[1.1.5]PewPewPews Cheap Detonate Dead build | 1.2 Info inside!

Check this post for info on the 1.2 release!

... It is that Templar we exiled from Oriath. There is nothing holy left on this man. He slaughtered thousands of our man with demonic rituals, and he is not stopping there. He is coming for you my lord.

One of the survivors reported that he summoned the corpses of the slain to the battlefield. Corpses of those they know. Comrades, old friends, even family. No body is holy to him. And then, he detonates the bodies, spreading body parts of the fallen throughout the battlefield. The survivor reported that the entire battlefield was a "burning hell".

I saw his demonic ritual myself. Those close to the bodies were slain immediately by the explosion. Others around the bodies were burned down to cinders. This is no man of god anymore. This is not a Templar. Wraeclast turned him into a demon - no, into something worse than a demon.

Hello, this looks like a nice build. What's it about?
Greetings fellow Exiler. This is a detonate dead build. Aimed at being a fun build with insane clearing speed capacities for a reasonable price. As always, I intend to make this guide suitable for newcomers, and people with less wealth.

So... Detonate Dead?
Detonate Dead. "Explodes an unused corpse, dealing fire and physical damage to nearby enemies." The fire damage is based off the Corpses Health, while the physical damage is a set amount. Though, the physical damage from a lvl 20 Detonate dead is similar to a lvl 10 Ethereal knives, making it rather lackluster and for our build something we can ignore.

An interesting skill, since it's neither a spell or an attack, making it rather unique as it is. The wiki also explains that the fire component only gets damage from elemental damage, fire damage and area damage. This seems like the skill would be rather lackluster, with just a few options to increase the damage, but that's not true at all. Thanks to the percentile base damage Detonate Dead deals, this skill has an incredible scaling.

If we get 200% extra fire/elemental/area damage from our tree and gear - which is easily obtainable, we deal 18+(18(200%)) = 52% of the corpses base damage in fire. And that is just Detonate Dead vanilla. Add in Concentrated effect for an additional 64% more damage, to get around 85% damage dealt of the detonated corpse max life. Add in a burn from chance to ignite, spread it around with Elemental Proliferation, ignore 35% of their fire resistance with fire penetration, and it's a wrap. And since it scales off the bodies of our enemies, the more HP our enemy has, the more damage we will be able to deal. This means Detonate Dead scales incredibly well in higher maps.

Sounds awesome! But how do we get to exploding bodies?
Desecrate. As you might have figured, we only care about the summon body section. The damage dealt by desecrate itself can be ignored. If you visited the wiki of Desecrate, you will notice that the max corpse level is raised each time you level up Desecrate. This does exactly what it says: it limits the level of the bodies desecrate can summon. So if you are in a lvl 66 area, with a lvl 1 desecrate, you will summon bodies from that area, only as they were lvl 22. These bodies will have far less health, then their 66 counterpart, and thus deal far less damage on explosion. Though, if you summon a body in a lvl 22 area with a lvl 20 desecrate, the level of the body is 22, not 100. The area of the level is a hard cap for the bodies you can summon.

Even though Desecrate can theoretically summon bodies up to lvl 100, since the highest area in the game is lvl 80, you will never be able to summon bodies higher then 80 - until they release higher level content of course.

So, how do we survive hits late game?
Before I answer this, let's take a minute to see what we will be doing most of the time. We summon bodies to the battlefield. We curse our enemies. We detonate the bodies. One the first body goes off, it usually means everything will die. If not, you simply detonate a second body to speed up the process. By this logic, you will never really be in danger, I mean, if everything dies before it gets to you, how bad can it be?

Sadly, there are a few things that can be a danger. Ranged attackers, chargers/leapers, bosses/occasional rare that survives the first few blasts.

So we need to setup our defences around those dangers. Here are a few options that can save your hide out there.

