignite, poison, bleed and frostbite.
But yet, it is not considered a “hitting” skill because it doesn’t crit. So what exactly is this interrogation mark of a skill?
Dev answer would be welcomed.
Kind regards,
VM
You would want to scale it like any other spell (except you can’t go with crit) - adaptive spell damage, cast speed (to get more of them out unless you take the node that limits it to 1), % increased damage of the relevant types (spell/phys/DoT) & attunement.
Don’t forget, there’s a difference between ailments (ignite, bleed, etc) and skills with the DoT tag.
Yeah, that’s exactly my issue, I dont understand why it’s a damage over time skill since it doesnt have an ailment. But I guess it makes sense? I just dont see it. Do you think cast speed would make the damage tick more often?
ps: I totally understand that ailments dont interact the same way, I just dont understand the fundamentals of it, theres plenty of skills who deal damage over a period of time without the “DoT” tag attached to them but they still “hit” which kinda feels the same for this skill
No, it doesn’t look like cast speed does anything for Tornado other than get more of them out faster.
Edit: Actually, I tell a lie. Cast speed does increase the damage they do “per tic”, but due to the way LE bunches numbers up, you won’t see it tic faster, you’ll see it do higher numbers per second. With 86% cast speed I was getting 128 on a “full tic”, but with 56% cast speed I was only getting 101 damage per “full tic”.
Edit #3: I’m being even more stupid, one of the items I put cast speed had +% DoT damage on it… sigh it’s early & I haven’t had my tea yet.
Actually, there aren’t any single use/fire & forget skills that do damage over a duration that don’t have the DoT tag. All the channelled skills are either DoTs or they effectively repeatedly summon a bunch of things that hit once per “summon” (eg, Avalanche), the exception is Warpath. Lightning Blast is a “single use” skill that can hit the same target many times with the Convergence node, though I suspect they’ve coded that to cast “from target to target” to get it to repeatedly damage the target.
Edit #2: that said, the cast speed node on the skill tree doesn’t seem to add any damage.
Yeah I was just testing the same thing on my end and it does just put all the stacks together even if theres a slight delay between the casts, which kinda ends up making me feel like it doesnt do damage per tornado, like for instance.
1 stack of my tornado is 898 dmg per tick, 2 is 1796 , even if theres a slight delay. they bunch the damage together which ends up feeling more like a “hit” to my eyes rather than a DoT hence my original “complain” But i think we understand eachother now. It’s kind of a weird way to deal damage in my opinion, it feels like half a cycle is 898 dmg. But to me it should be at least 2x even 4x that amount over a cycle. Maybe it would be too OP.
But anyways, What I mean to say is. If my 1 tornado stack is 898 dmg and last 8 seconds.
If I wait 4 seconds to cast another tornado, It shouldn’t add the stack together but start an entire cycle of it’s own. But im also using Eye of the storm, so im guessing this is where the issues lie, since you technically cant cast “additional tornadoes” I guess it makes sense that the number add on top of one another. But then why DoT?
I guess it’s getting too late for me lol. It’s just been bothering me that it doesn’t really interact like a DoT and you cant scale crits on it.
But in the end, I guess we figured out that it’s because of Eye of the storm that the number bunch on top of each other, while still allowing me to “cast additional tornadoes”
But it saddens me a little bit, I feel like the damage lacks
I’ll try more adaptive spell damage vs DoT see how that feels.
Thanks for being my Idea bouncer sir! Have a great day and enjoy your tea 
Well, as you say, Eye of the Storm is what’s causing you to only have 1 of them up at a time & recasting it refreshes the duration. But not all DoTs can stack, there are quite a few with a max stacks of 1 (Abyssal Decay, Stun, Plague, whatever the fire version of Plague is, Time Rot, etc).
Adaptive spell damage will boost the base damage of the skill which will allow any Tornados you have to do more damage.
another victory thwarted. if only I had arrived sooner.
So I crafted an infernal wand with t5 spell dmg and t5 phys damage and undead scroll with t3 spell dmg so total of 112 spell dmg vs composite staff (149 DoT) with t5 phys and t5 spell damage . And it actually almost deal the same amount of damage O_O 149% DoT is that insignificant on Tornado o_O ah well! Mystery solved! Guess ill just scale my other skill ( Avalanche ) to deal crits then!!!
Thanks for the help! Really appreciated 
For Tornado, Spell damage, Physical damage & DoT damage are all interchangeable, all that matters is how much you have of the combined total. I would have thought the staff would have given you significantly more damage until I ran the numbers:
Assuming you had average rolls for all affixes, you’d have had +206% increased damage from the wand + 45 adaptive spell damage (average roll), while the staff would have given you +403% increased damage & an average adaptive spell damage of +35.
This shows you the power of adaptive spell damage! +10 is better than an almost additional +200% increased!
Yup 
and it’s much cheaper to craft too
Edit: same logic applies to crit multi, it’s almost never worth that have that on your gear
lots of crit chance + lots of flat damage interacts way better than going crit chance + crit multi ( for some reason)
Not necessarily. Apart from 2 prefixes (1 on swords & 1 on wands I think), flat spell damage doesn’t compete for affix slots with crit multi, therefore you could stack both (flat spell damage in the implicit & crit multi as a prefix). What does compete with crit multi for an affix slot is % increased damage & that’s worth comparing the incremental increase you get from adding 1 additional % increased (on top of the total % increased you have, beware that the character screen adds global modifiers into every line!) compared to 1 crit multi prefix (weapon, offhand, amulet, relic) multiplied by your effective crit chance (the character screen won’t include any added base crit chance from your skill & the crit multiplier is x2, not 200% more damage on a crit).
TLDR - if you’ve got a high crit chance & a lot of % increased damage already, a crit multi prefix might be better than an additional increased damage modifier. But probably not.
By the way, just thought of something else, to get to eye of the storm, you need 4 points in hurricane. If we’re allowed to buff our tornadoes with multiple stacks of tornadoes, shouldnt that passive also work?
high flat damage + high crit chance + increase x damage is better than crit multi
Sometimes the way to key nodes within a passive tree serve as a opportunity cost.
So the double casts from “Hurricane” do not work with “Eye of the Storm”
It’s really hard to generalize that, it really depends on your actual numbers.
Crit multi is pretty weak early on, but becomes stronger the more your character is developed, since it basically multiplies your whole damage, while for example “increased X damage” only multiplies your base damage.
Here is a good thread, were @Llama8 goes into some more details.
As Heavy said, it totally depends on the numbers. A t5 increased damage prefix is 70%-105%, a t5 crit multi prefix is 37%-44%. If you have a total of 700% increased (from all sources of gear and passives), that t5 prefix is worth 10%-15% incremental damage. If you have just the base crit multi (200%) & 50% crit chance, that t5 crit prefix is worth 9.25%-11% incremental damage (worse than the increased damage affix). If you have 75% crit chance, however, it’s worth 13.9%-16.5% (similar to the increased damage affix) & if you have 100% crit chance then it’s worth 18.5%-22% (clearly better than the increased damage affix).
Maybe I should have highlighted this.
But as I said originally, it’s not worth investing HEAVILY into.
Yes it’s good. But in most cases, you do not want it on your gear, the crit multi you get from the Skill tress, or the passive tree is worth getting.
where as, you do not get alot of flat damage on trees
Yeah, that’s fair. It might be worth putting on a relic as an offensive prefix if you have a lot of crit chance but its unlikely to be a good choice for a weapon prefix. Not sure about the amulet prefix but I’d assume probably not their either.
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