Make damage over time status effects great again

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

Current situation:
Poison, bleeding and burn status effects are all very weak at the moment. Even on low level, the damage is negligible. Assuming a level 20 enemy with 20 life and 20 armor (life/armor pool of 40), even burn, while dealing the most damage (3 per turn), only does 7,5% of the enemies life/armor pool per turn. Which may be fine for that level, but quickly falls short as levels raise, not even talking about immunities.

The only decent use is to enable other abilities to trigger when targeting enemies with the corresponding status effect.

My suggestion:
Change poison, bleeding and burn to scale with enemy skills.

Poison is meant to be the “true damage status effect”. Poison deals 10% of the affected enemies current life rounded up as damage to its life. So, as the life decreases, the damage also decreases (minimum damage 1)
Strong against high life enemies, especially while using some other source of true damage.

Burn is meant to be the “anti-armor status effect”
Burn deals 10% of the affected enemies max armor rounded up as damage to its life/armor pool. Burns damage does not decrease when the armor decreases.
Strong against enemies with high armor and while using teams with high survivability because of burns steady damage income.

Bleeding is meant to be the “reapplying status effect”.
Bleeding deals 4% of the affected enemies max life rounded up, per stack to its life/armor pool. So with 2 stacks applied, the damage is 8% of the affected enemies max life.
Strong if you can continually apply bleeding.

Numbers are oriented on the starting example of a level 20 enemy losing 7,5% of its life/armor pool per turn, which feels significant enough without being overpowered.
Poison would deal 2 damage per turn until the enemy hits 10 current life. (2,5% of enemies life/armor pool but 5% of life when using true damage)
Burn would deal 2 damage per turn. (5% of enemies life/armor pool per turn)
Bleeding deals 0,8 (rounded to 1) per stack. (2,5% of enemies life/armor pool per stack)

Conclusion:
So what do you think about making damage over time status effects scale into lategame? Do you like the numbers or should they be higher or lower?
Tell me what you think.

8 Likes
2

I agree these status effects are very weak and need a buff to make them relevant again.
However I find your proposal a bit overpowered. Let these DoTs scale with the applier’s magic with 4:1 or 5:1 ratio, that would remove the cap also.

So for example burn starts at 3, with 24 magic if we round up, on a 5:1 it should do 3+5=8 dmg.

3

Edit: just realized that you probably already mentioned this in your post:

The only decent use is to enable other abilities to trigger when targeting enemies with the corresponding status effect.

So, please ignore below if this is the case.

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Original post:

Wait wait, poison is weak? Combined with Scorpious => deadly, led to one of the fastest farming teams in the past.

burn is weak? Combined with Fire blade => it still leads to most efficient farming (both PvP and explore) teams.

I will be honest, I don’t have anything to combine the bleed with :slight_smile:

My point is that at least two of these effects have a stronger association with enabling something better, so it is unfair to treat effects by themselves.

4

image
and ten more characters

5

Your idea sounds reasonable, its also more in line with how abilities scale generally.
I would be totally ok with your proposal too.

6

Yeah thats what I meant, sorry my wording wasnt really clear.

I still want to answer your concern:
Scorpious and Fireblade do not make poison/burn strong, Scorpious and Fireblade are strong despite depending on poison/burn.
I admit, considering the effects by themselves is more a design question than a balance one.
To explain that: I prefer effects to be designed being moderately useful in most cases and strong in some rather than being mostly useless but really strong in very few cases.

Its quite likely that such a change will lead to some balance changes to combinations you mentioned, like Fireblade being nerfed when burn gets stronger. Though Scorpious is actually a bad example for your concern because a kill mechanic is counter synergic with damage over time, so buffing poison wont change the strength of this combo noticable anyways.

Summarizing: my intent with this proposal isnt to shift the balance in any meaningful way, but rather to bring more variety to the game. (Admittedly with a bias, because I like damage over time effects) Because of the specific numbers I gave, some could confuse my proposal as a balancing request, but those numbers are just meant to make the proposal more imaginable.