Dotcap and dot build scaling needs to be rethinked.

Title. Why is it capped to 35 million while it is already soo hard to scale dot damage but other builds/archetypes can scale to hundreds of millions. Why is one allowed but the other is heavily crippled? I'm running an EA explosive arrow ballista elementalist and having hard time scaling above 20 mill on a reasonable budget. Even 20 mill you would say it is a lot but it really is not. I thought it was really good as well but once you start farming juiced t16.5 it is actually nothing.

Well the main contributing factor is that attack/cast speed becomes irrelevant at some point and the dot ticking is super slow. Maybe those needs to be revisited.
Last edited by Ispita#4020 on Jul 7, 2025, 7:22:02 AM
Last bumped on Jul 10, 2025, 9:40:28 PM
I myself play dot for 6 years, sadly but only option is not to play DOT at all, play crit hit builds is only option here, on event i played for first time in many years Lightning Strike, and it was best build in history for me, one shot whole map literaly , i leveled to 100 without problems with it, in this league o played hh kb, and that was giga blast.
I see dot builds more as a league starter. Pretty easy to scale in the beginning without much gear, but they are limited on the upper end. (except some poison builds)

Surely it would be nice to have more scaling, but I think the dot cap is a technical limitation that's not unique to dots, but affects dots the most. Maybe GGG can change that some day, but I think it's not an easy fix.

Having that said, I'm playing EA Ballista Champ this league myself and working towards 20mil dps right now. It really gets hard after that, but Elementalist should definitely be able to pull more than Champion imo.
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Last edited by Sadaukar#2191 on Jul 7, 2025, 8:51:01 AM
I mean i get that it looks unfair on paper and i guess it would be better without it, but with dot capped uber dps you'll kill pretty much anything in the game in a few seconds and unlike hit builds you can freely run around while the damage is dealt. So i don't really see the big problem here.
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I mean i get that it looks unfair on paper and i guess it would be better without it, but with dot capped uber dps you'll kill pretty much anything in the game in a few seconds and unlike hit builds you can freely run around while the damage is dealt. So i don't really see the big problem here.



Clear is not good on dot builds specially with skill effects delaying it. You can't clear a map in a minute with a dot build like you can with hit based.

I don't think it would break singletarget like 200 mill dps hit based skills kill bosses in 1 second too. They just attack 30 times a second which is how they reach hundreds of millions of dps. It is like breaking the game at that point but it is allowed while dot based gimped so hard. That is what I can't get behind.

The 35 mill dot cap is in the game for so many years now even before T17 and ubers. Sadly that hardly cuts it nowadays with the amount of juice you can do. Maybe it is time to increase the cap to like 50-60 or so and make it easier to scale as well.
Last edited by Ispita#4020 on Jul 7, 2025, 9:02:07 AM
Map clear has very little to do with dps though. It's a matter of skill mechanics. T17 mobs still die like flies if you have like 20 mio dps, you don't even need dot cap for that, just a skill with good projection. EA ballista obviously isn't one of them, totems tend to be clunky for clear in general.

It's not that removing it would break hit based builds, i wouldn't mind if they removed it, the day will likely never come where i even bother to scale a build that high to begin with so w/e. But there are likely technical reasons why the cap is there and it's not like it's a big issue because, as i said, 35 mio uber dot dps is plenty to kill just about anything instantly. It's more of a theoretical pob warrior issue than an actual ingame problem.
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There should be a damage cap in general.
Absolutely not.
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Crîmnor#4334 wrote:
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There should be a damage cap in general.
Absolutely not.


Absolutely yes. It never should have been possible to reach over 1B DPS in general. It wasn't even remotely possible in 2016. There's a reason why 3.9.0 doubled monster HP. We were already outscaling the game almost tenfold by that time, and that patch is less than 6 years old. The game has a damage problem. Whether you want to admit it or not. The term "zDPS" is being thrown around these days for builds that could easily clear endgame a couple years ago. It has to stop.
Power fantasy and chasing new heights is exactly what keeps this game interesting and alive. They will never be able to balance 12+ years of power and feature creep, damage cap or not.
Last edited by Crîmnor#4334 on Jul 7, 2025, 11:30:21 AM
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The game is where it is now because it used to be interesting, with the main focus being querky and obtuse mechanics that allowed for near endless possibilities.
You are right. It used to be interesting because we got fun leagues while also growing more powerful. Leagues with little to no increase in player power were historically less popular. PoE being the fast and zoomy aRPG and one-upping itself with every major patch is the reason it grew insanely fast after Ascendancy / Perandus. Lately? Not so much and I'm not even talking about Settlers and the massive delay here.
Last edited by Crîmnor#4334 on Jul 7, 2025, 11:40:33 AM
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Crîmnor#4334 wrote:
PoE being the fast and zoomy aRPG and one-upping itself with every major patch is the reason it grew insanely fast after Ascendancy / Perandus.


While Ascendancy technically added a lot of player power, true, I'd argue it was popular because it opened up a vaste range of new builds:

Elementalist builds that no longer needed to stack every Ignite chance node and mod where possible. Champion builds that could take their starting skill to endgame while feeling pretty tanky. Juggernaut builds that could stack a ton of PDR and never get slowed down. Necromancers spamming corpse skills for ridiculous Cast Speed. Raiders zooming across the map. Hierophant "pizza stick" totems and so on.

While it added more power, it was new mechanics the game hasn't seen before. The additional power creep was merely a side product and not the center piece. The days of us getting a whole library of new skills are long gone. And I think that hurt the game long-term. I didn't even play something new this league, no, I took an old build and elevated it with the addition of a Merc. That's how barren I feel the current gameplay is. Same old boring meta shit and no more funky, think-outside-the-box kind of builds.
See, I think we're mostly on the same page then. Sadly I feel we're never getting anything close from GGG ever again, they're just spread too thin between two games now. Man, just reading pizza stick totems brought back so much nostalgia. Good times.

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