Some damage over time powers behave a number of strange ways. I think this applies to any DoT that has a buggy description (see issue #1) or that has a "wounding" effect that applies a fixed percentage of weapon damage.

 

1) Their description is incorrect. The description of disintegrate, for example, states the damage dealt as 240 raw damage per 3 seconds, but this is actually an (incorrect) description of the total damage of the spell.

 

2) The description of powers like disintegrate doesn't account for the first tick of damage, which applies as soon as the spell hits. So the 240 damage mentioned above is only counting from the second tick, that applies after 3 seconds.

 

3) These DoTs with the buggy description don't scale their total damage duration. Disintegrate will always do 240 total damage + first tick's damage regardless of its duration. This means lower intellect and grazes results in higher dps, while higher intellect and crits results in lower dps.

 

4) Because the first tick isn't counted for the fixed total damage, but still (usually) does the same damage as a standard tick, low intellect and grazes results in higher overall damage for these DoTs, not just higher dps, since it shorter duration increases damage per tick, thus increasing the value of the freebie first tick.

 

5) If the duration of one of these DoTs goes under 3 seconds, things get really weird. The damage of the first tick seems to scale inversely to duration at a high rate when duration is shorter than a single tick. For example, cleansing flame with 10 might, 1 intellect and on a graze (1.4 second duration) deals 175 damage on its first tick. The next tick does exactly 80 damage (the appropriate total damage of the DoT).

 

I tested all of these against cre_dummy spawned through the console. I assume it has 10 resolve. Per a report already made by thundercleese here it seems likely targets with higher resolve will take more damage from these attacks.

 

Link to Save: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5947c9d2yikb8l9/Watcher%20%28CaptainsCabin%29%20%28685faa65-299d-4557-afab-c3f6aaf7641b%29%20%28LAX-2D%29%20%28916973636%29.savegame?dl=0

 

Hey Grasida!

 

Thank you for such a thorough breakdown of the damage over time effects!  I'll take everything you have here and forward it to our Systems Design team to investigate and get any needed fixes in to make the DoTs more accurate.  If you discover anything else about this, please feel free to add to this post as I will be linking this in the bug report for easy access.

 

Thanks again Grasida!

Epic bug report by the way.