Much like other weapon types, the deepwood staff’s card has a handful of keywords stating its intended function. In this case it’s “Sniper, Crowd Control, Damage Over Time”. However, as far as I can tell, it has no innate damage over time effect; while other weapons with the Damage Over Time tag, such as the hagbane bow, the dual daggers, and Sienna’s crowbill, fire sword, and dagger, without exception do.
I initially thought it might be the secondary fire that did some small amount of DoT, since the primary certainly doesn’t; but lifting enemies gives me no damage tick indicator (as usually appears with DoT) and also doesn’t trigger the blue crosshair kill indicator (from the mod) when the enemy dies (as i’d expect if i’d done any damage to it). Is there some kind of secret alternate-alternate fire mode that i’m missing, or is this just a text bug?
Better descriptor would be Rapid Fire although Damage Over Time should make sense for such a class.
Each projectile should trigger some poison or bleed damage effect. So you could essentially try and spread the shots in a cone in order to cause damage over time to multiple enemies in front of you.
If having the weapon actually deal DoT makes it seem to be more “op” then perhaps using the crowd control should cause a higher amount of charge build up but the weapon itself should vent at a faster pace. So rapid use of the alt fire would be harder and you’d have to pace yourself while the primary attack would be a little more useful.
It can bleed with crits and its very good at special killing if you roll the talent tree that way. Don’t think it should be avaliable for it otherwise.
The staff itself does not provide any kind of DoT I believe, so it’s most likely an oversight. It’s possible that the staff was initially designed to have DoT, yet the feature got removed but not the description.