Decoy Totem!
The first thing that comes to many peoples mind is the Decoy totem. We can put it in two ways in the build. Or we cast it before we go into battle, or we link it to one of the Cast when Damage Taken setups.
Since we don't put any points in totem life, having a Minion and Totem Elemental Resistance linked to it, helps a lot. Even so, the totem will be strong enough to survive a hit or two in the higher maps, allowing you to safely setup the explosions.

Devouring Totem!

Just like the Decoy totem, you can link it to Minion and Totem Elemental Resistance, and to a Cast when Damage Taken. It surely helps a lot during those tough boss battles, where you don't have time to stand still, but still need that bit of HP. It also helps a lot if your regen isn't up to par, since Devouring totem also replenishes your mana.

Zombies!
Yes! Zombies! Even without any of the minion nodes, raise zombie linked to a minion life will still have 3600 life(both at lvl 20, non Q). This isn't a lot, but enough to distract the enemies for a bit. Again, we can either summon them whenever we please, or link them to a Cast when Damage taken. Since you command three of them, can distract quite a lot, while you're laying waste to their ranks.

Frost wall!
Linked to a lvl 1 CwDT, Frost wall will push back, and defend you against both melee and ranged attacker. A very strong defense, and very simple to set up.

Arctic Armour!
This skill has two components we like. First of all, the flat damage reduction. Second, the ice ground we leave behind is also very nice to have.

Enduring Cry/Immortal Call!
I don't think I need to explain why this is nice. But just in case you are wondering, Enduring Cry, linked to a lvl 1 CwDT, is great for generating endurance charges, while Immortal Call makes us almost invincible while facing physical hitters.

Molten Shell!
Another great physical damage reducer, not only gives this skill us a lot of armor, once we take enough damage, it detonates, usually killing everything around you within a single hit.

These are the options available to us. Sadly, we won't be able to use all of them at the same time.

So what gems will we be using then?
The graphic below here should explain everything you need to know.



Let's Cover everything, shall we?

Detonate Dead
Our bread and butter. Linked to Chance to ignite, Elemental Proliferation and Fire penetration. Basically, what we are doing here, is ensuring everything is on fire, as often as possible. Especially with the huge amount of increased AoE nodes we get from the tree/gear, this is easily obtainable by just detonating one or two corpses. Thanks to elemental proliferation, everything around the targets that caught the burn, will burn as well. Since we only need the fire damage of Detonate Dead, we don't need to level Detonate Dead beyond lvl 1, though you can chose to do so, simply to Turn it into a 20% Quality gem once it hits level 20.
We use Fire penetration instead of Increased Burning damage, since Fire Pen allows us to demolish even fire resistant targets, especially after using Flammability.
Please keep in mind we put Detonate Dead in our helm. See the gearing section for more about this.

Aura's
Purity of Fire, is a must, since it not only ups our max fire resistance, it also helps us fight reflect. The combination of PoF and Arctic Armour, will minimize the damage we get from Reflect.
Clarity is necessary to uphold the high mana costs of Arctic Armour.
Discipline helps with sustaining Arctic Armour, but is far less important than clarity. If you can run AA without Discipline, feel free to swap it for another aura. Haste, Vitality or purity of elements are a few good possibilities.
We link all our aura's with a Reduced mana gem for the obvious reasons.

Weapon
Desecrate, faster casting and Arctic Armour. The use for desecrate is already explained above here. If your mana allows it, try getting your hands on a weapon that increases the levels of cold gems socketed by 1/2. Since Arctic Armour is a cold spell, those levels will increase the level of AA!

CwDTs
This is already explained above here. As you can see, we put one of the CwDTs in our armour. You can choose either for Raise zombie, decoy totem, or something else, if you... well prefer something else.

What about the skilltree?
Here you go



Let's cover the two keystones.
Eldritch Battery - We need it so we can run Arctic Armour. Simple as that. Without EB, you will never have enough mana regen to run it.
Resolute Technique - This one might raise some questions, but we take this point since we don't want Detonate Dead to crit. In reflect maps, Critting can spell out an unavoidable death. This allows us to blast away, even when reflect is on the field. As for the leveling tree..



