Combusting Wounds ticking more than it should?

[yorname]

To give a context, currently, the tooltip shows CW does "8.7 burn damage over 14.3 sec" on my character. If I got it right about how ApplyOverTime works, it should tick every 3s and about 4 damage per tick per stack. The damage part matches what I'm seeing.

However when attacked frequently, it ticks way faster. For example CW + Wall of Flame not only adds one stack per second, also forces the damage to resolve each time a stack is added. This means all pervious stacks are ticking at triple speed. It's difficult to nail down the time in the game, but I'm seeing the growing CW damage tick after every small WoF damage. If this speed is normal, then the tooltip is horribly wrong and greatly understates its damage (on top of ApplyOverTime already being confusing).

As for the multi-attack abilities, it really depends. For a single target, chanter's Her Revenge counts as multiple hits. Blunderbuss's 4 shots also count as one hit. Repeat effects from evoker or Marux Amanth count as multiple hits, and Eccea's Arcane Blaster + Imbued Ammunition count as 2 hits. I guess any multi-attack that has a delay at all can trigger multiple ticks. This really means CW is a party-defining spell, and can become the most important spell below tier 9 if built around.

I started a wizard run to try how high I can reach with Crushing Doom, but it seems so irrelevant now, among all the bosses only that fire dragon and Dorudugan can't be melt in seconds.

Edited August 14 by yorname

[Boeroer]

The part of "forces the damage to resolve each time a stack is added" is similar to other self-stacking DoTs like Bleeding Cuts or Saru Sichr's enchantment "Poison Dipped". That's what makes them much more powerful than one would think just from reading the description.

If you can achieve a lot of hits in a short amount of time (like with Swift Flurry or Barbaric Retaliation or such things) this becomes more obvious. 

Edited August 14 by Boeroer

[yorname]

33 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

The part of "forces the damage to resolve each time a stack is added" is similar to other self-stacking DoTs like Bleeding Cuts or Saru Sichr's enchantment "Poison Dipped". That's what makes them much more powerful than one would think just from reading the description.

If you can achieve a lot of hits in a short amount of time (like with Swift Flurry or Barbaric Retaliation or such things) this becomes more obvious. 

Yeah this is broken IMO. Saru Sichr has its own problem of infinite chain crits, at least axe attack speed is somewhat limited, factor in Barbaric Retaliation or Heartbeat Drumming it's probably like doubling the ticking speed on average I guess? Good but not ridiculously good.

Combusting Wounds has the potential of triggering multiple ticks per second constantly and up to hundreds of damage per tick. All I need to pay specifically is several casts of any wall spells, and one cast of combusting wounds. Other things I may add on top essentially aren't part for this, like blunderbuss attacks are alright on thier own. IMO this is way over the power curve of damage spell in the game, like after a few seconds of walls, every projectile of Missle Salvo can do extra 200 damage (probably, I didn't test this, but I did try Minoletta's Concussive Missiles). The only problem is that only bosses can survive the build-up.

My problem is that some of the game-breaking mechanics are at least as written, but this one is just messy implement and has a huge impact. One would assume it should effectively add a fixed amount of damage to each hit from the description.

[Elric Galad]

It's basically the same mechanics as Unbending, but reversed.

[yorname]

17 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

It's basically the same mechanics as Unbending, but reversed.

I see. I looked up the discussion on it and found that you also already knew about the chanter invocation scaling issue.

I wonder if there's anything to be done to CW?

[Elric Galad]

1 hour ago, yorname said:

I see. I looked up the discussion on it and found that you also already knew about the chanter invocation scaling issue.

I wonder if there's anything to be done to CW?

I would't consider it especially broken. Strong, obscure and a bit abusable, but nothing gamebreaking. 

[thelee]

CW is very very very good, but as far as cheese goes, IMO it's actually kind of niche. You need to warp your party a little bit to take advantage of it the most, and even then you still need to actually land CW, which targets fortitude (so a bit non-trivial to do), which bosses tend to have loads of, and on PotD you really need PEN boosts or AR debuffs to get it to work best (and resolve debuffs to make it work better even still). Plus, it's very one-note - it only lets you do one thing. Which gets boring after a while. In terms of cheese you can do a lot better with greater versatility.

