Over the last couple of weeks we've discussed upcoming changes to our Damage Over Time systems in three posts: Development Manifesto Part 1, Part 2 and a follow up that answered some of your questions. We've assembled a fourth post that addresses more of your questions about these changes.

Will we be able to see the effect of modifiers on damage ailments somewhere on our character information?

You will be able to see how much Bleeding, Ignite, and/or Poison damage a skill can inflict when looking at that skill's information in the character panel.

How will Damage over Time work with Damage Conversion?

Much the same as it does now. Damage over Time cannot be converted, but damage conversion effects will apply to base hit damage for Bleeding, Ignite and Poison before that damage is scaled by applicable modifiers. This means a skill like Molten Strike will still be able to ignite with Fire Damage that was converted from Physical Damage, but converting Fire Damage to Chaos Damage won't change the type of damage over time dealt by an Ignite.

In addition, cases where base damage of one type can cause a damaging ailment that deals a different type of damage will be treated similarly to conversion with regard to damage modifiers.

This means that if you have the unique item "The Three Dragons", so that you Ignite with Cold Damage, rather than Fire Damage, when hitting an enemy with Cold Damage, the hit will be affected by Cold Damage modifiers, while the resulting Ignite will be affected by modifiers to Cold or Fire Damage, because it's dealing Fire Damage from base Cold Damage - this is pretty much the same as converting damage from Cold to Fire, such as with the support gem.

Will monster bleeds remain the same? Will Map Mods like Increased Monster Damage still be able to double dip?

Monsters will use the same system as players for Bleed, Poison and Ignite, just with different damage values. This means that in some cases, these Damage over Time effects could be more dangerous, as player mitigation won't apply to both the hit and then the resultant damage over time effect. It will also mean that Monster damage increases and multipliers from map mods and other effects will not double dip. Because of these changes that work both in players' favour and against them in different situations, we may be adjusting monster ailment damage further during the Beta.

A melee physical based attack build using the poison gem will now no longer have their increased melee physical damage bonuses applied to the poison, meaning the poison will be doing significantly less damage. Does this mean that trying to use poison on any build invested in physical damage is not worth the investment?

Technically, those modifiers never applied directly to poison, they only applied to the hit. This then had an effect on the base damage of the poison because that was the final hit damage. Those modifiers will still apply only to the hit, as before, but since the poison is no longer based on the hit's final damage, they won't change the poison's base damage any more.

This means that if you have taken no weapon clusters or supports that benefit the poison damage, the poison damage will indeed be lower. However, in the Beta, many weapon clusters will have large modifiers to Bleeding or Poison damage on them, in addition to their other effects, so you will have some natural increases to Bleeding or Poison Damage by directing yourself to those clusters, while still increasing your physical hit damage.

The intent is that poison becomes a deliberate choice that you've chosen to invest in, especially as we intend to add some more special effects that reward you in ways other than direct damage.

Does poison being an Ailment now mean that Critical Strikes with Chaos Damage cause Poison now?

No. Poison and Bleeding are both still caused in the same ways as before. Being ailments doesn't mean they are caused by critical strikes - Chill has always been an ailment caused by cold damage hits rather than critical strikes.

The properties that all ailments share are that they're usually applied by a hit, and in some way scaled by damage of that hit, and that they aren't Skill Effects, and are thus unaffected by Skill Effect Duration.

Poison and Bleeding already met the first criteria, and the change to make them ailments makes them follow the second one. It also means that all three Damage over Time effects that come from the base damage of hits (Bleeding, Ignite, and Poison) are the same type of mechanic, making it easier to have modifiers that apply to them.

Are these new item modifiers going to make it much harder to roll a good Rare item for players that don't care about Damage Ailments?

We're going to be looking at how this affects items during the Beta, and adjusting mod chances accordingly.

Will poison still have a base duration of 2 seconds?

Yes, other than on Viper Strike.

If you have an item like "The Red Trail" that gives you a chance to bleed when hit, does that count as the monster applying the bleed, or the player? Whose modifiers does it use?

The monster applies the bleeding, you're just giving them a chance to do so. It will use the same modifiers as any other bleeding would have if caused by that hit against you.

Will there be any changes to the bleed-related passives in the gladiator ascendancy i.e. Gratuitous Violence and Blood in the Eyes? If so can you divulge any details?

These are the kind of balance adjustments that we'll be making during the beta, once we've all had a chance to experiment with builds extensively.

How are "with Attacks" and "with Attack Skills" stats different from each other now? How do they interact with damage over time?

