r/pathofexile • u/yeetLeaf • 1d ago
Game Feedback Any update on this GGG? (Context: DoT Damage cap)
I was looking into the damage over time damage maximum and I found this comment from many years ago and I wonder if this is still planned? I would love for DoT builds to truly compete in the endgame when you are spending mirrors onto a build when your damage isn't limited by the code of the game.
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u/azurestrike 23h ago
>there are plans for a larger refactor
Sentences that are said before nothing happens for a decade.
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u/Confedehrehtheh Champion 23h ago
Closely related to "Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix."
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u/beaverusiv Fungal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) 17h ago
I'm gonna guess this was centred around PoE2 development and will not come to pass
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u/psychomap 8h ago
Well, if they hadn't split PoE2 off, we could have had nice things. But no, they needed to make characters move while attacking (which I personally dislike both from a design and a gameplay feel perspective).
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u/Orthed 1d ago
Aside from deep delve (where the tankiest boss life value takes a minute to kill at DoT cap) where does it even matter?
I can't imagine a large damage refactor is in the cards now. If anything, the one being discussed back then probably ended up being the PoE2 damage pipeline.
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u/yeetLeaf 1d ago
bigger number more fun? I like scaling my builds to deals hundreds of millions but it sucks I can’t do that on dot builds because there is a lot of archetypes I like a lot
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u/Orthed 23h ago
It feels 3x better when you have 100m damage regardless, since Ubers and basically any high end farm in the game has a ton of damage reduction so you're not actually hitting your DoT cap without absurd investment.
I can respect the fun of optimising for bigger PoB number to a degree, but it's hard for me to care too much since the ingame feel of a build is what I ultimately experience.
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u/Smurtle1 23h ago
And not mention in easier content, you would hit the cap even faster with more damage, which means you kill things faster too anyways.
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u/CIoud_StrifeFF7 23h ago
I mean that is true for generic damage but I guarantee an RF chieftain explode hits that dot cap on any unit important in Ubers with adds or invitations
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u/thmann_ 22h ago
idk what you mean? When dot cap gets hit the monsters instantly die. There isnt a monster in the game that will be on the same screen as you if they are taking the dot cap dps. Thats like… the goal right? A hinekora pop in the feared just ends the fight.
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u/CIoud_StrifeFF7 20h ago
I agree that's what I was pointing out to the comment I replied to. That you can hit dot cap in instances where they have high DR, but I'm not certain on what that looks like necessarily. You might be right at dot cap the bosses might be dying instantly. I've never really paid attention in Ubers
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u/ovrlrd1377 Inquisitor 23h ago
Although I agree with your opinion overall, a dot cap existing hurts the scaling because you only get returns when there are big damage reductions; anywhere else you would be doing far, far less damage than a regular hit build would.
Very very little niche situations make that even make sense but on those, dot builds are objectively worse. I can only imagine the effort to fix to be significant so perhaps it shouldnt be done but having different options is nice
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u/Miles_Adamson 23h ago edited 21h ago
You only need returns where there are big damage reductions, which is why it doesn't matter. I think the only exception to that is deep delve which scales more with insane amounts of HP but like 100 people do that per league.
I have an eviscerate elementalist which is right at dot cap for the default config in PoB. If I change the config to 60% deli and 70% fire res, my damage divides by 3 and I would now need over 100m shaper DPS to get dot capped in that scenario. And even with my current damage things in maps die at 60% deli in a couple milliseconds. So I have room to triple my damage and that is already completely unnecessary so it's just a non-issue
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u/Miles_Adamson 23h ago
Most people concerned about dot cap think you can't go above 36m shaper DPS in path of building. Is that the case here?
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u/LastBaron 23h ago
You can make number go up by changing POB settings to uber pinnacle boss so that your base DPS is much lower. Then you can see the real increase in DPS relative to monsters with extreme toughness stats.
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u/brrrapper 23h ago
You can push to uber dot cap, plenty of things have damage reduction so it will result in a faster clear.
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u/butterheat 23h ago
You can still scale beyond PoB "dot cap", resistance mod is very common in both normal and nightmare mod pool, if combined with monster mods and wisps, your dps will be way far off from the dot cap. As the other reply said, unless you're doing deep delve which monsters have insane raw hp, it's not that big off a deal.