That being said, watching a boss's health bar deplete rapidly in real time is neat to watch.

Edited August 14 by thelee

[yorname]

17 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

I would't consider it especially broken. Strong, obscure and a bit abusable, but nothing gamebreaking. 

IDK it's pretty broken to me now that I managed to make more use out of it, scales too well in a party.

When I think of near-insta-kills that're still possible with BPM, they're usually hard to achieve as enemy stats go up and some even doesn't work against single enemy, but this is too easy to set up compared to e.g. infinite crit chains, and is fully online as early as tier 4.

The only real limitations are fire immunity and the shape of walls. I just feel a tier 2 spell shouldn't be able to end boss fights in seconds.

[yorname]

20 minutes ago, thelee said:

CW is very very very good, but as far as cheese goes, IMO it's actually kind of niche. You need to warp your party a little bit to take advantage of it the most, and even then you still need to actually land CW, which targets fortitude (so a bit non-trivial to do), which bosses tend to have loads of, and on PotD you really need PEN boosts or AR debuffs to get it to work best (and resolve debuffs to make it work better even still). Plus, it's very one-note - it only lets you do one thing. Which gets boring after a while. In terms of cheese you can do a lot better with greater versatility.

That being said, watching a boss's health bar deplete rapidly in real time is neat to watch.

I'm not a big fan of it because compared to tricks with similar power, just landing a spell once against fortitude is still way too easy.

Being from a wizard makes it even worse, the character doesn't need to pay anything to be able to do this, so choosing not to do this (against right enemies) is like objectively wrong as a wizard, isn't that exactly the point of OP stuff ruining game experience? Also ironically it makes MC Evoker the worst blaster subclass choice together with Enchanter.

You did remind me of penetration issue though, I'm playing a loremaster so it was never a problem. That being said against high AR bosses, wizard don't have many choices anyway, if they want to do damage. The raw damage spells only do like 100-200 damage per cast, other damage spells mostly have similar pen. Maybe Crushing Doom will eventually crit so that's something.

[thelee]

3 minutes ago, yorname said:

so choosing not to do this (against right enemies) is like objectively wrong as a wizard,

eh, this is kind of an interesting point. i'm not sure if i know how to properly express myself in this respect.

back in IWD, it was like the optimal way to play to slather the ground with web, entangle, whatnot and just nuke enemies to death with fireballs and such. it was so optimal that it was boring, and if you didn't do that, you felt super weak by comparison.

CW is very very very good, but I don't feel like i'm nerfing myself by not doing it. and i don't think it's so good that it warps gameplay, it requires a lot of support to be good in most situations. though as you point out (and i hadn't considered) that a loremaster kinda covers much of that, with AR debuffing and fort debuffing and resolve debuffing (and maybe even PEN boosting with the energized inspiration). maybe we can say CW is a good trick in the bag for a loremaster. (probably also a sorcerer, if we're excluding entire party setups)

for my typical party, when I have CW access, it is a nice damage boost, but it is not absurd w/out having to put more work into it. in that respect it definitely punches above its weight, but it's not on the same level as Salvation of Time or Brilliant in how easily it lifts the party and how consciously I have to avoid using them if I want the game to play "fair."

[yorname]

35 minutes ago, thelee said:

eh, this is kind of an interesting point. i'm not sure if i know how to properly express myself in this respect.

back in IWD, it was like the optimal way to play to slather the ground with web, entangle, whatnot and just nuke enemies to death with fireballs and such. it was so optimal that it was boring, and if you didn't do that, you felt super weak by comparison.

CW is very very very good, but I don't feel like i'm nerfing myself by not doing it. and i don't think it's so good that it warps gameplay, it requires a lot of support to be good in most situations. though as you point out (and i hadn't considered) that a loremaster kinda covers much of that, with AR debuffing and fort debuffing and resolve debuffing (and maybe even PEN boosting with the energized inspiration). maybe we can say CW is a good trick in the bag for a loremaster. (probably also a sorcerer, if we're excluding entire party setups)

for my typical party, when I have CW access, it is a nice damage boost, but it is not absurd w/out having to put more work into it. in that respect it definitely punches above its weight, but it's not on the same level as Salvation of Time or Brilliant in how easily it lifts the party and how consciously I have to avoid using them if I want the game to play "fair."

