Question: How does Reactive DoT really work?

Here is how it works, at least with non dot or rain powers.

You have a chance for up to 5 ticks of damage every time you do damage. 1 tick at the same time the damage is taken and 4 more ticks, each 1 second later. Each one of those 5 ticks has a 75% chance to hit if you are at tier 4. Effectively this means you have over a 99.9% chance to do "some" additional damage. 1 out of 1024 times you will miss with all of them. Meaning you have a 0.098% chance of not doing any additional damage. This much is fact and I have been able to verify with several tests on several different powers. Even if a power has 2 damage types like smashing and ice for example there will still only be a chance for 1 group of 5 ticks, per hit.

Now for the speculation. It seems that each tick of DoT damage also has a chance to have this 1 group of 5 ticks each time it does damage as well. However with the limited info in the combat logs, I have not been able to figure out the maximum number of times this effect can stack. It would seem 5 times since that is the max number of all the other incarnate procs but hard to say. I also do not believe that the effect stacks past a certain point even with different powers.

In other words if you have 2 rain powers at the same spot, one of them would probably just be adding its normal damage since the mobs in the area are already at the max number of procs. But if you were in, say an ambush farm and had 2 different rain powers going off on different groups, that could cause some pretty extensive damage. Again, just speculation on that part.

Edit to add other numbers for the curious. At 50% chance to proc, the chance to do no damage is 3.125%. Or to put it another way a 96.875% chance of some extra damage.

At 25% chance to proc it comes down to a 76.27% chance of doing some extra damage. So even at the low end, odds are good you will do "some" extra damage. Granted you will alwasy do more extra damgae with the 75% chance as more of the ticks will hit.

how does Reactive effect pet heavy ATs like controllers? like an illusion? does reactive affect the phantom army or the phantasm? or what about MM pets?

I have the 50% -res and 25% chance for fire proc and it is surely broken.

The -res seems to just lower the -res once, as in if I hit them for 150 damage and the -res applies, I only hit them for say an increased damage of 160 over and over and over.

Also, I have tested the fire proc REPEATEDLY and I can assure you, it almost never works properly. 1 out of about 15 hits does the fire proc hit more than once. So I will strike, I can see the extra fire damage, and then nothing. Strike, nothing, strike nothing, strike, 1 fire proc, then nothing. VERY RARELY will the fire proc actually tic 3-4 times on the target by itself. Strike, fire proc hit for 11 - 11 - 11 - 11.

To test this fact I used Brawl on bosses and LT's that are even level. Kind of frustrating, I thought reactive would be better. Hopefully they fix it.

Er, Reactive's -res definitely does stack the effect, even from the same user. Just tested it to be sure using a Bane (so I could Surveillance to monitor the target's resistance buffs/debuffs) with the tier 1 25% chance of -res version and got 3-4 stacks going.

Pretty sure the DoT portion still works as described in the rest of this (old) thread too.

We've been told by the devs (Synapse, I think, but would have to go check) that the DoT part of Interface powers that have one stacks to a maximum of 8 duplicates. I might have missed us posting about it, but in this thread it looks like we still thought it was a max of 4 stacks for the DoT.

Holy cow, NNNNNNNNEcropost

While I'm here, I should point out that I'm no longer seeing the behavior described in the OP. The DoT now seems to stop after the first failure to tick, just like every other DoT in the game.

I was just noticing this myself the other day, in my own Ice Blaster's "Spectral Total Radial Interface" when I was idly [Freeze Ray]ing a boss. At first I was curious to see if it was a difference between Reactive and the newer DOT's, but if your report is accurate, they're now ALL cancel on miss.

A bit of a shame, but still a sizable chunk of DPS added so maybe I should just shut up and enjoy the free damage.