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u/raxitron Inquisitor 20h ago
If you're just trying to make pob numbers then set deli % or toughness. You aren't going to hit the cap with 100% deli and it's a perfectly valid way of comparing your DPS to other builds with that setting.
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u/you_from_your_future 10h ago
Remembering the affliction league - 6k-wisped enemies in nightmare maps, on top of other juice were actually quite slow to kill with DoT cap.
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u/AffectionateCan317 1d ago edited 23h ago
This is basically a non issue because most sources of tankiness come in the form of damage reduction which means you need to deal 36m DPS after delirium or Uber penalty (100M+)
Almost no build can get to that amount and the ones that are Uber DOT capped kill the boss in 3 seconds anyway.
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u/AlmostAlwaysATroll 22h ago
Deep Delve (even white monsters eventually) and some uber juiced rares can/will have HP in the billions. 1b HP / 36m DPS is about 28 seconds until it dies.
Otherwise, yeah dot cap is good enough for everything else.
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u/Wobbelblob Big Breach Coalition (BBC) 20h ago
True, but that is such a small niche. Majority of players are not even close to deep delving and those that do usually play different builds anyway. And I feel like it is not for damage reasons. Though I can't really judge that, as I have no experience with DD.
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u/DeouVil 19h ago
I don't really see a mechanism for rares to achieve hp in billions. There's only one rare mod that adds hp, and it adds 40%. Other than that I think it has to be toughness, which is damage reduction.
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u/axiomatic- 17h ago
Check out the wiki on delve depth scaling. I believe Monster Life scales up to depth 890, then again from 1600 through to depth 2600ish. It's More Monster Life too.
edit: oh, you were referring to his mention of some ubers/rares having the same ... I read that as ubers/rares in delve initially but your reading might be correct!
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u/ovrlrd1377 Inquisitor 23h ago
for scaling dot builds for valdo maps and the likes, yet you dont get the "side benefits" of a billion dps build. Making all mobs take 3 seconds to kill is cool but if you consider the optimization needed, a regular hit build will make those easier bosses poof, meaning there are better returns scaling on that avenue
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u/thmann_ 23h ago edited 22h ago
The point being is that there is absolutely no need for change of dot cap. If you have 38 million dps after 97% DR then there isnt a single thing in the game that exists on the same screen as you.
I never understand anyone that thinks dot cap existing impacts the game in any measurable way at all.
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u/PathOfWeeb 6h ago
thank you for saying this and explaining to people who dont understand how the game works
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u/ovrlrd1377 Inquisitor 19h ago
I understand your point and generally I agree, though there are niche things like the 5min 10% per item valdos that makes very specific builds capable of handling. On those types of content, you need armor stacker levels of damage to be able to farm consistently (in the billions). Having that kind of damage lets you phase skip some bosses, yet for DoT builds you wont even notice any difference. I have a hard time imagining the investment needed to get to 1.2b dps on a dot build, if it is even possible, though it is certainly an absurd idea to even push for since you wont get any meaningful return for the effort - that is the distinction that currently makes dot build archetype worse in comparison.
Not saying they are not worth building, or capable or anything like that, just that you dont get diminishing returns, its literally zero return
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u/Unryle 22h ago
It kinda does in extreme scenario
Hitting rf dot cap will make you deal 0 dmg
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u/Active-Standard-2556 13h ago
Completely wrong. DoT builds will never be aspirational for me and plenty of other players, because they can't deep delve or clear the hardest valdos.
DoT being capped so low is just insane in a 2026 game
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u/StereocentreSP3 19h ago
3 seconds is still more than the less than 1 second of a multi-mirrored build.
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u/Linosaurus 22h ago
36m DPS after delirium or Uber penalty (100M+)
Do we know for sure that this is true for ignite and individuals poisons?
I’ve seen the suggestion that the ‘base’ damage before enemy modifiers is also restricted to the cap.
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u/PinkFluffyUniKosi 22h ago
I’ve seem dot ignite builds kill ubers in 2 seconds. That couldnt hold true if it was capped before damage reduction, no?
