DOT classes

[Skadi]

hi recenty restarted the game as a shifter because i wasnt feeling Inquistor halfway through act 2.

but i heard that Blood Kineticsit could count as a DOT class?
i am a dot enjoyer and didnt even know this game had DOT classes. is blood kineticist a dot class and are there other DOT classes in this game?

[jonnin]

there are a variety of spells and effects that do damage over time but most of them are minor (meaning it would take 10 or more rounds to kill the thing from the effect). Basically you can apply dots all day but with very few exceptions (like some poisons or stand in it spells) the effects take a while to stack up to a point that they do anything significant. On top of that damage reduction, resists, saving throws and such will negate a lot of attempts to land such an effect. The good news is that bleeds stack, and they bypass DR.

Anyone that can apply bleeds or use poison or do magic has some capability here but there are no dot themed classes. Enemy are really not supposed to last enough rounds for this kind of thing to matter... anything that lives more than 3-4 rounds is probably going to do something horrible to your team.

rather than a class specifically, a dual wielding high BAB many, many attacks per round anything with a bleed that can be consistently applied will do OK at it. I mean if you land 4 1d4 bleeds on something every round, by turn 4 its like getting a free attack every round in damage. But as I said, that is only going to work on very, very high health stuff that lasts many rounds. It will take *forever* to get there but a bleeding critical setup on a high BAB character with 10-20 critical range(this is what takes a while to earn) can land some really awful amounts of bleeding per turn very quickly. By the time you can do that, though, the game is 3/4 over?

[Soul]

DOTS in this game isnt really effective fast as "I" know....

most combat you want the rounds to be as quick as possible so you take minimal damage mainly....

closest thing to DOTS that IS effective though.... CC....

I mean take the tavern defense fight for instance.... my sorcerer before the fight starts.... runs around to the area outside and plants selective grease spells and selective web spells at the points of entry the enemy spawns in..... then talk to irabeth to trigger the event.... cutscene happens and every single enemy that enters the battle has to roll 2 different saving throws from 2 different spells....

it may not be "damage over time".... but the CC in this game is like "disable over time".... and some of those spells do actually do damage while CCing... winters grasp and sirocco for instance... (winters grasp is NOT a sorcerer spell though unfortunately...)

and if you go azata route with favorable magic it gets even better.... see a group of nasty enemies with that superpower and they gotta roll 2 times for every spell you cast that allows a save.... so hideous laughter with best jokes and greater command halt.... they'd have to roll 2 for both and take worst result...

[MalodorousIntent]

Prophet of Pestilence. It starts with an underwhelming hex, but eventually you're dotting everything for major stat damage. I recommend starting with constitution since the save against the hex is fortitude.

[Konebred]

MORE DOTS MORE DOTS MORE DOTS

[Draken]

Originally posted by Konebred:

MORE DOTS MORE DOTS MORE DOTS

Here:

.............................................................

Sorry, couldn't resists.
But yeah, Prophet of Pestilence should do the trick if you want to slowly wittle the enemies attributes down. Attribute damaging DoTs are probably the best way to go about it.

[jonnin]

if you can land them, attribute to zero is fatal, so while it does no damage it will eventually kill where allowed. Some effects won't take a score to 0/death and many things are immune (undead, bosses) to either disease/poison and/or stat draining. Not sure these scale well. It only takes a few rounds to kill an idiot with an int/wis below 10 or similar for whatever stat you drain but as they approach 20 that 3-4 rounds doubles and its back to what I said earlier where 6+ rounds is too slow.