Ah I wasn’t sure from your original wording, thanks for clarifying. I do hope a Dev responds and clarifies but double the dot damage doesn’t seem outlandish compared to double the uses (though obviously the bigger explosion radius muddies the comparison somewhat).
Just another case where consistently putting actual numbers in the talent descriptions would go a long way. If it’s meant to double the dot damage don’t know why they can’t just say “double” in the description
I queried this and our designer does recall Kaboom being buffed in this way a good while ago, and that they assume it’s intended - but, that it would be ideal if all burns did the same damage so that it was easier to understand. It’s something we’ll need to dig into in the future.
I think having different burn sources provide different burn damage is good game design. It allows for the benefit of some sources to be in things other than damage, and for other sources benefit to be increased damage. For example, the benefit of burnout is in the absurd mobility, stagger, and amount of enemies you can light on fight with a single ult. Burnout is much less mobile, can’t stagger as many enemies (and can only stagger bosses a single time, making ledging harder), and can’t light as many enemies on fire. Its benefit is that the enemies you do light on fire die significantly quicker than with burnout. Burnout is already the stronger pick just because of the utility and versatility while also still having significant damage, making kaboom do the same damage as burnout would remove the one thing that kaboom has going for it.
A similar thing goes for the different staves and melee weapons. Almost all melee weapons have the same burn ticks because they are similarly equally easy to apply and apply to the same amounts of enemies. Beam staffs beam can only be applied to a single enemy and has its damage ramp up over time, and so has the single highest burn tick in the game. Flamestorm has a long charge up, leaving you vulnerable both while charging and firing, and so has a very high burn damage (though less than beam as it hits a lot of enemies). I can go on, the balancing of the staves is dependent on many things, and the damage of the burn they apply is an important dial that can be turned to change where each staffs strengths and weaknesses lie.
Could the damage numbers be simplified so it’s a little easier to follow? Maybe. Should the variability be removed entirely? Definitely not
Damage per tick? Damage per second? Ticks per second?
Homogenizing how burn works seems like strange thing to do at this point but if you are going to put in an effort to do so then I think it’d be better to make all the burns have the same tick rate per second and adjust their damage per tick to fit in line with current DPS values. I think it’s easier for people to understand different DOT sources if the damage number displayed was simply different while having the same tick rates (like lots of other games do) instead of different DOTs having the same damage while having different tick rates which cannot be easily visualized and is more difficult to grasp without external measuring tools.