Previously, we had some modifiers to attack damage which said things like "increased Fire Damage with Attacks". This description has always been inaccurate, because it doesn't apply to all damage dealt by attacks, since there are some cases (such as the explosion of Infernal Blow) where attacks deal non-attack damage as well as their standard attack damage.

Since these cases were so rare, changing that description was not a high priority compared to other things we could do. However, the changes to damaging ailments in Fall of Oriath meant we needed to add new modifiers that do apply to all damage dealt by attacks, so we needed to make that change. The pre-existing modifiers that claimed to increase "Damage with Attacks" will now correctly say they increase "Attack Damage". The newly-introduced modifiers that have already been discussed will say they increase "Damage with Attack Skills", and will apply to all damage dealt by an attack, even if it isn't attack damage.

Why are you making this change, instead of leaving poison/bleed/ignite based on hit damage and just making them only able to scale on damage over time and poison/bleed/burning modifiers and nothing else (not even generic damage) while ignoring resistances?

The first reason is that (apart from ignoring resistances) this suggestion is how Ignite in PoE's very early days used to work, and it resulted in large amounts of negative player feedback, and proved very tricky for new players to understand. The fact that Ignite dealt "Fire Damage" (over time), but was not affected by "increased Fire Damage" confused a lot of players, and caused a fair bit of anger from players who discovered it after playing for a long time under the assumption that modifiers to "Fire Damage" would affect all "Fire Damage". Adding on to that, a property of Damage over Time ignoring resistances would cause a lot more unintuitive situations on top of that. If a player is on fire, and uses their Ruby Flask to boost their Fire Resistance, they'll expect that to work, and rightly so.

The second reason is that doing what you describe isn't as simple to apply, or to understand, as people assume. An Ignite might come from a hit that deals fire damage, and thus has already been affected by modifiers to fire damage. It might come from a hit that deals no fire damage, and thus has had no fire damage modifiers applied (for example, if using The Three Dragons). It might come from a hit that dealt no fire damage, but did have fire damage applied to it because that non-fire damage was converted from fire damage. It could be that all three for different parts of the damage, and the final hit values (which are all the old system had to apply an ignite with) cannot be used to reverse-engineer that information, because it doesn't know what damage types things used to be. It simply isn't possible from those final damage values to work out which modifiers have applied to them.

The third reason is that this change brings things more in line with how a lot of mechanics in Path of Exile already work, which keeps things simple, rather than introducing new special cases. Molten Strike, for example, uses the same base damage for the melee hit and the projectile explosions, but different modifiers apply to each. Some modifiers apply to both (Fire Damage, Attack Damage), some apply only to the Melee Hit (Melee Damage), some apply only to the projectiles (Projectile Damage, Area Damage).

Under this new system, the hit and Ignite (or Bleeding/Poison) of a skill are both calculated from the same base with different sets of modifiers in exactly the same way that the melee and projectile hits of Molten Strike already are. Many players are already used to understanding these calculations for skills such as Molten Strike, Wild Strike, Shock Nova, Earthquake, and many others. Making Bleeding, Ignite, and Poison work more like existing skill mechanics is preferable to making them work even more differently.

Is there going to be any interaction between the inbuilt damage multiplier of skills and the DoT for poison/bleed/ignite? As an example, if I ran a skill with a reduced base damage (like spectral throw), would I do less damage than a skill with higher base damage (like heavy strike)?

In the Fall of Oriath Beta, we're changing the stat that is described on skills as "Deals x% of Base Attack Damage" to specifically apply to the base damage; Previously, it was a multiplicative damage modifier similar to what you'd find on a support gem, just presented differently. This meant it actually scaled all damage, not just base damage.

In future it will correctly modify the base damage. In addition, most attack skills will also have a Damage Effectiveness multiplier as many spells do, so that added damage such as from the Added Chaos Damage Support will be modified separately, since this Base Damage modifier will no longer be applying to it. Because Damaging Ailments are based on the base and added damage of the skill, this means that the Base Damage modifier and the Damage Effectiveness will correctly affect the ailment damage. As a result Spectral Throw would apply a smaller bleeding or poison than a Heavy Strike.

Will Wither increase the damage taken by enemies from poison? Will chaos damage nodes still apply to poison?

Yes, both of these things will still apply.

As a result of these changes, I infer that minions will still benefit from poison double dipping, is this correct?

No. No damage modifiers will double-dip for Bleeding, Poison or Ignite. Since those were the only Damage over Time effects that did double-dip, this means no Damage over Time effects in the game will double-dip any more.

How will Flameblast's "more spell damage for each stage" interact with ignite? Will the ignite be based on the first stage of flameblast or the stage it was released?

We will be changing Flameblast's "more spell damage for each stage" stat to a generic "more damage for each stage" stat that also affects the ignite.