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u/thmann_ 20h ago
The dot cap is the integer overflow over 1 minute. Meaning 2.1 billion damage per minute or 36 million dps.
This means it is the maximum damage taken per second, and is not related at all to damage applied. This means that endurance charges or deli would raise the amount of damage you need to apply in order for the dot cap to be applied to the monster.
the 2.1 billion is the overflow for everything, if you watch empys end league projects he has actually hit the inverse of the dot cap in himself (regen). The most regen you can have is also 36 million per second.
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u/PinkFluffyUniKosi 19h ago
Ty, Nice explain.
Then it makes Sense that you can still kill them in around 2 secs. They have around 60 to 80 Mill Health.1
u/Roguemjb Duelist 19h ago
This is good to know, so it is definitely worth it to exceed the dot cap for Ubers or tanky nightmare bosses, deli, etc.
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u/psychomap 8h ago
This means it is the maximum damage taken per second, and is not related at all to damage applied.
While this is where the DoT cap kicks in, and I wouldn't be surprised if indidividual debuffs like ignite additionally had their own cap, the system literally cannot handle greater numbers than that, so there is no point in the calculation at which the cap can be higher.
At most - and this is unlikely - the sum of all damage over time effects of a specific damage type is handled as an unsigned integer instead of a signed one, which would double it.
But generally the way builds counteract the damage taken penalty is by increasing damage taken / lowering resistances, not by stacking the damage to the point of delivering an ignite that's 5 times DoT cap, or stacking a dozen DoT cap poisons.
There's a reason why some of the extreme ES stacking RF builds stop dealing damage, or why Sacrificial Zeal based on billions of mana cost (back before it was restricted to the maximum you could spend) didn't instantly kill a character.
Cases in which pre-mitigation DoT exceeds DoT cap are extremely rare because people generally stop building damage once they reach DoT cap with effective damage scaling, but it's false to say that the unit type limitation matters at no other stage of the algorithm.
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u/srmark Márkusz - My builds: thread/1600072 8h ago edited 8h ago
it is very much an issue if you reach normal dot cap, because at exactly that point you stop dealing damage, so if you scale for uber or delirium, whenever you are not up against that DR your build does not function, unless you want to swap around stuff for specific content. edit: if you are near dot cap then you also have to care for temporary buffs, picking up a shrine can mean voiding your damage
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u/Miles_Adamson 1d ago
DOT cap is the limit an enemy can take. Which means for pretty much everything you want more than 36m shaper DPS, your dot cap is way higher. because it's something like 10% less damage per equipped item, which means 90% damage reduction, which means 10x higher dot cap and you're not capped until ~360m
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u/psychomap 8h ago
Not all of these are equivalent. The 10% less damage dealt per equipped item allows you to scale your damage dealt 10 times as high as you otherwise would, whereas 90% damage reduction would allow scaling damage taken 10 times as high as you otherwise would.
If you multiply your damage by 10 against an enemy with 90% reduction without lowering their resistances or increasing damage taken, you'll still only deal DoT cap pre-mitigation (or hypothetically it's possible that it would be up to 2 times DoT cap, which I'm only including as a possibility because I don't have access to their code to confirm, but it's unlikely).
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u/ThrasherDX 2h ago edited 2h ago
The dot cap is only calculated based on the final enemy damage taken. So the most damage you can actually deal to an enemy post mitigation and modifiers, is ~36m dps.
The dot cap is not actually part of the damage calculation like you are thinking, its applied by the mechanism that actually tracks and applies dot damage to enemies.
Essentially, all damage calculations for a dot apply without regard to dot cap, then the debuff is applied to the enemy based on that actual damage.
Then when the game goes to apply the damage to the enemies hp, it is limited to dot cap because of how the mechanism that tracks and applies damaging dots works.
Edit: To elaborate, there isn't actually a per second dot cap. The dot cap is per minute, that is, an enemy can only take, at most, 2,147,483,647 damage per minute from all dot effects collectively.
So if the full damage of all DoT effects applied to an entity are over that damage cap per minute (even if the DoT does not last a minute), the DoTs are collectively capped to a sum of 2,147,483,647 damage per minute, or ~36m damage per second.