Considering its requirement on the party (only need one or two companions to help really, and not even very specific in terms of their class), I think it's pretty high on the broken list. Not like the auto-win buttons like SoT/BDD, and pretty limited in terms of usage (bosses only), but I would probably rank it above Effort+AOE, crit chain or most tricks that need crits to work. And I do think it's the best thing a wizard do against bosses. For example against non-megabosses, I usually needed brilliant or got every close to being out of spells as a MC wizard. But with CW not only is it way faster, I also only needa handful of spells.

Sorcerer is not very helpful in terms of CW, IIRC they couldn't have more than 1 wall active, and their other AOEs are just okay, not something a wizard can't do. I believe one tick of Venombloom only adds one CW stack, unlike 3 interrupts with energized.

The only thing a loremaster helps is energized I think, other stuff are more or less accessible in a normal party as I consider them "general buffs/debuffs". If I'm playing a SC wizard, CW + wall + ray + Missile Salvo is arguably better.

Edited August 14 by yorname

[thelee]

35 minutes ago, yorname said:

Sorcerer is not very helpful in terms of CW, IIRC they couldn't have more than 1 wall active, and their other AOEs are just okay, not something a wizard can't do. I believe one tick of Venombloom only adds one CW stack, unlike 3 interrupts with energized.

unlike a wall you can have as many aoe effects active as you want. each tick of venombloom only adds one CW stack, but you can have 2x venombloom, 2x wicked briars, a wall of your choice, 1x nature's terror (unclear to me if you can double-up), 2x relentless storm, and then whatever random aoe effects you bring over from wizard (though i don't recall if combusting wounds gets cancelled by ice effects); you also have more ways to debuff fortitude and resolve. when i melted neriscyrlas with my theurge it was because fassina landed a combusting wounds when i had a lot of druid aoes active, the CW ticks skyrocketed very quickly. (i think i might have crashed my game once due to too many stacks related issue when the fight ended)

Quote

And I do think it's the best thing a wizard do against bosses. 

agree to disagree, but i think the best thing a wizard can do is spam interrupts, mostly slicken, and concelhaut's hammer, and debuff. maybe against the oracle or the memory hoarder in FS who are immune to interrupts.

Edited August 14 by thelee

[yorname]

27 minutes ago, thelee said:

unlike a wall you can have as many aoe effects active as you want. each tick of venombloom only adds one CW stack, but you can have 2x venombloom, 2x wicked briars, a wall of your choice, 1x nature's terror (unclear to me if you can double-up), 2x relentless storm, and then whatever random aoe effects you bring over from wizard (though i don't recall if combusting wounds gets cancelled by ice effects); you also have more ways to debuff fortitude and resolve. when i melted neriscyrlas with my theurge it was because fassina landed a combusting wounds when i had a lot of druid aoes active, the CW ticks skyrocketed very quickly. (i think i might have crashed my game once due to too many stacks related issue when the fight ended)

agree to disagree, but i think the best thing a wizard can do is spam interrupts, mostly slicken, and concelhaut's hammer, and debuff. maybe against the oracle or the memory hoarder in FS who are immune to interrupts.

That's probably when the fastest caster (cat + dex inspiration) is still not fast enough, because now one character needs to do everything. My experience with sorcerer is that they're very safe and are best on a large battlefield, but for specifically CW, casting all those spells is still slower than wizard's more direct multi-attacks. I didn't even realize CW is this good when I played it, too many spells to cast. Casting 3 of those AOE spells is effectively only 1 tick/s, but costs ~10s to cast. It's probably better when you send a tank to lure the enemy and the sorcerer do all the ground work in stealth.

[Elric Galad]

An easy fix (similar to what BPM did to unbending) is to change the ticks from 3s to 1s. Without further change, it would divide by 3 the reapplication damages. 

Note that it would also divide by 3 the initial tick, changing the spell base damages from 4+2(initial tick) to 4+0.67(initial tick). Therefore the spell would be nerfed vs non abuse targets. 

I feel like it is the right direction to go though, I'm just wondering if a slightly tweak up is necessary to compensate the effect on initial tick. 

Maybe 5 damages over 5s with 1s tick. So the base damages are kept, damages per tick halved (compared to current) and the time the reapplication can happen is reduced a bit too. 

