Psyker DoT duration bugs(?)

12

Hey again, Neocore.

It's been a bit over a year since my previous Psyker DoT test, and with all the Psyker changes since then I thought I'd give it another go.

I'll start with the TL;DR:

Findings:

Fire Bolt and Firestorm DoTs:

* DO benefit from +%dot damage effects in the Damage Over Time skill tree
* DO NOT benefit from +%heat damage in Heat Attacks skill tree
* DO NOT benefit from +1 sec duration part of "Caustic Reagents" in DoT skill tree
* DO NOT benefit from +2 sec duration from "Haemotoxins"

Perhaps this is intended, but it is not clear from the descriptions. (caustic = poison? haemo = blood, toxin = poison? Maybe neither is meant to affect burn.)

Haemorrhage:

* DOES benefit from +%dot damage effects in the Damage Over Time skill tree
* DOES benefit from +2 seconds duration from "Arterial Wounding" in Physical Attacks skill tree
* DOES benefit from +2 seconds duration from "Haemotoxins" in DoT skill tree
* DOES NOT benefit from +%physical damage in Physical Attacks skill tree
* DOES NOT benefit from +1 sec duration part of "Caustic Reagents" in DoT skill tree


More details:

Methodology:

General approach here was to re-enter the same mission with low damage gear and a higher difficulty (so enemies lived long enough), record the HP of the enemies I was going to hit before hitting them, then record both the direct damage and the final HP to evaluate the DoT portion.

E.g., something like:

Rampager w/167 hp
Force rod single attack: 24 direct
Final HP: 94. 167-94=73 damage, 24 direct + 49 DoT.


I repeated this several times for each skill tree point I applied, in order to test which worked and which did not.

I tested three sources of DoTs:

1. Force rod "Fire Bolt" attack
2. Firestorm with cooldown reduction and -warp heat masteries
3. Haemorrhage with cooldown reduction, -warp heat, and area of effect masteries

My gear had no DoT damage buffs or +%physical or +%heat buffs.

Remaining to test, grouped loosely:

* Doctrine: Hyper-rad Psalm + Haemo-drain Psalm + Binharic Psalm + Hermeticon Psalm + Voltagheist Psalm ("+1 to all DoT durations")
* Doctrine: Technomartyr Psalm + Haemo-drain Psalm + Icarus Psalm + Static-burst Psalm + Uncreator Psalm ("Each vulnerability stack has a 300% increased effect on DoT effects")
* Doctrine: Transonic Psalm + Haemo-drain Psalm + Neuralis Psalm + Volkite Psalm ("All Fleshbane attacks also cause Bleed")
* Doctrine: Terminus Psalm + Haemo-drain Psalm + Volkite Psalm ("+200% Bleeding damage bonus against enemies in 8 meter radius")

* Burn 'procs': Top of Heat Attacks, "Spontaneous Combustion": How do these behave?
* Debuffs Skill Tree, "Dirty Fighting": Do DoTs count as a debuff? Do they benefit? Do multi-stacked dots count as multiple debuffs?
* Single DPS/Ranged Combat/Area Effects: Do DoTs benefit from anything in these trees? Are DoTs considered 'Single target'?

* Generic Affixes: e.g. "+X% Damage Bonus"
* Generic +Duration% Affixes: e.g. "+20% DoT duration"
* Relic Affixes: e.g. "+XX% Damage Bonus for Bleeding Effects"
* Relic Flat +Duration Affixes: e.g. "+3 seconds to Burning effect duration"
* Relic Cooldown-Threshold Damage Bonus: e.g. "+250% Damage Bonus for DoT Effects applied by skills with at least 3 seconds cooldown" (and: does this work on base cooldown or real cooldown?)
* Damage-vs-Burning/Bleeding Affixes: Do they apply to the DoT damage?

* Psyker Power: Fiery Form, both % damage bonus and % heat damage bonus
* Psyker Power: Foreboding, % physical damage bonus
* Psyker Power: Divine Shot, does the bonus affect a DoT applied as part of first attack on an enemy?
* Psyker Mastery: DoT mastery on various powers

* Critical Hit Strength: Is this additive or multiplicative for DoTs? I believe it's Mult for normal attacks, so if it's somehow Additive for dots that represents a significant scaling loss.

