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Are damage over time effects (DoTs) going to be useless in the next ESO update?

By Andrew | 11 Jul 2022 | Share
Are damage over time effects (DoTs) going to be useless in the next ESO update?

The planned changes to light and heavy attacks for the Lost Depths update have gotten lots of attention already in the ESO community, with quite a lot of disagreement on whether or not the changes are a good or a bad thing. However another aspect of these changes that isn't being talked about as much are the changes to damage over time effects, or DoTs, and how this might affect the PvE meta.

What is Changing with DoTs in ESO?

You can read the extended explanation and reasoning in this forum post by Gilliam from the ESO dev team. But in summary, the duration of many skills that have a persistent effect, including DoTs, is going to be significantly increased, however the damage per second output of them is going to be decreased. This is intended to make rotations easier for newer players, while also decreasing the importance of having very high DoT uptimes when you are doing DPS on an enemy. 

This does raise some questions with regards to some skills though, most notably ground DoTs and if they will remain relevant in the next update from a DPS perspective. 

Wall of Storms Ground DoT in ESOWall of Storms Ground DoT in ESO

How Ground DoTs Might be Affected in Lost Depths

Ground DoTs are (as you can probably work out) DoTs that are placed on the ground as an AOE. Enemies standing in the AOE will take ticking damage from the DoT, usually every second but sometimes on a different time interval. However unlike single target DoTs the effect does not persist when the enemy leaves the AOE. Examples of Ground DoTs are Endless Hail and Eruption, while single target DoTs include skills like Burning Embers and Fetcher Infection

The potential issue arises from the fact that a lot of bosses in the Elder Scrolls Online like to move around a lot, or have a mechanic that makes them immune to damage until some adds are dealt with. This means that DPS players have to spend a lot of time recasting their Ground DoTs on the new target location every time this happens. At the moment this is still generally worth doing, however if the damage value on ground DoTs is nerfed by a considerable margin, it is possible that these skills will start getting dropped in favour of simply using a spammable attack instead. 

Saint Olms boss in ESOSaint Olms boss in ESOWe will have to wait and see what the values are in the PTS Patch notes, which should be released later today, and of course test how the skills perform on the PTS. It's definitely something to keep an eye on though. 

We hope you enjoyed this article about the Lost Depths update for ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
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