It should pause the damage. The dots should still tick down, but the cc should pause the damage until the cc ends or breaks.
It’s ridiculous that dot specs can have their entire setup countered not only by 8 second dispels, but also by unaware teammates careless use of cc.
I main affliction so I see it a lot. It didn’t used to be this bad, but as cc has gotten more and more common, it’s just made it more difficult to actually deal damage as a dot spec.
This has happened to me more times than I can count. Even just today, I had a paladin fully dotted, about to kill him, and a brewmaster monk runs up, uses paralysis, completely erases my dots, and then he ran away. He literally just helped the enemy then dipped out…
Any healer can dispel my entire setup at any moment, and now almost any other spec on my own team can dispel it too.
It is so frustrating to set up full dots (which in and of itself takes quite the effort since there’s so many and it requires hard casting and hoping you don’t get dispelled at any point along the way) only to have a teammate carelessly use a cc and ruin it all.
2 min CDs (with long setup) shouldn’t be overridden by a random insta break throw away cc.
TL;DR: CC shouldn’t remove dots. It should pause them instead.
That’s not possible anymore. So many classes passively throw dots everywhere now. Spellslinger might as well remove polymorph from mages if that were the case.
Doesn’t this just inform you that playing with teammates in an organized setting is preferable to you than not?
CC being able to remove dots is to make sure the CC actually works and does what it is supposed to do. It is infinitely more frustrating to have CC not work than to have dots be removed. This can be demonstrated, as a warlock, by any time you use Shadowfury, Mortal Coil, or Fear and imagine it getting removed after 0.1 seconds. I cannot imagine anyone in good faith being happier with a 0.1 second CC than having dots be removed.
To have certain kinds of CC remove dots is a desirable facet of the game, not an undesirable one.
op if they were to go with this route something would be broken
1 would be the dots still tick on cc
2 after the cc the dots would be hit with all the damage at once from the stored ticks
Some of these spells have that, but not all of 'em. As far as I am aware, I think most of these are also typically on an individual basis.
Warlocks can make it take more damage to remove fear, but you can’t have a mage’s polymorph not remove dots.
Again though, this isn’t really an issue as it is a desirable aspect of the game. Imagine anytime you go to Polymorph something and there’s a random dot on the target, from you or someone else, and the polymorph fails as a direct result.
It’d be infinitely more frustrating.
You aren’t though. You are saying “I want my dots to stay on the target because someone Polymorphed the healer, so I want my dots to be paused on the target until it has been broken.”
There’s multiple different ways to interpret how you mean “pause” but… all of 'em fundamentally breaks the game in various different ways. So what you are suggesting isn’t a solution, especially since there isn’t a problem to be solved in the first place.
You calling it a bandaid solution doesn’t magically make it into one. Play a bit on the Classic servers and you’ll have the gameplay experience you are looking for, and everyone in a group will say “why would you put dots on the CC-target?”
This is why I’m saying this is a desirable thing, and not undesirable. It is more important that CC works than that dps metres go up (regardless of whether it is PvP or PvE).
All of the types of CCs, with only like one or two exceptions (there’s probably more but short-ranged disorients aren’t really the type of CC we are talking about but rather hard CC), that remove dots are also associated with types of CCs that makes you or the target leave combat.
Polymorph being one of the best examples of this:
Since the thing breaks on ANY amount of damage it means that for it to run out, a target cannot have taken any amount of damage in that time period. From a PvE setting, this is solved in dungeon and raid environments with mobs being unable to deaggro (unless they are hard resetting). In open world environments, you have the leash range.
In PvP, this is where things are a lil’bit more tricky but, typically a polymorphed target whose polymorph runs out will have been left alone for long enough where they drop both the CC and combat.
This is further emphasized if they are, for an example, CC’d around a pillar in an arena setting so they don’t remain within the combat area so any of their more direct damage abilities haven’t kept them in combat and any of their dots/hots would’ve run out and they are now out of combat as well.
You first issue would be “How do pausing a dot still allow for this intended gameplay to take place?” It is possible to solve it, but not without making a whole load of special exemptions and exceptions, most of which would be basically identical as if dots had dropped off and needed to be reapplied again.
The second issue is how do you deal with things that stack over time or interact with stacked dots. Like Agony being a prime example. You can’t have it keep the stacks but then, this also makes this as if you had to reapply the dots anyway. So now you have to keep stacks but also not, but also make it different from just having to reapply said dots again regardless?
Safe to say, making some kinds of CCs remove dots is both the most elegant and honestly realistic solution to what would otherwise be just special exemptions, weird mechanical weirdness, and a whole load of other things. Especially when it ultimately would also at the same time have to facilitate gameplay where people leave combat.