Fair enough. So what about our gear?
To keep the costs as low as possible, we use one core piece: the Rime Gaze. Other good uniques are: Carcass Jack, Lightning Coil,
Cloak of DefianceSaffel's Frame, Rise of the Phoenix

The Rize Gaze is not only cheap, but also our most important core piece. The high Es and mana is perfect for increasing our mana pool, and the concentrated effect increases the damage output from Detonate Dead by a lot. Too bad it adds cold damage, and not fire.

Like I said the Carcass jack isn't mandatory, and can be substituted for any (high)es/health/res chest. But if you do get your hands on one, it's great. The increased AoE is really noticeable and the increased area damage works for detonate dead. Unless you aim for something more defensive, this is the best chest you can get.

The lightning Coil has great synergy with Arctic Armor. On top of the already reduced physical damage, it will convert another 40% to lightning(which should be capped). Great defensive item vs hard hitters, like Kole.

Cloak of Defiance grants us Mind over Matter, converting a % of our damage to our mana pool. Great overall defensive armor, just be careful in half regen/no regen maps.

Next is Saffell's Frame. Those who know my incinerator build, know how much I love that shield. That 4% to all max resistance is game-breaking great. It allows you to weather even the worst cases of elemental hell. And it's a great help for reducing the damage output of reflect.

Last, but not least is the Rise of the Phoenix, for those that really want to be save from reflect damage. The Rise of the phoenix gives you 8% to your max fire resistance, but none to any other resistance.

Everything else will just do fine with the rares you find among the way. Make sure you look for the following stats on your rares:

Weapon: Increased Fire damage, Elemental damage, Faster Casting, Mana, Mana regen, Resistances(we don't use spelldamage!)
Armor: Health, ES, Armor, Resistances, Mana,
Rings: Health, Resistances, Mana, Mana regen, Fire damage.
Amulet: Health, Resistances, Mana, Mana regen, Cast speed.
Boots: Increased movement speed, Health, ES Resistances.
Gloves: Health, Resistances, ES

Here is my current gear(all found/traded in the one week domination league):


I got my hands on a 6 linked armor..

Since this build is all about those with less wealth, I don't want to go into too much detail on this subject. But in this case, put Detonate dead in your armor, as the 5th and 6th slot, link Concentrated effect and Increased Area of Effect/Increased burning damage, depending on the available colors. The Rime Gaze can be substituted for any other helm(Alpha's Howl, Geofri's Crest are both very nice for example).

While we are on the subject of the more expensive items, the Fire variant of Doryani's Invitation and Doryani's Catalyst can both be considered BiS for this build as well.

So how does this build look like late game?
See for yourself!
[1.0.6]VS Dominus(68): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHydeWRyx5M
[1.0.6]VS Asphyxia(72): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30c20m40SqE
[1.0.6]VS Double Temple Piety(71): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHxVyQanbHE
[1.0.6]VS Shadow of the Vaal(74): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLMJfIRuO1g
[1.0.6]VS The Warmonger(77): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiRccpj--oQ
[1.0.6]VS Lady Stormfly(76): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSGXT7uTrnk
[1.1.5]VS the Academy(76): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBbFeFBdv68
[1.1.5]VS double Magaera(76): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSMJvp2dHfs

Wait, I was wondering..
If you still have questions, need advice, or just wanted to let me know how this build works out for you, feel free to post a comment in this topic. I'll try to answer as many questions as I can :)

I used this build to level to 87 in the one week Domination league. My rank was 58th, but that was also with a two days late start :>

Thanks DonaldF for the inspiration to do this build :)

Enjoy everyone!

Guide Update Log
22/02/2014 - time to put in some work into this build! Started writing about the essentials of Detonate Dead and this build!
27/02/2014 - Finished testing this build, finished defenses, working on gems.
03/03/2014 - Took me a bit longer than expected, but this guide is now.. Finished!
27/02/2014 - Fully updated for the 1.1.5 release!

