He means that DoTs are underpowered unless they explicitly have a beneficial secondary effect. Like a Burn with Mana drain, or a Bleed with Max Hp debuff. Or have some form of stat reduction.
Their values go from okay-moderate at levels 1-20 to non-existent as early as well level 20+ in PvE and in PvP unless they're applied on a target with <5% hp left and in PvP/Bsq it's midigated with potions alone.
Witch's Curse and Sleep are not made for a damage dealing in mind. It's made as a stall skill. To turn your enemies into non-factors, essentially disabling them until they take damage and should need focus then. If you turn a target into a frog, it means you don't wanna fight them or let them act until it's necessary or in F7 until towers can properly focus them. DoTs acting on that without disabling means you wanna DoT a disabled target to finish or chip them down while they're disabled.
That's right but you are tunnel visioning. As long as Dots suck "chipping down" would not happen.
Here's the different scenarios:
1v1, no burn on rain of fire:
Rain of Fire is now usable with Witches' Curse. That means people might use Rain of Fire.
Effectively a nerf to invoker
2v2 or 3v3, no burn on rain of fire:
Rain of Fire is now usable with Witches' Curse. That means people might use Rain of Fire.
Effectively a nerf to invoker
Group pvp, no burn on rain of fire:
Rain of Fire is now usable with Witches' Curse. That means people might use Rain of Fire.
Effectively a nerf to invoker
1v1, dots don't cancel sleep or frog:
Means the same thing, people might use Rain of Fire. In Ninja's case there's the poison dot and being able to use that would be an actual buff, but an insignificant one.
Effectively a nerf to invoker, A slight slight buff to Ninjas.
2v2 or 3v3, dots don't cancel sleep or frog:
Only one that could be problematic since now all skills that cause damage dots work together with Witch's Curse and Hypnotizer and players can't reliably make themselves get hit in a safe way in frog form as the opponents will avoid hitting them without catching. But there's not many powerful skills with dot effects, so the synergy buff would only be very slight.
Slight buff to how Invokers and Ninjas synergize with other classes.
Group pvp, dots don't cancel sleep or frog:
The above is still true, but the more people there are the easier it is for people hit by Witch's Curse to find a piece of damage that they can relatively safely get hit by. It still sucks to have to do that, but you can't make people useless for the whole duration of the debuff. So the synergy advantage gained gets even smaller the more people there are. In the case of Hypnotizer it's worse since you can't actively get rid of the debuff yourself, but that somehow doesn't seem to be the problem you have.
Even slighter buff to how Invokers and Ninjas synergize with other classes.
In the case that dots get buffed someday these changes can be reverted/adjusted. But until then these changes would do nothing to the game's balance. I dare to suspect removing the burn from rain of fire is massively easier then reworking all dot effects even with how old and unpredictable this game's code is.
I use the words nerf and buff above quite generously, those are so small effects that they aren't really either. They are just neutral changes. The fact that even after all these nerfs the thought of Invokers getting a neutral change that'd only make them more fun and interactive to play in normal pvp gets backlash is quite frankly baffling to me.
