The Damage Over Time Ailment Problem

In Path of Exile 2, Poison, Bleed, and Ignite can only be stacked once on enemies by default. Their damage is now based on the full damage of the hit that triggered them, rather than the base damage of the hit before increases and reductions. The chance that each ailment is triggered is also based on the damage of the hit.

There are a few major problems with Damage Over Time at a philosophical level in Path of Exile 2.

1. Skills being built for the Class rather than for their own sake means that you run into the issue of not having enough options, and the options you do have might be very undertuned. Ranger and Mercenary are the only classes that have Poison skills, for instance. Path of Exile 1 allows you to turn non-poison and non-ignite skills into Poison and Ignite skills, so it feels really bad that, in PoE2, you really have to stick with "the poison skills" and "the fire skills" to really make Ignite and Poison work. Same with Bleed.

2. DoT "builds" go against Path of Exile 2's "use multiple skills" philosophy significantly, since, by the nature of DoT the way it's implemented in PoE2, only one skill can have inflicted the current DoT. And is having 1 damage skill and a bunch of otherwise-useless skills meant to built up the single DoT skill really what we're going for here?

3. Support gems being only usable once per character means only one DoT skill will have all the damage support gems. I assume this will be fixed as more and more support gems are made.

4. Clearly, the change to how DoT Ailments are scaled (based on the actual hit damage rather than the base damage) was done because GGG wants us to be dealing hit damage as well as our DoT damage. And to me personally, this just reeks of a desire for players to not specialize. And that just sucks. What if I want to just deal Ignite damage? It just feels like I have a lot less freedom to build the way I want to build. Maybe this will be fixed as more and more skills and support gems are made for new and existing classes. This desire to make skills combo into each other, by its very nature, forces people to use specific skills to make their builds work. Path of Exile 1's build diversity is incredible. Path of Exile 2 has none, because of this specifically. You'd need to add hundreds of extra skills for it to feel like we have the same freedom as we do in Path of Exile 1, because each build is a list of skills that must be used together, rather than a single damaging skill.