Reserved :>

What are you using for a weapon?

Ignore this, I was aware 'Spell Damage' didn't affect Detonate, but I didn't actually realise the Gem didn't even class itself as a Spell at all.

Didn't realize I didn't link my weapon, fixed it!

Have you thought of using any lightning damage spell and Elemental Equilibrium? That should increase the burn even more.

A Shock Nova trap or sth with Arc. If you can pump your lightning damage high enough you may even able to gain shock stacks. This will result in a even higher burn.

Or Cold Snap trap.

Hmmm...but now that I think of it. If the enemy explodes that may trigger EE and actually activate fire resistance. Which would be bad for the burn. :)

Thanks for posting this!

Also, aren't you not supposed ever level up detonate dead?

Aactually thought about this, with a reduced duration Lightning Storm:
Cast LS, Desecrate, Flammability, Detonate Dead. Once you cast DD, LS will go off, so DD will still deal full damage, and LS will decrease the fire res.

It worked, but it required way too much micro, ended up dropping it :>

Saw your video on reddit and man I must say it really intrigued me.

The insane amount of damage you are doing with gear that doesn't seem to boost the damage directly (Am I missing something?)

Seems like a very strong candidate for a IIR/IIQ build. Your thoughts?

Also can you clarify the bandits? I assume it's something like Oak/Skill/Skill based on your tree point total on a level 87 character.

Do you still recommend Flameblast for leveling? Your reddit post makes it sound like you didn't swap to DD until you can get an Ele prolif. This sound right?

My damage gets boosted by the increased area damage from the Carcass Jack, and the fire and elemental damage from my wapon. IR/IQ is an option, though I don't know how burn and IR works.. If you link Increased Rarity to Detonate Dead, and the burn from Detonate Dead kills something, so we get the IR from the linked gem as well? Or just from the gear?
Also, we need to keep out HP high, so high life/res from gear is also something we like to see. As it is now, I wouldn't go IR/IQ on it, but with a few tweaks... maybe...

As for the bandits, you are right: Oak/Skill point/Skill point.

And yes, Flameblast is fast, and strong without any supports. Perfect for leveling, especially since we get those increased area of effect nodes early on :)

As I am writing this, I'm uploading three more video's. They should be all ready in a few minutes/hours.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30c20m40SqE
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHxVyQanbHE
- In queue, check my channel.

I've been working on a few things, how to deal with fast attackers, how to deal with reflect, hard hitters, etc etc. Since the build has no build in sustain, most of the regen is done by potting(even though I might put in a vitality or something).

Well, I'm going to keep a few things:
Rime Gaze: Detonate Dead + Change to Ignite + Ele Prolif + Fire penetration
Lvl 1 CwDT + Frost Wall(life saver)

Currently testing: Max level CwDT + Zombies + Skeletons + Minion Life(will they survive long enough to pull away some aggro?)

Current Weakness: Leapers(they bypass the frostwall), Projectile piercing(They also bypass the Frostwall)Evangelists(annoying bubbles), Corpse Spitters(STOP. FUCKING. RUNNING.)

As for now, I would rate this build as follow:
Survivability: 2/5 - Can take a hit, but not too many.
Damage: 4.5/5 - Insane on groups, little less insane on single targets spawned without magic mobs.
Map Clear speed: 4/5 Very Fast, might opt a movement skill(most likely lightning warp).
Partying: 5/5 High damage, Great range, Can hold a bit on your own, just get one tank, and you will do the rest.

Overall: Still Squishy. And pure HP is not going to help. We need some utility to keep us safe. Going to test a Decoy totem as well soon. Might seem perfect for the job now I think about it. Most likely on a max level CwDT(might put it with Immortal Call, Molten shell etc)

As this build is now, I wouldn't recommend it for HC, even though it's most likely going to survive, you will have close encounters every now and then - something you don't want to see on any HC build.

But I'm positive this build can be made for HC :)