 

Other question : should a similar treatment be given to bleeding cuts and Saru Stitch? 

Like Bleeding Cuts to 3s 5% damages ticks. Edit : maybe not because it's fun and not intrinsecally abusable. 

Saru Strits is a lesser concern cause you can't equip your whole party with it. 

Edited August 15 by Elric Galad

[Boeroer]

Exploiting Combusting Wounds either takes a lot of time (if done by one character) or a specialized party (which then becomes a one-trick troupe - which is very boring to play).

Even though I knew about its potential I rarely use it - because if you invest the time you need to set it up most efficiently into different nice actions, you can have similarly good, yet more entertaining outcomes imo. Where I use it regularly is in Beast of Winter, esp. against Neriscyrlas because that's where I get the feeling that the outcome actually warrants all the hassle with multi hit actions such as walls and beams etc.

By the time I get CW to tick for considerable bonus damage that I would deem balance-breaking, the enemy is already beaten by other means. And I'd rather make sure the enemies are constantly debuffed and disabled and can be disposed off safely than trying to set up massive damage ticks with CW. 

Like... I can disable any enemy in the game except two or three mega bosses from start of the encounter to finish with just one arbalest + modal. That's kind of game breaking, especially when it's about power curves imo. Just needs a Ranger and a Chanter in the party and works without any setup during the fight.

Where CW is really great and easy to exploit without bending the party around it is when you have a lot of pulsing or multihit spells anyway - like if you have a Chanter with Her Revenge + a Druid with Venombloom, Wicked Briars and so on + a Wizard with Chillfog and Walls and maybe a blunderbuss dude or so. Then it really starts to feel like you are nerfing yourself if you don't use CW. 

 

Edited August 15 by Boeroer

[yorname]

@Elric Galad I'm for it. I'm not sure if it needs further change because the total damage usually scales over 10, and as I understand it's always better than intended no matter the frequency of other attacks. Maybe? It's hard to tell how strong the intended effect actually would be.

@BoeroerI did happen to have such party, but I planned it to make use of how I thought CW works. Maybe that's why I'm feeling it's too good. It is too good than it's intended or it should, I mean it's hard to have your whole party to have an average of 1 attack/s, and that's already tripling the effect.

If it does what exactly it says, it can be a good addition to an AOE heavy party (that's what you'd expect from a tier 2 spell right? Situationally good). But the current implementation makes a thematic party into a exploit party, instead of empowering this kind of party, CW becomes the core of the party and is the reason it feels one-note. Like in my party I have a blunderbuss gambit rogue, which is typically pretty good at single target damage, but now he's become a support character. It's impossible to "legitimately" make good use of the intended effect, which could have had a place in certain parties without being the one trick.

Edited August 15 by yorname

[Elric Galad]

5 minutes ago, yorname said:

@Elric Galad I'm for it. I'm not sure if it needs further change because the total damage usually scales over 10, and as I understand it's always better than intended no matter the frequency of other attacks. Maybe? It's hard to tell how strong the intended effect actually would be.

@BoeroerI did happen to have such party, but I planned it to make use of how I thought CW works. Maybe that's why I'm feeling it's too good. It is too good than it's intended or it should, I mean it's hard to have your whole party to have an average of 1 attack/s, and that's already tripling the effect.

If it does what exactly it says, it can be a good addition to an AOE heavy party (that's what you'd expect from a tier 2 spell right? Situationally good). But the current implementation makes a thematic party into a exploit party, instead of empowering this kind of party, CW becomes the core of the party and is the reason it feels one-note. Like in my party I have a blunderbuss gambit rogue, which is typically pretty good at single target damage, but now he's become a support character. It's impossible to "legitimately" make good use of the intended effect, which could have a place in certain parties without being the one trick.

It does not NEED further tweaking but that's a general principle I used in the past : don't nerf a spell if you can focus on nerfing the abuse only. That's why avoiding to nerf base damages is a goal.

 

[yorname]

5 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

It does not NEED further tweaking but that's a general principle I used in the past : don't nerf a spell if you can focus on nerfing the abuse only. That's why avoiding to nerf base damages is a goal.

 

I see. If you factor in the possibility difference of "accidentally" making use of the unintended effect, then a buff is indeed requied.

