Chance to Ignite

I have a question about burn damage triggered by this support and triggered by critical strikes.

If you crit with fire damage, target takes at least 50% more damage due to critical strike multiplier.

Burn damage from crit:
(no elemental resistances)
crit_dmg_multi*base_fire_dmg*4/3 over 4 seconds

and burn coused by this support:
base_fire_dmg*4/3 over 4 seconds

Or is this support gem triggering burn as if critical strike coused it?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Nothing about igniting takes the crit damage multiplier into account separately. It just cares how much fire damage was dealt by the hit which triggered it. Usually, critical hits will cause more burn because they cause more fire damage, but that's not because burning separately applies the multiplier for crits and not for non-crits, it's just that the forumla is
fire_damage_per_second ( fire_damage_dealt * 1/3 )

Thanks! Thats is why it seemed to do less damage when proced from this support...

Hate this

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Multiplie instances of burning on a single entity do not stack. At any given time, whichever is the highest-damage burn will be applying it's damage, and the others will be inactive.

Example: I burn a monster for 20 fire damage per second, for 4 seconds (the base burn duration). 1 second later, I crit with molten shell, causing a burn dealing 50 fire damage per second. At this point, the 50 dps starts being dealt and the 20 dps burn becomes inactive. 2 seconds later I ignite for another burn dealing 30 dps. That burn is inactive due to the existence of the 50 dps burn.

1 second after that the original 20 dps burn expires (still inactive). 1 more second later the 50 dps burn expires, and the 30 dps burn starts dealing damage (because it's now the highest-dps burn on the monster). It lasts 2 more seconds.

So the monster got 1 second of 20dps, 4 seconds of 50 dps, and 2 seconds of 30dps.

And the wizard got cheated out of 3 seconds of 20 dps and 2 seconds of 30 dps for a loss of 120 or 30% of the 400 burn damage the player actually earned by stacking crit and using this skill gem.

This kind of math creates a bad and confusing situation where wearing too much crit% creates diminishing returns, especially on a Pyromaniac wizard with all the burn passives (total of 80% increase) where burn damage is 60% of the initial hit rather than 33.3% It devalues Pyromaniac, burn damage%, and crit damage% because the full burn damage from successive crits, or even crits 2-3 seconds apart is not applied. At 50% crit, crit damage% nodes are only worth about 3/4 their stated value on a chain-casting Pyro/burn wizard. Cast speed is also devalued because the more crits that land in the 4 second burn period, the more damage is lost.

To give a concrete example, a player stacking 50% crit and chain-casting a fireball every second trying to kill a high-health, regenerating elite (when DPS really counts!) loses half their burn ticks and thus 16.7% of their potential damage. A player who has taken all the increased burn damage passives loses 30% of their potential damage. Also, this wizard should not bother with this gem because a better burn will usually overwrite the gem burn. Faster cast times exacerbate the problem - I think at 2 fireballs/second our unfortunate crit-stacking Pyro loses 3/4 of the burns so 45% of potential damage but it's late and I could be doing the math wrong.

I'm used to thinking about this sort of burn situation because World of Warcraft mages have a similar burn-on-crit passive. In WoW, all burn damage a player has earned is applied by summing the damage per second. Your sample wizard would get 1 second of 20 dps, 2 seconds of 70 dps, 1 second of 100 dps, 1 second of 80 dps, and 2 seconds of 30 dps burn so that all 400 damage the wizard earned is applied. There is no confusing diminishing returns situation for a fireball-spamming wizard to worry about. (Give or take the notorious "ignite munching" bug.)

This may require a little reduction on the burn damage formula but it's much less confusing that being forced into theorycrafting exactly how many crit% nodes to take in Skilldrassil to avoid losing too many burn ticks for your play-style.

If all burns are added, the value of the skill gem gets preserved because in-between crits, the gem will proc smaller, "backup" burns.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Imagine firing five Fireballs with stacked %Crit, Chance to Ignite and Elemental Proliferation. Every Fireball can Crit for AoE Burn, and can trigger CTI for AoE Burn. Per cast. Add in a +Lightning damage support for Shock if you're feeling particularly sadistic.
Just a small reduction in Burn damage won't be enough for something like that.

No, that's the whole point. A bunch of the burn damage from those five fireballs gets thrown away if more than a couple crit, or they crit back-to-back. I don't mind that some damage is thrown away if I can play effectively. My objection is that for a pyro witch it puts a diminishing return on the value of crit% and cast speed. There's no point running a pyro/Elemental Proliferation witch at 50% crit if you like to chain-cast because you just throw away burn ticks left and right. Once you're critting enough to get burns up reliably crit dramatically loses value in an AoE fight and damage% (crit damage%, elemental%, fire%, spell%) dramatically gains because it gets multiplied by the number of burning mobs. Even for a single target 1% crit damage > 1% crit chance once you hit maybe 30% crit chance (less if you're casting fast).

More relevant to the gem, since this is a skill gem discussion, Chance to Ignite is worthless once you have a reasonable amount of crit% from gear or passives. You will have a crit burn going most of the time, so the burn from the gem simply gets ignored.

As I said before, I'd much rather have a system where individual burns do a lot less damage but stack, which preserves the value of crit and cast speed across all gear levels and makes Chance to Ignite worth using until you have very high levels of crit.

As an aside, I'm regularly getting "reviving" mobs when they die from Burn. Since my Fire Witch uses DD on bodies, this is rather annoying. Sometimes, they stay "dead" for more than a second before instantly jumping back up
Other mobs will just have their hitpoints bar get down to zero then jump back to 5%

I suppose the client calculates DOT effects in advance, making them dead, then gets a delayed update from the server that shows them alive. Or maybe it conuts a tick too much, dunno.

Hey I've been testing this ability here with my duelist and the only situation I have run into is this. It seems to be really hard to tell when it activates. I was expecting the enemy to catch fire or something but so far I haven't seen much of a special effect when the enemy " ignites ".

Is this what is supposed to happen? If so, perhaps I am not paying attention enough or I'm just not getting it to activate for some reason. Thanks. BTW, using it with Heavy Strike or Double Strike.