Pandemic no longer smooths the damage

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Pandemic no longer smooths the damage when extending dots with different amounts of spellpower.

This is from 5.1 patch notes (bugfix section), could anyone be so kind and explain me this and what does it mean to DoT snapshotting?

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it basically means that pandemic functions exactly like fel flame now when it comes to reapplying dots. b4 pandemic would give you an average of the spellpower etc. when you it was in use, for example, if you applied your dots with 20k sp and then reapplied your dots with 30k sp, then your new dots would tick as if it had 25k sp. Now it basically functions like fel flame, where the full duration(afaik) of the dot is full powered with current procs when pandemic is used.

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almara gives a good explaination, which I'll try to illustrate, even though it might not be exactly how it worked, my aim is to give you an understandable view of what was happening. In 5.0, corruption was given a special treatment, while all other dot (UA, Agony, Doom, Immolate) were working "in a natural way".

5.1 : Corruption (and all other dots)

Transitioning from low spellpower to high spellpower
- you already have a dot applied on the target when your spellpower was low
- you refresh it when a proc is up and your spellpower is high now
- the dot will be ticking with damage based only to the higher spellpower

Of course, same for the opposite case (transitionning from high to low) would yield only lower power

5.0 : Corruption only

Transitioning from low spellpower to high spellpower
- you already have a dot applied on the target when your spellpower was low (S_low)
- let's say the existing dot had 25% of it's duration remaining
- you refresh it when a proc is up and your spellpower is high now (S_high)

What was happening (again it's an example, don't pick it as exact) ?
- the new power of the dot would take into account the previous ones and both remaining duration and new total duration
- the new spellpower would be something like S_intermediary ~ (25% * S_high + 100% * S_low) / 125%
- so the dot will be ticking with damage based on the interermediary spellpower

Of course, same for the opposite case (transitionning from high to low) would yield S_intermediary power

So ... how does that affected our gameplay/dps ?
- on one hand, refreshing a low power dot with a more powerful one gave you a little less than you should have had otherwise
- on the other hand, overwriting a high power dot by a less powerful a proc gave you a more than you would have had otherwise

IMHO, even if it's an abuse of language, you could think of Corruption in patch 5.0.x it as :
- the remaining power of the previous dot (be it high or low) being rolled into the refreshed dot (being high or low).
- this provided us with an even better tolerance on the refresh management : even if you cut short a powerful dot you would still kept part of its power

As a final observation, due to the nature of dots and their ability to snapshot power, players are/were good enough to keep more uptime of powerful dots than lower power dots, thus averaging to a higher global power for that dot, and now it's lower but more understandable and reliable. Again, this is only a way to explain things, i don't mean it to be valid/exact.

---------- Post added 2012-11-28 at 03:10 PM ----------

Here's an oversiplified graph to better illustrate what i'm explaining. Hope it helps.