Thread: 8.0 DPS Job Rework Workshop/Megathread. Goals, Design Principles, and Mock-Ups.

Originally Posted by Carighan

Yes, the difference between a 30s DoT and a 30s cooldown DD attack in gameplay are essentially just:

* The former gives you extra movement/mechanics resistance (as the DoT continues to tick while you move, this is important for casters).

Tbf, this is only important if there's procs. You're still putting up the full amount all at once, under the effects present on initial application only.

E.g., if Glare III had a chance to give Glare IV vs. Dia having a chance to provide Glare IV, the first would be more uptime-dependent is present by penalizing you for every delayed GCD (needs each of 12 GCDs per 30s fully timed for max effect), whereas the first would only lose uptime if you delayed the single GCD by whatever number of GCDs (need 1 of 12 fully timed for max effectiveness).

The former can be re-cast early, but this produces no extra damage. But might sometimes be useful depending on the upcoming few seocnds.

Aye.

The latter can burst more, sometimes important depending on the fight.

Likewise only important if the mob needs to die in less than a DoT's time or in too far from a multiple of its duration.

(In a 6+ minute fight against a single enemy (the boss), though, there is effectively no difference, since the damage for the whole DoT is snapshotted to its moment of application, identically to instant-damage actions.)

Originally Posted by mallleable

And to be honest, I feel like dots encourage padding which I don't find interesting at all, whereas burst damage is better at like, I don't know, killing stuff.

Oh, as soon as tight DPS checks or TTK mismatch (see above) can become an issue, DoTs (as soft-CDs) are objectively weaker than our instant-damage CDs (be they normal/hard CDs or soft/granularly-charged-up ones). They just happen to be more flexible than hard CDs and tend to do something interesting with the gap between single-target and pure AoE since they, in effect, have simultaneous recharge per enemy.

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Tl;dr: Soft CDs and DoTs are functionally identical except in that the first gets only X charges while DoTs get X charges times the number of enemies but see diminishing returns the further the enemy's TTK gets from a multiple of the DoT duration.