Detonate Dead

"

soul4hdwn wrote:

um... the fire damage can crit last i was told... it's how people can make one dd take out 90% of nearby monster's hp. it is also why the crit base for the spell is so low (4.5%). that or the burning from a crit is what puts mobs to critical hp.

You can get 100% without crits. That's all I say about this skill. Oh and also: area of effect does affect this but you need to stack it alot to see some effect. (+30% atleast)

took me awhile to do math because i doubted you for a long moment. 18% +250% from passives and +266 from maxed mods on equip = 111% (actually 1.1088 rounded up and converted back to a % XD)
that doesn't count resistances though... or crits

"

soul4hdwn wrote:

took me awhile to do math because i doubted you for a long moment. 18% +250% from passives and +266 from maxed mods on equip = 111% (actually 1.1088 rounded up and converted back to a % XD)
that doesn't count resistances though... or crits

Funny thing is... you're doing it the harder way. Concentrated aoe support (You can still have well positive aoe with passives) and elemental weakness curse help to achieve this alot easier without sacrificing the whole skill tree to fire. I Reached ~90% without taking nearly as many fire passives as I could've.

With those 2 skills leveled you'd actually only need around <150% fire damage.

yes i know it was the harder way, kinda the point actually. with con effect, a player would only need the lv to use con effect lv 1, and then things go wild... except for the size but that is vixable.

i didn't really want to resort to res modification because that makes things another "more" base step in calculations.

then to trump both of our statements, crits. don't need to say much about it... the tiny amount shadows get early on (60%) is well enough stacking with damage boosts before that... makes me cry a little

edit: the path i took would've worked for all three int classes, and gained 40% AoE size boost... all within lv 70

Yeah, I just calculated it with my leveled conc. effect, levelled and quality'd ele weakness on 0% resists and didn't take unreliable crits into account. Still the kill speed boost from 2 hits to kill to 1 hit to kill is not even as big as one would think with detonate. It has fast cast speed and cast speed quality. My 75 lvl Witch got 146% increased cast speed to detonate while doing that 90% damage.

I rather like the idea of scaling down the damage and having the skill automatically detonate all corpses within a certain distance that scales with level.

Dealing damage as a % of monster's health is difficult to balance. You don't want the skill to be able to inherently deal 100% of a monster's health, as that would essentially turn the skill into "kill one monster, corpse explode, room clear." Withholding, of course, fire resistance.

Scaling back the damage slightly, such that specced builds cannot achieve, let alone exceed, 100% health as damage, will allow the skill to be rebalanced in other ways such that it has a use without being another spam skill. Here's my idea, and what will make it desirable: Replace a portion of the removed damage with a damage multiplier that scales with the number of corpses being detonated.

This plus the scaling aoe to the multi-corpse exploding effect provides incentive to level the skill and justifies the scaling mana cost. Furthermore, this places more emphasis on the idea of using corpses as a resource, and corpses are in limited supply. Few corpses means more remaining monsters and a low corpse multiplier. The damage is low but spread across more monsters -- good for handling reanimators and attempting to proc burning dot; bad for trying to inflict high damage as it consumes resources for later use. Having many corpses means fewer remaining monsters -- good for dealing high damage to a few monsters; more difficult to time to maximize the ratio between damage dealt and damage needed to make efficient use of the skill. Also means, potentially most of the monsters are dead.

All of this contributes to a much more tactical spell, rather than something to be either ignored or spammed (which dex users have a hell of a time doing, especially with useful support gems like added chaos damage), which seem to be the two possible directions this will go with further rebalancing if something different isn't done with the skill.

Another problem with this skill that I encountered in group-play was shattered corpses.

After some testing I discovered that literally any amount of cold damage will shatter corpses, if the killing blow was a crit (seems to work this way, at least).

Even 1 point of cold damage. How many players have at least 1 point of cold damage?

UPDATE: Nope, I was wrong. Needs to be at least 3% of the mob's health.

can anyone please tell me if the damage reduction from totems does apply to detonate dead. thanks for feedback.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

This is not the case.

I've tested the crap out of this to verify it, but I will test again. ;)

UPDATE: You're right. :P With a ring that does 3-7 cold damage I can consistently shatter any white mob if I crit... however, I cannot shatter blue or yellow mobs (they have way more health, so I focused on them for this test).

So, it was my crit damage multiplier pushing the few points of cold damage up to ~3% of their health... but, since this only happens on white mobs, it's not that big of a deal... still enough to make me avoid using any cold damage (reasonable), though... and I probably won't use a dd totem in groups, either (bummer).

The "3% of a monster's maximum life as cold damage to freeze it" part really helped. Thanks for the info, because I thought the threshold would have been much higher than that. :D

And it makes sense now that I never see them frozen, since I 1-shot them if I crit. Everything makes sense now.