#303 Warlock - Siphon Life periodic damage never critically hits

Status: Fixed · Area: Classes & Specs · Warlock

Siphon Life damage ticks never crit in testing, even though other damage-over-time spells can, so warlocks lose expected damage.

Current behavior

Siphon Life periodic damage never critically hits, even though DoTs can crit baseline in WoW Forever. In a test of 24 Siphon Life casts (219 damage ticks), not a single tick critted. None of the damage or heal events in the combat log carry the criti flag, and tick sizes stay between 13 and 15 damage with no outliers. Spell crit during the test: 5.58% on the character sheet, with 5/5 Malevolence.

Expected behavior

Siphon Life ticks should be able to critically hit at the character's spell crit chance, like other DoTs. The Pandemic talent also implies this. Its tooltip reads: "Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Corruption, Bane of Agony, Bane of Doom, Drain Soul, Drain Life, Siphon Life, and Wrack spells by 100%." With 219 ticks at 5.58% crit, about 12 crits would be expected. If Malevolence adds 5% on top of the sheet value (10.58% total), the chance of no crits happening over 200+ ticks is abysmal.

How to reproduce

1. Log in to a Warlock with Siphon Life.
2. Optionally, add Malevolence or other spell crit to speed up the test.
3. Enable combat logging with /combatlog.
4. Keep Siphon Life up on one or more targets for 100+ ticks.
5. Check SPELL_PERIODIC_DAMAGE events for Siphon Life (spell ID 18265) in the combat log.
6. Observe: no tick has the critical flag set, and no tick is noticeably larger than the others.