Early Access Damage over Time feels weak.

Bleed, Poison and Chaos Damage over time don’t feel very good in PoE 2.

In particular Decaying Hex for example gains no benefits from any modifiers other than Intelligence, this
makes it unviable and not even a good choice for a support end game.

Also, there are 0 damage over time nodes on the passive tree, this makes me wonder if DoT’s are basically being
Abandoned or merely serve a support role in favor of main damage coming from on hit effects.

If this is the case, I think we would like some confirmation because although DoT build’s aren’t as sweaty as stutter step builds. They do offer a smoother playstyle for players that like to build into DoT’s.

Will we be seeing some new DoT’s and will current damage over time get fixed? I don’t think the community
Would be upset if we saw Bane or Wintertide make a comeback or at least some variant.

Regardless, I know it’s still EA but the lack of nodes on the board and the current state of DoT scaling in general (especially Decaying Hex) is concerning.

I'd agree with this assessment. For my blood mage, I had originally intended to throw in some Bleed using Bone Storm, and Contagion / Essence drain as the 'primary' means of damage (based on concepts from PoE1, assuming that I could support both via DoT nodes). After seeing that I couldn't do such, I attempted some Physical / Chaos nods, but that too proved fairly low viability, and have cut the bleed aspect entirely (along with essence Drain), and pushed Contagion entirely into a support role as a way to apply hinders. While I don't hate it, it lacks a lot of interest it could have had, and I don't see a way to make bleed particularly useful in the Int side of the skills at this time, despite it being a fairly pushed aspect of Blood Mage.

DOT builds don't really exist in poe 2 without forcing it. Becasue DOTs scale with hits it means it is basically always better to just spec fully into hits and forget about the DOT altogether. It's bad tbh no idea why they did this to dot builds, they were my favourite in poe 1.

I have to agree I've been maining poison conc and the direct hit damage scaling with crit chance and crit damage feels way better then scaling the DoT itself which I was doing when I first started, currently at 30% crit chance on pconc and 920%~ crit damage and I can 1 shot most things, difficulty +4 xehst takes me about 10 seconds maybe, and I'm in no way near min maxed I still have many upgrades available