PoE2 DoT Cap Found, Breaks Ignite Damage

Most players who’ve built a Damage Over Time (DoT) build in Path of Exile will be familiar with the infamous DoT cap. Because Damage Over Time in Path of Exile 1 is stored as damage per minute as an unsigned 32-bit integer, the most it can be represented as is 2,147,483,647 damage per minute. Divide by 60 and you get the DoT cap of around 35.8m damage per second. If your DoT effect exceeds this value, your damage gets clamped to the maximum DPS the game can represent.

To this point it’s been unclear if any DoT cap exists in Path of Exile 2; unless players are stacking party members and fighting the toughest pinnacle bosses in the game, bosses tend to have low health pools that make calculating a proper damage-per-second prohibitively difficult. Players in Path of Exile 2 also do far less damage than their Path of Exile 1 counterparts, making reaching the DoT cap also a considerable challenge.

In the Last of the Druids expansion, just over a year into Path of Exile 2’s history, this has finally been settled. The same DoT cap of 35.8m dps exists, but it works a little differently than for Path of Exile, and not for the better. Whereas in Path of Exile high damage DoTs are limited to the maximum allowed, at time of writing such DoTs will break in Path of Exile 2, inflicting phantom ailments that deal no damage.

The Build that Broke the Game

To reach such a high ignite dps, PoE2 player Nemu took a build created by Swedge, the Ignite Archmage Infernalist, and threw some of the most expensive gear in the game at it.

By adding the unique helmet, The Vertex, with the much sought after “+4 to Level of all Skills” corruption affix, a Prism of Belief jewel boosting the level of Comet spells, and an Atziri’s Splendour body armour providing “+1 to Level of all Corrupted Skill Gems”, Nemu was able to take the level of their Comet spell to the cap of 40.

Combined with the build’s heavy scaling with Archmage Mana-stacking and heavy Critical Damage Bonus investment, this gave the build a projected 92m ignite DPS from a single fire-infused Comet.

Unexpected Results

Swedge and Nemu assembled a 6-person party to buff pinnacle bosses like The Arbiter of Ash and Xesht, giving them health pools in the hundreds of millions. What they observed was very peculiar; when dropping Comets, the spell would inflict an ignite as indicated on the buff bar, but no ignite damage would roll on the boss.

Eventually, a Xesht kill gave the answer that explained this baffling phenomenon. When dropping damage boosts for testing, the team observed that a lower damage ignite in the low 30s of millions did roll damage, but as the Withering Presence debuff accumulated on the target, increasing the chaos ignite it was taking, the Ignite abruptly stopped dealing damage. When they looked at the observed ignite damage, they found that the ignite had started just below the theoretical 35.8m DPS DoT cap and proceeded to cross above it.

How high DPS DoTs are Broken

This fortuitous test indicated that any ignite that starts out above the 35.8m dps DoT cap would roll a “phantom” ignite that deals no damage, and any ignite starting below that threshold and rising above it would abruptly shut off its damage.

This represents a real challenge to min-maxed DoT builds in Path of Exile 2, who must be careful not to cross the DoT cap and have their damage be killed off by this apparent bug in the game’s damage calculations.