Please stop removing Damage Over Time effects from every job, add more complexity

[Shurrikhan]

Part of the issue with DoT jobs is that DoTs are sustained damage, they aren't reliable when you're having to burst down an add to prevent a wipe. DoTs are incredibly useful when there's downtime off the boss, but SE has made it so a lot of the downtime is often an invuln phase for the boss, removing the usefulness of DoTs. Short of them adding an ability that "detonates" the rest of the DoT damage as a burst, I don't foresee them ever allowing a DoT reliant job to exist again.

Right.

Despite DoTs being kind of ingenious in terms of flexible and even decently player-friendly design (though less so when you create specific penalties for letting them fall off for even a moment, such as bonus damage on filler skills to DoT-ed enemies or shit like Iron Jaws) for sustained combat, they do have an inherent weakness that can only really be offset by cleave that (A) is sustained or near enough to a multiple of the DoTs' duration and (B) isn't replaceable by AoE [combo] spam. That, for better or worse, just doesn't really happen in this game, and would still create fight-by-fight specific advantages

My point earlier, though, was that XIV is a game with notoriously little going on other than sustained damage, nor so much variance in situations that DoT classes could leverage their cleave into significant fight-specific advantages.

Most short-term dps checks are negligible and/or at least long enough for a DoT cycle or two (though it slightly helps with ease of designing for parity in encounters for DoTs durations to near enough share early common multiples, and then build those checks around those shared total durations, such as ~24 [enough for a 21s and near enough a 30s DoT] or 42 seconds [enough for 2 rounds of 18s or 21s DoTs, or for a Bard cycle], etc.).

I do think, though, that downtime at least shouldn't arbitrarily punish DoT users --as relatively insignificant as it may be-- by making enemies invuln to afflictions already applied prior to their "jumps" or "invuln" periods.