Hey, your article on Damage Over Time Abilities really helped me. I'm designing an RTS (fool that I am), and I was planning a flamethrower unit, and it ignited units, but something about it felt off because the damage of the flamethrower was clashing conceptually with the damage of the DOT. It took your article to realize, "...Wait a minute. This sucks. What're the decisions that players are supposed to make? Ignite a unit and STOP shooting it to let the DOT kill it?" Thanks for correcting me!
The interesting thing about design challenges is that we can still make damage over time work for the player in a way that is both intuitive and skill-testing if we're clever about embracing the constraints. Damage Over Time is not good for a direct toe-to-toe fight for the reasons I discussed before, but it does excel at one thing - continuing to deal damage when the attacker isn't there anymore. In the case of a Real-Time Strategy game, damage over time becomes compelling if it were utilized by a unit that could attack and apply the DOT to multiple enemy targets while moving. Thus, the unit would fill a well-established RTS role in a way that allows the DOT to shine - hit and run/harassment.
Imagining a fantasy setting, you could have a dragon unit that flies over an area and strafes the ground with flame. Enemy units in the flame would be ignited, causing DOT that continues to burn even after the dragons have left the area. For more fun (e.g. a potential upgrade path), you could allow the dragon fire to leave hazards on the ground or allow the ignited units to ignite other nearby flammable units too. In a game where a role exists for units that don't need to stay for the whole fight to be useful, damage over time makes a lot more sense.
We can lean into this concept in other kinds of games. If state is maintained over multiple encounters with the same enemy, applying damage over time so it may continue even in the player's absence can make it a compelling player choice. Consider a game like Monster Hunter. The MH monsters have significantly large time to kill and a hunter often needs to wear down a large monster over several encounters before finally defeating it. Applying damage over time to the monster before it flees can help weaken it for the next encounter as long as the monster doesn't get a chance to recover full health between fights.
This isn't to say that we can use it everywhere for everything, but I think you get the idea - there are ways and types of gameplay where we can use damage over time to provide a viable choice to the player. It's a tool in the toolbox that we used to think was a lot more versatile than it really is. It's good to re-examine our old ideas every now and then to see if we can figure out a new solution to an old problem.
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