What in the world. By fire and forget, I mean you can move after you fire it. You don't deal damage once you break the cast.
And yes, the game treats it like periodic damage. I said that exactly. How about this: All DoTs are Periodic Damage. Not all Periodic Damage are DoTs. Does that make more sense?
can we agree that Mind Flay is a channeled spell as it has a time between when it starts and when it stops, and during that time the caster is unable to perform any other actions as it will cancel the spell. However, Certain mechanics of the game treat it like a DOT, as it does Damage over time.
as for the OP's Question there are too many variables to be able to accuratly compare, if your asking which provides more DPS then take a look at a some log files and compare the two classes making sure that there of equal spell power / crit / haste etc.
Not at all. Damage over time implies periodic damage. Period. What everyone has labeled as "a DoT" is a debuff. DoT is shorter than Debuff, so we continue to use DoT, and people have come under the impression that DoT only means things like moonfire and insect swarm. This is not true. If damage is dealt over time, it's a DoT. There are two KINDS of DoTs however. Channeled (Mind flay) and Debuffs (Moonfire). But to say either is not truely a DoT is complete nonsense.
Aff warlocks have to maintain debuffs in their target in order to let their DoTs do competetive damage whereas shadow priest dots ramps up through selfbuffs, so in essence shadow priests have the best "apply and forget" dots.
i guess this means arcane barrage is a dot too
Last edited by rutiene; 2011-08-01 at 12:34 AM.