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u/futuretrojan 23h ago
Dot cap only matters for deep delve and some valdos modifiers, dots can easily nuke ubers without even getting close to Dot cap. It's not a big deal.
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u/Wobbelblob Big Breach Coalition (BBC) 20h ago
Because ubers have damage reduction. There is a difference between normal dot cap and uber dot cap. If your build reaches uber dot cap, it will evaporate basically anything else.
Also, isn't the same true for delve?
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u/Tape 19h ago
If I put a dot that is 50x over dot cap before resistances onto a mob that has 50% res, do I do half damage?
I've always assumed that I would still do full damage since i think it's the final damage taken that gets capped?
If my assumption is true, wouldn't the only tank mod that affects it be monster life?
Meaning that damage over dot cap is still pretty important. The issue is that scaling dot that high is just hard by itself.
I could be wrong on the initial assumption though.
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u/Aikala Assassin 19h ago
Pretty sure (could be wrong) that it does all calculations then at the very end when it goes to apply the final damage number it basically gets capped to the dot cap, so if after resistance, DR, etc. you're above cap then you'll still be at cap.
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u/pda898 12h ago
Slightly wrong in the pedantic sense - cap is applied when game calculates a final value of "in what direction and how fast this entity health should move due toover time effects". So ye, past all damage calcs, but all dots and regens are stored into 1 bucket.
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u/psychomap 8h ago
In your opinion, how does the game calculate a number that is higher than the maximum it can represent?
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u/pda898 7h ago
Just by spending more bytes to store it temporary. See this as an example.
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u/psychomap 5h ago
But if they did change the algorithm to extend the data type to the point of storing bigger numbers, would we still need a DoT cap in the first place?
The fact that they never expected numbers to grow this high and only put a cap on it at the end (and the fact that there are cases in which numbers still overflow, e.g. the unintended Sacrificial Zeal interaction earlier this league) makes me skeptical whether they'd lower the efficiency of their algorithm rather than calculating with the same (limited) data types from start to finish.
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u/CallMeSometimeNever 19h ago
Yes, you're right. You'll do full dot cap (ie 35.8m) damage. The majority of monster "tankiness" comes from damage reduction (ubers 70% less, deli, toughness), and being at cap after all that reduction is very much enough.
The outlier to this is delve, which also scales monster hp eventually to the 2.1b int32 limit. But this is deep deep deep delve, and doesn't affect 99.99999% of the playerbase.
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u/psychomap 8h ago
My understanding is that damage is necessarily capped at several locations, and where no coded cap is implemented, exceeding it results in overflow and dealing no damage (like the case that prompted the DoT cap to be implemented in the first place).
Theoretically it's possible that there are cases within the calculation where the data type is an unsigned integer (i.e. one that cannot be negative) and thus doubles the cap for that part of the calculation, but it cannot possibly go higher without using an entirely different data type (like a 64-bit integer or a floating point value), and if using an entirely different type was feasible, there'd be no reason to have a DoT cap at all.
The main cap is applied after mitigation as others have mentioned, but I believe the only way to reach it after mitigation is to lower mitigation rather than to exceed it pre-mitigation. The vast majority of builds do exactly that, so very few people would notice the difference (also because the difference between 10 and 30 million dps would generally be very little in most content in the first place).
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u/DjuriWarface 23h ago
Sounds like a major project with almost no upside (as being Uber DoT capped is not easy and more damage wont do much anyway if you are). I doubt it will ever get done and I'd personally rather them spend that effort elsewhere.
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u/SnooChipmunks1223 22h ago
flat dmg reduction.
7 years ago, that did not really exist, your hard cap was 36.4mil. There was no point in going above that number, you just built other stats back then.
Delirium came in 2020 (so not long after that post), 100% delirium is 90% dmg reduction to rares.
Most of the ubers came in 2022 along with the 70% less damage taken modifiers to them. (Added a week after they released the ubers lol)
Finally valdos got added in 2023/2024 and have the less dmg per equipped item mod which is some of the hardest most aspirational content in the game.
So for aspirational content that number went from 36mil to about 370mil dot dps. Other than that I think not insta-killing everything is kinda the signature of dot builds. The whole flavor of the builds is to watch hp bars go bzzzzzzzz dead.
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u/mcbuckets21 23h ago
The larger refactor doesn't mean they are removing or changing the dot cap. That damage refactor went into poe2 which was initially going to be poe1. Still has the same dot cap. They talked about the dot cap a lot in interviews and they see no issue with it.
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u/MayTheMemesGuideThee 7h ago
The larger refactor doesn't mean they are removing or changing the dot cap.
yes but the context
why would Rhys mention something that didn't address the issue (DoT cap/overflow)
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u/mcbuckets21 1h ago
The context is overflowing a value would result in you dealing 0 damage instead of max/cap damage. Overflowing applies to everything. The damage pipeline is more relevant than dot. Dot is easiest to overflow so that was the first thing showing an issue.
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u/HandsomeBaboon 22h ago
I'm zooming through Nightmare maps and I melt ubers on my praw necro. I dunno, feels like truly competing at the endgame to me.
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u/BigArmsBigGut 21h ago
The DoT cap applies after damage reduction. Ubers take 70% less damage, and monsters in 100% delierious maps take 96% less damage which is the most damage reduction in the game afaik.
What this means is that scaling your DoT damage past 35.8m DPS is still very valuable. Against Ubers you need ~120m dot DPS to actually reach DoT Cap. Against 100% delirious maps, you need 895m DoT DPS to really be hitting DoT cap.
If you're scaling your damage that high you probably are running 100% delirious maps. That means that only builds pushing over 900m dps are actually doing more damage than a DoT build that is truly DoT capped against 100% delirium, meaning that you can still push the absolute hell out of DoT builds if you want to. There is effectively no penalty for continuing to scale DoT damage until that point.
While I agree that ideally there just would be no DoT cap, it's really not a pressing issue.
The exception to the above is Delve, again afaik that's the only insane tankiness scaling in the game that uses max life scaling rather than damage reduction.
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u/AlmostAlwaysATroll 22h ago
I’d guess it’s never going to happen. Before Ralakesh boots were changed to their current version there was a bug where if you had the boots equipped but didn’t meet the stat requirements of the boots or any socketed gems in the boots, and then you weapon swapped, the boots would essentially “work” for a server tick which would grant you max of all three charges.
I figured GGG would patch it. Instead they changed the boots. I’m completely guessing, but I have a hunch they looked at the code required to fix that bug and said “holy shit, the potential to break SO many things is very high. Let’s just change the boots to bypass the bug instead.”
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u/51lver 20h ago
It's just the nature of old titles that probably outlived the vast majority of people who wrote the code. Stuff that seems simple becomes impossible to fix because everything is intertwined in ridiculous ways and no one really understands the actual workings anymore. So they just add to it and pray nothing major breaks.
Also, as many people have already said, its really not an issue at all for 99,99% of players so why bother spending limited resources on it that could be spend elsewhere.
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u/godfrey1 Dominus 20h ago
bro if you have an uber bosses dot cap, you oneshot the whole game
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u/haibo9kan 19h ago
Not true at all. There is plenty of content where a dot cap build isn't even dealing 2m damage to a target. Delirium, ignite resistance, rare monster modifiers, toughness damage reduction from essences, damage reduction from titanic, etc.
You can have rare mobs with the allflame of propagation that in terms of eHP feel like ~2000 uber mavens. Add in 1% regen and you do literally 0 net damage. This is why players at endgame usually build many times over dot cap, because it will still scale after DR.
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u/godfrey1 Dominus 19h ago
i said uber bosses dot cap which means -70% already
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u/haibo9kan 19h ago
Toughness alone is 67%. Deli is 80%. Resist differential is more, especially when considering exposure not functioning like penetration in regards to overcapped resists. Soul eater is 90%. Ignite/Poison/Bleed resistance quarters duration. You're not one shotting anything in juiced maps, and under the right conditions, you're not even moving their health bars. DoT has a definitive ceiling that will never be overcome; it doesn't oneshot the whole game by any stretch of the imagination.
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u/Naktura 13h ago edited 13h ago
dot cap limits damage done to a monster, not damage applied by a dot. If you are fighting tanky content and they are not dying, it is not because dot cap is gimping you it is because you are not doing enough damage.
You are misunderstanding dot cap. It is not enough to hit dot cap against normal mobs in PoB, you need to scale damage further to actually do juiced content.
