Detonate Dead

can sombady give me beta kay

Getting to the end of normal with my shadow, I'm getting highly variable results.

Most of the time, the spell does very low damage or misses altogether. How is the hit chance of the explosion calculated by the way ?

From time to time, probably when it crits, it DOES high damage. This seems to come mostly from the burn. Since I added lightning (I don't have that many support gems) I'm guessing the mobs might be shocked on top of it, which may account for the damage.

Then it goes from taking about 10-15% of the mobs life to killing them or close. Most of the damage seem to happen when burning.

I took a couple nodes of Fire Damage and the Blaze keystone to see if it would help. But of course, the low increase of fire damage does not change much the results.

It's a fun spell, but I think it takes too much effort to make it useful or somewhat reliable.

For pure fire specialized witch I just recently (68lvl+) discovered the true lategame power of this skill. 18%*3,32(fire/ele/spell dmg)*(concentrated area)1,66~=99,8% fire damage as monster hp. Add elemental weakness and this you'll oneshot non fire resistant mobs and twoshot most fire resistant mobs with it. With very nice cast speed quality and nonexistant manacost of lvl 1 detonate dead this skill outperforms everything provided you can get some bodies to roll on with.

Another problem is gem level scaling: physical damage portion is practically useless end game even with leveled gem.

My suggestion: Buff physical portion considerably at later levels, make the fire damage portion scale in percentage (like 20%+3% per level) and make that part nonboostable with fire/ele/spell dmg.

Yeah, that's a green gem that works better with a caster build heaviliy invested in fire. Does not feel very right.

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Targuil wrote:

For pure fire specialized witch I just recently (68lvl+) discovered the true lategame power of this skill. 18%*3,32(fire/ele/spell dmg)*(concentrated area)1,66~=99,8% fire damage as monster hp. Add elemental weakness and this you'll oneshot non fire resistant mobs and twoshot most fire resistant mobs with it. With very nice cast speed quality and nonexistant manacost of lvl 1 detonate dead this skill outperforms everything provided you can get some bodies to roll on with.

Another problem is gem level scaling: physical damage portion is practically useless end game even with leveled gem.

My suggestion: Buff physical portion considerably at later levels, make the fire damage portion scale in percentage (like 20%+3% per level) and make that part nonboostable with fire/ele/spell dmg.

I see that you've gotten a way to make this gem finally shine, but so much effort should actually show more rewards than the meager ones we see from Detonate Dead. Until something about this gem is done to make it appealing to the players, this gem fails. Too much effort is required at the moment to squeeze some juice out of it.

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Skjuld wrote:

Yeah, that's a green gem that works better with a caster build heaviliy invested in fire. Does not feel very right.

Same could be applied to Fire trap and molten shell.

True... But Fire Trap is quite useful without going that much into Fire. Same for Molten Shell.

What I meant was this has been classed as green, does not behave as a spell, adds Phys damage... And yet pretty mich needs a caster build to be effective.

I can't shake the feeling that it was more designed for hybrids, but doesn't fit.

Anyway, I respecced out of it on my shadow. It requires too much investment for very inconsistent returns.

Molten shell pretty much falls off in all aspects endgame. Armor is useless and damage mediocore at best unless you passive it out.

I agree fire trap is more useful unspecced to fire damage as the aoedot part of it is not affected by passives. At least I think so.

Fire trap may be fine currently but Molten needs significant armor boost and detonate %-scaling and % unaffected by passives combined with higher scaling physical damage.

Tied DD again, this time on a Fire Witch. +Fire, +Burn, +AOE, +Cast spd. Linked the gem with Ignite and added Lightning (took what I had in store) I'm working my way to +Crit.

Used like that, it's certainly useful and effective. Yet...

Why is it a green gem if it fits mostly with a Witch caster build ? Why the added Phys damage that has no synergy ?
And leveling the gem is still counterproductive.


If this is meant as "I booby-trapped your pals bodies with explosives" that's not what it feels like in practice.

I'd say this skill needs to be defined better. Either it's a Fire spell (which it feels like for the moment) and would better be Blue, or it is some sort of booby-trap (which its color and added physical damage seems to indicate) and it needs to work differently.

Is DD supposed to get bonus cold damage from Hatred on the physical damage part or is it a bug? Damage is very low, since it's percentage based, though.