This is a really generic question but I can start with some very specific one.
With several way to apply a “burning” dot at this time, are they stacking, separated or overriding each other?
For example:
Burning from the Purgatus Staff
Burning from the Flamethrower
Burning from the Ogryn new talent tree (on combat ability for gun lugger)
I’m sure there are others. With no way to check the current active dots on enemies, I’d like to understand if, when playing with friends, we should avoid stacking damage as they override or not.
I don’t know the exact damage numbers, but I believe damage over time stacks to 16, the stacks have independent duration and the damage scales non-linearly.
I assume stacks are tracked per-player (and not globally) since otherwise having multiple Flamers/Purgatus staves would dramatically limit the effectiveness but don’t quote me on that
EDIT: Go read @Flawless posts, they’re more useful than this one
Your assumption is wrong. You can test it with the “Debuff Indicator” mod and the “healthbar” mod…
Each separate dot (burn, bleed, soulblaze) has a separate stack on each enemy, but ALL sources of burn go into the same burn stack, all sources of bleed go into the same bleed stack and all sources of soulblaze go into the same soulblaze stack.
Examples:
A vet throws a bleed grenade at a boss. Then an ogryn starts heavy attacking it, and keeps bleeds on the guy the whole time.
If the ogryn starts applying bleeds, before the bleeds from the veteran grenade have completely run out, the bleed stack still belongs to the veteran (since that player “opened the stack”).
So all of the ogryn’s bleed damage will be counted towards damage dealt by the veteran.
If you ascendant blaze a horde with 1 stack of soulblaze (which does like 5 dmg overall), then i start burning the horde with my staff, all of the soulblaze stacks from my staff will be counted as your damage. You get all the kills.
Each type of dot has a separate stack.
An enemy can have have bleed, burn and soulblaze effects at the same time.
All sources of the same dot (even from multiple players) will feed into the same stack.
If you stack burn or soulblaze on an enemy and then leave it be, all stacks stay on the target for about 7 seconds.
After that delay, the stacks go away one by one.
If you apply a new stack at any time, the decay stops and the window of “stable stacks” is reset.
So with zealot and psyker flamethrowers, you can apply 15-16 stacks of burn/soulblaze to a target and then just tap it every ~6 seconds to prevent stack decay.
Bleed works slightly different.
Bleed is generally applied many stacks at a time, but the stack decay of bleed starts with only 2 seconds delay. So you have to constantly reapply it (or hope that a teammate does it for you) in order to keep a high stack on the enemy.
Well, that’s enlightening. Mechanically, not the most intuitive, but I can understand some reasons why they might approach it this way. Does Burn Damage/+Power scaling depend on the source of the original stack then?
I think my flawed understanding came from primarily using the Kantrael shotgun; I thought the stack duration roughly coincided with the fire rate in that firing a third shot would line up with the duration of the first stacks expiring (so you could only keep 2 shots worth of stacks rolling). Tried it again just now and it all adds up!
Thank you so much for this detailed response, I hate to have to repeat this question so often but with how little is the in-game information I need to ask: Do you have a source for this? or a way to replicate these results with some in game test?
Edit: Sorry! I missed a reply in which you point the mod to see that. Thanks!
