Spells: DOT Damages

[John Adams]

Experts,
When a spell/art has a "DOT" effect on it, is the total damage inflicted by the DOT always the same as the first cycle?
For instance, I have a spell that instantly DD's my foe for 10 damage, but will then inflict between 2-8 disease damage every 4 seconds for 12 seconds.
So the 10DD is inflicted on cast.
The DOT component now kicks in and a random is rolled between 2-8 to determine my DOT damage. Let's say it's a 5.
Now, for 12 seconds, every 4 seconds, does the DOT do specifically 5 disease damage? Or does the random happen each cycle and a new DOT damage is inflicted?
Make sense? Thanks in advance.

[LethalEncounter]

The random amount occurs each tick and does not have to be the same amount as the previous tick.

[Scatman]

On live, I'm almost positive the tick random value is calculated only once. Because I know for a fact if I'm healing someone with a DOT heal and it crits, it will crit every tick. If it doesn't crit, it won't ever crit on following ticks.

[John Adams]

All my live characters are such lowbies, it's hard to determine which is correct due to my tick/proc/dot stuff always being like 1 or 2 anyway heh. Hopefully others will chime in on this, but for now I will go with DOT as LE says, and HOT as Scat says, and somewhere we'll figure it out.

[Jabantiz]

I just tested DoT's on my 75 necro, cause I never really paid attention, and they are indeed random on each tick. Will test the other stuff later when I have more time if you still need it.

[John Adams]

Thank you, Jabantiz. I think that sums it up, unless anyone thinks different DOTs behave differently?

[ZexisStryfe]

Jab is correct. Prior to TSO, the damage was fixed for each tick, but that was a bug. It now functions as the developers wanted, a random amount each tick. As part of that fix they also made it so crits are always max base damage + random crit amount, instead of the old way of medium base about + larger random crit amount (which resulted in crits doing less than max damage 50% of the time).

[Scatman]

Ah, I haven't played since TSO came out so that's why I could've sworn it was a fixed amount.