» Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:20 pm So I was going through the esohead build calculator trying to make a decent dragon knight build when I stumbled upon a skill that caught my attention. Unstable Flame IV (morph of Searing Strike): Deals 14 flame damage and deals 56 flame damage over 8.5 seconds. Damage increases by 12% every 2 seconds.
At first this seemed fine; albeit good, especially for it's low magicka cost. However, continuing down the Ardent Flame tree, I saw 2 other passive skills: Kindling (Increases burning effect by 66%) and Searing Heat (Increases Searing Strike duration by 2 seconds).
This seemed really powerful so I decided to run a few calculations. Unstable flame IV DoT deals a base of 56 damage over 8.5 seconds, meaning it deals about 6.59 dps. This means that with the Kindling bonus, it deals 10.93 dps. The Searing Heat bonus increases the burn duration to 10.5 seconds, meaning the total damage here is increased to 114.68. Since were talking about the morphed version, we need to add in the compounded +12% per 2 second bonus, so we really end up with 21.86+(21.86(1.12))+(21.86(1.12^2))+(21.86(1.12^3))+(21.86(1.12^4))+8.6 which comes out to 143.79 damage over 10.5 seconds. When you add in the initial 14 damage we get a whopping 157.79 damage at the cost of just 18 magicka.
Somebody check my math, but that seems absolutely absurd; no other skill comes even close to that. Even the Nightblade assassination skills, which everyone proclaims are the best single-target dps in the game, don't come anywhere close to that amount of damage.
My question is what am I missing here? Does regular damage scale massively while DoT remains constant? Why does nobody seem to care that one of the lowest-costing skills does this much base damage, without factoring in any other bonuses? I R CONFUSED. D:
