Great guide.
Just watched it and learned a couple things I did not know, even though I thought I had everything figured out about ailments and a solid grasp of the game.

Things like this are needed in the community especially when the game is new and some people sometimes give misinformation about game mechanics.

good video, i dont think u missed anything, certainly not that i am aware of. you explain it all very well. i think anyone asking about dots from now on we just link them to that video xD

do you think when it comes to deeper endgame its ever worth being a pure dot build? ive been playing a lot with dot setups in the offline mode, just trying to wrap my head around the games mechanics while theyre still fixing the issues. my thinkings kind of gone along the lines that the 'time which cannot heal' node ticks off hit damage, crit is such a good damage scaler, now theyve fixed the crit dot node you get more out of your dots for being crit invested...

to me i feel like you can get most of the benefit of dots, ignore all the nodes that reduce hit damage to boost ailment damage, get full on crit, get time which cannot heal and i think u get to keep 90% of your dots power, maybe even get more dot power thanks to so much crit, but also deal a ton of upfront hit damage which gets a non crit mirrored hit through twch and the overall damage output just seems to have way bigger potential in endgame. youre basically always on top of twcn as an ailment build right? its a 3 pointer.

i think early on you spread yourself too thin trying to do it all, it makes sense to play the campaign focusing on ailment chance scaling and applying them but as you get to maybe the 60s switching over to a hybrid of crit hit damage and crit dot damage has a much higher ceiling.

The thing about WTCH passive I don't quite understand is in fact if the mirrored hit from a stasis hit is just supposed to be non-critical damage? I thought if we crit when we proc WTCH we are supposed to get free crit as well; basically whatever we did mirrored +20% if we have the smaller passive?

well, thats the way its worded so you would think u get the same damage again, after extensive testing i can tell you it almost certainly doesnt unfortunately. if i inflict stasis on a mob and then hit it with a direct damage hit, for easy math we will say the hit does 1000 damage, you can see it then tick for 1200 damage a second later. if the next direct hit on the mob is a crit and it does 4000 damage, the following tick it still 1200. always, ive tested it a million times and its never delivered a crit or the corresponding damage of a crit on the tick.

it might be just as well because its power would be outrageous if it did. but from what ive seen it never mirrors crit damage and it never mirrors dot damage, it doesnt even really mirror the non crit damage it recieved in an exact mechanical sense if were really drilling down on how it works. it seems to hit the mob again with the skill at 0 crit chance and, im less sure about this one, presumed 0 ailment chance. so if ur damage range is 50-120 you might hit for 65 and the tick goes off at 110 cause its rerolling ur damage range, it wont even be the exact damage number rolled by the initial hit.

its a strange node, and significantly less broken than the wording suggests, but still absolutely insane in its own way.
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because its right there, and on an ailment build you are throwing out so many skills that keep ticking damage on mobs over a prolonged period, and you are probably using anomaly to group monsters into those skills aoe coverage everything is getting inflicted with stasis and then smacked with crazy amounts of direct damage hits it just feeds into that thing of why not build into this? im getting double value on my direct hits, and now we can crit with dots my direct hits can also scale with crit multi.

i dunno, i think the game hasnt really gone the way of here you can do this thing but its at the expense of that thing, you can sort of do all the things and actually doing thing A makes doing thing B and C more profitable. im struggling to see a reason to pick between dry hits, crit hits and dots, or between this damage type or that damage type. just do them all. its the exact opposite of how i would have designed it in all honesty.

Is it ever worth doing a pure dot build in end game? Well the way I do it currently, it feels pretty ok so far. I tend to hit and run with abilities with ground effects. I'll reserve my stamp of approval for when I get ahold of really good gear. Currently crit damage doesn't seem to scale Primordial insights. Regardless of skill, gear, or passive nodes; I was seeing a crit damage of 200% (double the base damage). In terms of what ends up being the most reliable (landing crits and ailments on the same hit), you want to split your ferocity and wisdom fairly evenly so you avoid diminishing returns as much as possible. This becomes easier with gear and levels.

So in my testing WTCH isn't directly impacted by crit and it won't proc ailments. Its very strong in it's own right, but it doesn't particularly scale those types of builds out of control (lots of numbers can be deceiving though). I do think they need better power management in the tree. A lot of diminished returns and many of the negatives don't end up being punishing. It's hard to say with the numerous bugs or obvious power level problems (summons).

I was reading in another thread that before the patch WTCH was actually doing too much dmg and multiplying it too many times or something so apparently this patch they had to correct that as well.

For trash mobs direct crit dmg or dots seem to work OK but for bosses, especially at higher levels I find dot and run is easier to survive. I don't have time to stand still and cast/shoot multiple times unless I do some insane facetank build and pump everything into toughness. This is even truer for pure mage/crit direct dmg builds given how poorly spell dmg currently scales in the game.

i just dont know why u would pick one or the other tbh. just do them both right? if ur crit chance is good because ur critting with dots then why dont you just load up on crit multi that makes your direct hits savage too? its not like getting that crit multi means sacrificing some kind of dot scaling that severely impacts your dots. in scaling ur dots uve already invested in the ailment chance that makes TWCN awesome, in scaling ur dots uve already invested in the crit chance that makes crit damage awesome, and you are not forced to sacrifice to get them. youre not chosing between rings that either offer crit damage implicit or some kind of multiplicative dot damage scaler. its just there, you just take it. crit damage implicit rings, crit damage suffix on belt, rings, weapon, offhand, crit damage nodes on the tree, why not? youve done the hard bit which is scaling your crit chance, why wouldnt you just ice that cake?
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these nodes that give increased ailment damage for reduced hit damage, that seems like a trade off. but think about them, what are they? 50% increase on dot for a 15% decrease on hit? well for a start increased and decreased damage are not impactful because of the % damage from core stats giving everyone such a high base, so its not a big deal either way. but lets look at them further, you probably have roughly 50% ailment chance, so you take that 15% decrease twice with 2 hits you deal and only proc the ailments on one of those hits. So you double the loss for one application of the benefit, then if you use TWCH it doubles your hits, so for each hit that procs your ailments you are taking that decrease in hit damage 4 times. in a game where these %s are largely invalidated by ur core stats % damage what are these really doing for you?

are these really giving you this tradeoff dealbreaker where youre gonna say yes, this is so good for my dots that im gonna sacrifice the benefits of being a build that cares about hit damage to be fully dot focused? its kind of debateable if theyre even worth taking at all tbh, thats how minor any perceived benefit from them is.
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so it comes to gear. i can get triple flat damage on weapon, offhand, if i get life rolls on rings and belt i can get 2 flat damage rolls on all 3 of these. now i can trade a flat damage stat on my weapon for something like 90% burn ailment damage. thats a tradeoff, i can do the same on my offhand. but thats it, i can trade 2 of these flat damage sources for a % increase to 1 of my ailment damages. but its never worth specialising in 1 type of ailment damage, im doing all 4 of them all the time so these 2 stats are only scaling 1/4 of my dot damage, and i still am left with 2 flat damage stats on weapons, 2 on offhand, rings, belt and amulet, and i can get crit damage on all these pieces that again scales hit and i already have good crit chance. for the gems in my weapon i can use offense 3 slots that give, with the top level gems, 15% damage to one of my ailments... when i already have probably 800% total increase when all is put together. OR i can feed precious flat damage to my spells that scales hits that are doubled with TWCH and are multiplied by crit damage. i feel like its only worth ignoring ur hit damage and crit damage when u dont yet have the gear for it to matter, the better gear and more passives you get the more redundant it becomes to try and specialise between these forums of damage and not just feed all of them.
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I dont really put anything significant in toughness and i still just facetank the bosses. you got tenet points, really high resist from those nodes, youre a caster and u got ailment chance and cooldown so you just have the boss caught in 2 stasis anomalies being endlessly chilled and frozen by hails of etheliel ice tears, i just stand toe to toe with them and circle around them from time to time spamming out turrets, anomalies, winsters grasp ground effect and ice storms that all persist after theyre cast continuously slamming damage and crowd control onto the boss and then poison laser him with annihilation in between it all. i think theres shock, burn, poison, bleed, freeze, curse and stasis all being endlessly applied. im trying to avoid using that mark of impurity curse thing cause it feels like it might end up on the hitlist for later balance with the way its working atm.

Please credit me (and not yourself) when linking this video. You know who you are.

I don't think it's asking too much.