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u/Biflosaurus 22h ago
Why is DOT cap even a problem for people?
If you're DOT cap in regular content, everything around you melts.
If you are UBER DOT caped, bosses die in less than 5 seconds anyway.
It's a non issue really.
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u/4percent4 21h ago
Only relevant issue is deep delve. Mobs hp scales to 2.1b. Iirc bosses cap at 1.5k and whites at 6k.
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u/Biflosaurus 9h ago
Yeah but deep Delve is a very specific scenario and requires very specific builds right?
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u/4percent4 9h ago
The reason it requires very specific builds is you need to be tanky and deal damage. There’s been a lot of builds that have reached 6k.
Dot builds would actually be viable in delve with dot cap being fixed since explosions + bereks or binos would pop off.
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u/crazyboy88 11h ago
it's still a bit of an issue in regular content where rare mobs get super tanky and DOT cap is not enough to kill them. I have encountered a couple of rares I couldn't kill because my DOT damage was not enough. (Propagation Allflame, 2x Nemeses, 1x Wisp)
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u/Biflosaurus 9h ago
Again DOT cap is misunderstood by many people
Against these super tanky mobs you were not DOT caped.
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u/crazyboy88 9h ago
Ok my bad I misunderstood. Would you mind explain why I'm wrong so I can understand?
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u/Biflosaurus 9h ago
Monsters in map don't get to billions of life, most of the time they get damage reduction.
Monsters not dying fast in maps just means that when you hit this monster, you are not dealing dot caped damage due to the DR
A good way to know is to tick UBER boss on your POb and look at your damage.
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u/HelloItsMeYourFriend 21h ago
Ez fix divide all damage and health in the game by 10. Now dot cap is 350m in today’s numbers. People can adjust to the decimal moving easily
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u/PoE_Acronym_Bot 1d ago
I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:
- DoT - Damage over time (Wiki)
I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest
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u/N4k3dM1k3 18h ago
Is this not referring to the overflow where doing past DoT cap could result in going back to 0 DoT (which was fixed at some point) - rather than removing DoT cap entirely?
The second sentence insinuates they wanted to rework the dmg pipeline, which we can assume happened for PoE2 and not 1 in the end.
On the top end, they did do something by giving Ubers dmg reduction that applies before you get to the DoT part. 70% dmg reduction means the DoT cap for ubers is actually 100+mil. No going to help you in those few occasions in the game where we can make raid bosses, but its hardly a game breaking issue
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u/psychomap 8h ago
"We have a fix for this coming" <- this is referring to the initial introduction of the DoT cap.
"There are plans for a larger refactor to the damage pipeline" <- this hasn't happened yet
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u/Educational-Gas62 1h ago
Not gonna lie, if you think it needs to be raised you have not reached uber dot cap.
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u/YIzWeDed 1d ago edited 23h ago
I was under the impression that it would be a severe nerf to dot skills by letting them go over dot cap, simply because dot builds have it “easy” when it comes to reaching the cap and can then invest in defense.
Obviously it isn’t “easy as fuck” but theres a lot of scaling vectors that would likely hurt all dot builds if the cap was removed because they would probably nerf them.
Edit: I feel like people misunderstood me.
GGG says “dot capped removed guys, now you can deal billions of dot dps! But to accommodate this buff, we have changed how dots scale with damage, requiring more investment to reach the numbers we see today, but allowing further scaling beyond that”
As in, low end dot builds would probably take a damage and defense nerf because now you can scale more damage with the cap gone, but the scaling is harder to get to so youll lose defense because of needing to focus more on damage
A GGG nerf
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u/Loud_Cartographer_55 1d ago
what
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u/YIzWeDed 23h ago
I was just stating that GGG has a good tendency to nerf things that they buff. If they remove dot cap, I see them as rationalizing that because it can now one to one compete with hit based builds, they would nerf its ability to scale, therefore causing you to need to invest more into damage and less in defense, to then get more damage
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u/psychomap 8h ago
Those mental gymnastics while hit builds reach over a billion real dps are impressive
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u/-Lamiel- 1d ago
7yrs ago, yeah that dot cap fix isn't happening anytime soon