* Perk: Mind Rift I / II: Does generic damage bonus affect dots at all?
* Perk: Cull the Weak: Do DoTs count as a debuff? Do they benefit?
* Perk: Attack Anchor: Do DoTs benefit?
* Perk: Grinder: Do DoTs benefit? Does the crit removal prevent crit DoT-duration buff?
* Perk: Heatsinks: Do DoTs benefit from this +% heat damage?
* Perk: Inverse Warp Attenuation: Do DoTs drain life?
* Perk: Psychic Escalation: Do DoTs from psyker powers benefit too?
* Perk: Psychic Supremacy: Do DoTs from psyker powers benefit too?
* Perk: Tactician: Do DoTs from psyker powers with >=2s cooldowns benefit?
* Perk: Under Pressure: Do bleeds benefit from this?
* Perk: Warp Heat Conversion: Does this manifest as +%dmg, or +base damage, or what? Does it benefit DoTs?
* Perk: Warp Resonance: Again, do DoTs from psyker powers benefit?

It's unlikely I'll get to all of these, but if someone else wants to test, it would be great to have answers to some of these.

My current assumptions/beliefs about much of these are:

* that DoTs do not benefit from any general +% damage, or +% physical/heat damage.
* that DoTs do not benefit from buffs to the psyker power that produced them
* that DoTs DO benefit from vulnerability


Takeaways so far:

* Not gaining +duration seriously limits the strength of fire-based DoTs. It also just seems less fun, doesn't meet the fantasy of 'damage over time' when the burn lasts ~3 seconds.

* The lack of heat% and physical% scaling on both DoT types limits the gearing, skill, perk, psyker buff, and psalm-doctrine choices for these builds, and may ultimately make them less viable.

* The "Bonus Duration to DOT Skills" row in the Character > Offense list doesn't seem to reflect any changes. It always says '5'.

Enjoying the new season, but I'd love to see changes/fixes here!

Cheers

This post was edited 2 years 250 days ago by Nahvin
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Psyker DoT duration bugs(?)
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2 years 182 days ago
UPDATE:


No problem was found with Haemorrhage, the physical passives' damage bonus affects it, the Caustic Reagents too.
The same goes for the Firestorm. The Heat damage passives and the Caustic Reagents affect it, HOWEVER, it seems the Haemotoxins doesn't. It's the same with Fire Bolt.

2 years 183 days ago
Nahvin

The Volkite Psalm got checked on our end. It properly stacks if socketed in DIFFERENT equipments but don't stack if more socketed in the same item (by design). 


Haemorrhage is still in the works, checking what's going on with it! Thanks very much your diligent work!:)

2 years 222 days ago

Finally got a chance to hop in and test some of the changes in 2.4.1.


Quick test of these two:

* Fixed the Caustic Reagents passive skill of the DoT skill tree which did not grant +1 second to DoT effects duration

* Fixed the Volkite Psalm which didn't increase the DoT duration


I tested with Haemorrhage again.


Results:

* Caustic Reagents affects Haem as expected, now, adding 1 second to its duration.

* Volkite Psalm DOES NOT STACK, but does add 1 second duration to Haem.


1, 2, and 3 Volkites (in the same item) yielded identical damage. Maybe this is intended, but seems unintuitive.

This +1 second bonus did not change as I added DoT durations from other passives.


Regardless, this is a pretty good change, since it means 2 seconds added to your DoTs (assuming it all works on all of them, which is a very big assumption given earlier testing).


Thanks for the work, Neocore.

2 years 249 days ago

Mistake in previous post: Haemorrhage works correctly with Enhanced Attrition


I found that I had the perk reset bug when clearing my Physical Attacks tree and hadn't noticed it.

This means I had +2 seconds on Haemorrhage DoT already.


Thus it was a 3+2 second dot, instead of 3 seconds. Adding 3 seconds to that with Enhanced Attrition means the duration portion was an (8/5) buff, i.e., 1.6x. 1.6x * 2.5x = 4x, roughly what I observed.

2 years 250 days ago

Enhanced Attrition perk testing:

* Firestorm's burn seems to do exactly what you'd expect: double duration, 2.5x damage, for 5x total damage on the DoT.

* Haem's bleed is different, and it's unclear exactly how. It typically seemed to be ~3.9x damage. Ticks appear to be for 2.5x, so that suggests the duration isn't being added properly. By damage dealt, it appears it actually gets closer to 1.67 seconds of additional duration, but I'm not timing visually.

* EA's damage bonus is additive with skill tree +DoT points, so full up DoT tree you have have +200%.


I also did a quick test with a Volkite psalm to replicate what Bomjus reported: I agree that Volkite DOES NOT affect DoT duration.

* Haemorrhage DoT: same damage with and without Volkite.

* Firestorm DoT: same damage with and without Volkite.

Misc perk testing:

* Close Quarters Gunnery: +25-75% ranged damage: DOES NOT affect powers or force rod, nor their DoTs

* Retrograde Psychic Dominion DOES NOT impact DoT numbers (though it seems a portion of the power damage bonus is not applied immediately?)

Mastery testing:

* Firestorm: Enhanced Effect DOES NOT impact DoT strength from Firestorm


Also a note for any potential DoT players who: DoTs adjust with your currently selected weapon/signum set base damage. Potential for some build concepts there (i.e., may be able to snapshot bonuses from one affix set, then switch to a different affix set).

2 years 252 days ago

would like to add my own experiences with the "volkite psalm"


it states +100% DoT duration. which should, at the very least, be double the base duration of any DoT when equipped.


however, i've found that it does nothing when equipped in my armor/gear and also does nothing when equipped on my radium rifle (poison dot). it's easy for me to tell because if i spam my primary attack as fast as possible, i'm barely able to keep 3 stacks of poison on a target. and that holds true with or without the volkite psalm equipped. 


i've found that quite a few things in martyr say one thing, and usually do nothing lol. i made a post a month ago about the "euphoria" boon for the assassin doing nothing as well. 

This comment was edited 2 years 252 days ago by Bomjus
2 years 253 days ago
Well, my information is outdated :)


Borogove probably saw that in the game files. There's an entry for "dot_bleed" but haemorrhage has its own entry "haemorrhage_bleed" which has slightly different values. Though I can't properly explain what the values mean.

2 years 253 days ago

Information someone might find useful: Standard affix Bleed% and skill tree DoT% appear to be additive for Haemorrhage.


Without either, DoT portion was 158 damage.

With 37% bleed%, DoT portion was 217. 217/158 ~= 1.373, so that seems reasonable.

With 37% bleed% and 40% DoT from skill tree, DoT portion was 280. 280/217 ~= 1.29, when multiplicative we would expect ~= 1.4. However, 280/158 ~= 1.772, which we would expect from additive (37%+40%).


If we assume this is how DoT% and DoT-Subtype% works generally, then we can expect "Doctrine: Terminus Psalm + Haemo-drain Psalm + Volkite Psalm ("+200% Bleeding damage bonus against enemies in 8 meter radius")" to be weaker than we might like. I.e., if you've got 150% bleed%/dot% from gear/skills, your bleeds go from 2.5x to 4.5x, instead of 2.5x to 7.5x.


This suggests that the Vulnerability build, with the +300% for DoTs doctrine, might be a significantly stronger approach.

2 years 253 days ago

Additional physical% testing:


With no bonus% or skill tree points, the bleed from Haemorrhage ticks for 8, hit direct for 58.

With 21.2% physical damage (6.2 from gear, 15% from Physical Attacks tree) and +10% physical from Fleshgaze (for 31% total), I see a direct hit of 76 (almost exactly 31% more, hah), and ticks for 8. The DoT portion did the same damage with and without bonus physical damage, 158.


Oddly, 158 / 8 is 19.75, so I'm guessing there's a tick of 6 in there. I've been unable to visually verify that, but perhaps the DoT mechanics account for partial damage better than other hits.


Regardless, I see no evidence in this brief test that phys% affects Haemorrhage's bleed damage, even when the initial hit is significantly larger. In the thread from last year, user Borogove commented "(3) haemorrhage is actually implemented with a separate-but-equal fake bleed", though I don't know where they got that information. So perhaps phys% affects some bleeds, but not Haemorrhage's.

2 years 253 days ago
Psojed
I do not believe DoT damage is a function of the applying attack's damage, rather it seems to be a function of your base damage stat. If I'm wrong on that, that's a pretty big miss on my part (and it would significantly devalue the Enhanced Attrition perk).


That said, for e.g. heat I was actually toggling on/off the entire heat tree's +%, for 15%. I think burn was ticking for 8 before/after that, but it's possible the 8 was a later test. (8 * 1.15 would be 9.2, so it should round down to 9 and show a difference). I'll test again with larger % variance to verify, and update the OP if my conclusion was wrong.


I had observed my burn ticking for 6, the ticks for 8 coming after adding dot%. If heat% and dot% are additive, then it might not show a difference with 15% heat, since that would be 15% of 6, or whatever it is under the hood, rather than 8. So I'll definitely run a couple more tests here.


Thanks!

2 years 253 days ago
I forwarded your assessment to our designers, they will check on it. Thanks!
2 years 253 days ago
+% heat damage bonus from Heat tree passives should work on the main damaging spell, and if DoT damage is still based on the applying skill's damage, then it should also indirectly affect DoT damage. I think the reason you can't see a difference is because of your test methodology, namely testing with low damage, but I haven't done any testing myself.


For example, if I deal 100 damage, one passive gives 3% heat damage, that would make it 103 damage, but a DoT tick would be still only 10 damage, no different from a test without that one passive.