[thelee]

What if the duration of the damage debuff was reduced? You could even buff the actual damage.

 

thats why it becomes absurd, because wit enough int and/or enemy resolve debuffs (or enfeebled) you can cause the dot stack to  re trigger way too easily. A lower base duration would make it harder to do this

 

edit: I’m an illiterate dummy; I missed Elric’s post that was exactly this suggestion

Edited August 15 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

3 hours ago, thelee said:

What if the duration of the damage debuff was reduced? You could even buff the actual damage.

 

thats why it becomes absurd, because wit enough int and/or enemy resolve debuffs (or enfeebled) you can cause the dot stack to  re trigger way too easily. A lower base duration would make it harder to do this

 

edit: I’m an illiterate dummy; I missed Elric’s post that was exactly this suggestion

Consider that the main aspect of my change was to set tick to 1s. This means the damages on each reapplication is divided by the number of tick. More ticks mean bigger division. 

The reduction to 5s is only a secondary aspect. 

I thought about making it a flat 6 damages on each hit without any DoT component, but it would have changed the spell too much. 

[thelee]

4 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Consider that the main aspect of my change was to set tick to 1s. This means the damages on each reapplication is divided by the number of tick. More ticks mean bigger division. 

The reduction to 5s is only a secondary aspect. 

I thought about making it a flat 6 damages on each hit without any DoT component, but it would have changed the spell too much. 

Ah I actually once again misread your change.

im sure the 1s tick will help but if you’re able to stack on the stacks a 1/3 division of damage only delays the inevitable. If we want to actually reign in that inevitable, a shorter duration would make it a lot harder to accumulate such a high number of stacks. 
 

maybe a harsher cut in duration coupled with your ticking changes? 3s plus 1s ticks? Can boost the damage to compensate for non-degenerate cases.

[yorname]

I think the point of shorter ticks is to make it match the description/intention better, not only dividing it by 3, having 1s between 2 attacks is way more common, in this second the 1s-tick-CW just works normally. In comparison you'll practically never get the original CW to work normally at any moment.

Say we have 2 hits/s on average with a party, on 3s ticks CW is doing 6× intended damage, on 1s ticks, CW will do 2× intended damage. Reducing the duration (if keep total damage unchanged) doesn't change "how wrong" it is if I'm not mistaken. The max stack count for a given party is reduced, but total damage per tick is unchanged because damage per tick is proportionally increased.

If DoT behavior can't be changed, then probably making it not a DoT at all is the only way to match the description. Though I understand it's probably too far for the goal of BPM

Edited August 16 by yorname

[Elric Galad]

6 hours ago, thelee said:

Ah I actually once again misread your change.

im sure the 1s tick will help but if you’re able to stack on the stacks a 1/3 division of damage only delays the inevitable. If we want to actually reign in that inevitable, a shorter duration would make it a lot harder to accumulate such a high number of stacks. 
 

maybe a harsher cut in duration coupled with your ticking changes? 3s plus 1s ticks? Can boost the damage to compensate for non-degenerate cases.

I don't really want to stop the inevitable though. Delaying it is ok. This strategy should be somewhat rewarded. 

Solely shortening duration makes each tick bigger which in turn makes each reapplication bigger (but with Shorter duration the number of ticks being reapplied decrease). Overall it is a neutral change. 

The above change was also about having more rounded numbers. 

6 hours ago, yorname said:

I think the point of shorter ticks is to make it match the description/intention better, not only dividing it by 3, having 1s between 2 attacks is way more common, in this second the 1s-tick-CW just works normally. In comparison you'll practically never get the original CW to work normally at any moment.

Say we have 2 hits/s on average with a party, on 3s ticks CW is doing 6× intended damage, on 1s ticks, CW will do 2× intended damage. Reducing the duration (if keep total damage unchanged) doesn't change "how wrong" it is if I'm not mistaken. The max stack count for a given party is reduced, but total damage per tick is unchanged because damage per tick is proportionally increased.

If DoT behavior can't be changed, then probably making it not a DoT at all is the only way to match the description. Though I understand it's probably too far for the goal of BPM

Basically Yes. 

Switching to a non DoT isn't excluded if necessary. But I don't think it is necessary.