Quote Originally Posted by Rainsford View Post
As someone else posted, it runs a simulation. So if you cast a 30 potency DOT that lasts for 25 seconds, it will approximate the damage over that time period. Super accurate? No. But if you're talking about an endgame fight where you're doing 80k damage, 2k in one direction or another because of dot crits/etc won't have such a huge effect.
Unfortunately, you have a limited understanding of some classes. DoTs can crit, and there are classes with DoT criting mechanics (River of Blood for archer) which drastically changes the DPS. So any parser is in accurate when trying to calculated Archer DPS. With high enough crit rate (I've done it) you can use Heavy shot and 2 Bloodletters every cool down (all with no drop in TP at that) for a grand total of 450 potency percool down, not even taking into account that DoTs have to have crit (changing the approx. damage) for River of Blood to activate.