Corpse explosion: One of the my (and probably many others) reason we initially rolled the class. Bugged and rather useless in live, this thread examines it's potential uses.

General Info:

Essentially 2 spells:
Ghoul Explode: Instant cast; GHOUL casts: 1.5s Cast time (Modified by haste). Must target your ghoul, it explodes for 25% of its maximum HP (20k buffed with fort etc. would hit for 5k)
Corpse Explode: 222+%Runic Power*.0475 AP.

Glyph: Does not work with Ghoul explode, works occasionally with Corpse explode.

Macro:
/target pet
/cast Corpse Explosion
/targetlasttarget
(Note: calling it in one line hasn't worked for me)


Few uses:
-Exploding your ghoul at the VERY end of a fight. is worth an extra ~3-4k damage
-Sapphiron where if you continually summon it with NotD you can get a decent amount of dps if you explode it before it dies.
-You also can continually explode your ghoul throughout the fight if you have 2/2 NotD. The only problem's that you lose all the buffs it had before it exploded, so not a good idea if there's a long chunk of fight left.
-AoE: Again if the cooldown's up you can Explode it for the cost of an unholy rune (and do about 4k damage with it)

Basically, i'd love to use this ability if someone could brainstorm some further or updated ideas. I know the patch will change it a lot so we'll see what it does.

Corpse explosion could be lethal in PvP under the correct circumstances as an extra burst damage.
Sadly corpse explosion is more of a humiliation (worse than cannibalize or other shits & giggles imo) than a PvE or PvP skill.

The patch will indeed increase its damage by a large chunk (although I don't think the increase applies to the 25% of the ghouls HP).

It's fun to use for the extra damage, I even attempted a PW with NotD and AotD spamming CE using my Death runes and casting CE on my ghoul whenever I could use it without risking my dps. My dps dropped by over 2k...

Are you saying that:
does not work?


Anyway, if you are GCD bound, summoning and blowing up your pet would probably be a loss of DPS.

Post patch, it still sucks. My personal preference would be for it to be removed from the tree, and replaced with a talent that doesn't suck so badly, but hey, to each his own.

There's no real way to abuse it in pvp, because you need the ghoul around for ghoul stuns as Unholy.
In PvE it is a flat DPS loss to blow up your ghoul and re-summon.

So you're saying that the buffed 3.0.8 ability is not worth the talent point at a cost of only 40RP for AEing? Or just that exploding your ghoul isn't worthwhile in standard DPS rotations and PvP? Hopefully the latter.

Both. I will spend the talent point on additional single target DPS talents as normal, and use my 40 RP to cast Unholy Blight, doing more DPS over time than the explosion. In doing so, I get to keep my talents optimized for DPS where it really matters, bosses.

Lots of boss fights require AE tanking. In fact, more benefit from it than not. Just off the cuff I can think of sarth elementals/whelps, anub scarabs, maexxna spiderlings, gothik phase1, grobbulus slimes, gluth zombies, noth skels, and KT OT phase3 (although obviously corpse explosion wouldn't work there). Roughly half of the boss encounters currently in the game have an AE component to be offtanked. I suppose if you're exclusively maintanking, you don't much care about AE. But don't denigrate it as only applicable to trash, because that's not accurate.

It doesn't quite work that way however. Unless you spec master of ghouls, you won't have a ghoul up when you need it unless it's a timed event. That means you need to get your ghoul out of the ground, which takes quite a few seconds to begin with. If you have a perma ghoul, or summon it before, you still need to have it alive when needed. Then you detonate it, but it doesn't detonate instantly, the ghoul stops and "cast" the explosion(much like when you suicide in ghoul form) which means in a high movement situation, it won't hit anything. All this make corpse explosion a very unreliable AE tool. As for actually detonating corpses, most raid boss adds don't leave corpses to detonate. Even if they did, most of the time you AE everything down at once, you don't single target mobs so you don't actually get corpses to exploit until everything is close to dead anyway.

Also most of your examples are poorly chosen, but that's another issue. Maexxna and anub scarabs don't use a threat table they just run around, so there's no tanking, and they have such low hps and hit so low that tanking wouldn't be an issue either. Gothik phase1 is continuous spawn of adds, you can only summon one ghoul and I don't think you can blow the corpses of the mobs since they become spirits instantly and fly to the other side. Grobbulus slimes aren't an AE situation, there's only one slime at a time. Noth skeletons are again a continuous spawn, and only a small amount of mobs anyway such as getting aggro doesn't even require AE abilities. Gluth zombies aren't tanked, the damage could be nice, assuming you'd manage to blow a ghoul in the right spot. I fail to see how KT requires AE tanking either, it's mostly a pickup issue and using the 40rp on a long range deathcoil to pickup the adds is better spent than somehow AEing stuff. Only sarth whelps might be useful for initial threat, because it's somewhat timed, and if you blow up your ghoul at the right time, it'd hit all the whelps for a big burst of threat. Or you could just use Death and Decay which doesn't require fancy timing or positionning.

Even in its new form, Corpse Explosion is at best a gimmick. The requirements of having a corpse nearby, or sacrificing a ghoul is simply too limiting to make it a good AE ability. Especially for a class that has DnD, and can spec morbidity in tier1 of unholy(so no wasted points).

I'd like to see it as a baseline ability. It is too situational and gimmicky to really be worth taking in any serious talent build. But it's a defining ability of the class, and it's really cool. It's a decent RP dump on AoE, but that's about it. If it did significantly more damage it would be awesome, but that could easily get out of hand.

It seems like a fairly balanced ability considering the corpse requirement and hefty RP cost. You're unlikely to even get a chance to use it effectively in Arena. But the damage just doesn't come up to par, even in the best PvE gear avaliable. It should be so easily outdone by a couple of disease ticks.

I too would like to see the push to have this become a baseline ability. It is a nice situational ability, but it is sorely out of place. Why is there another aoe effect at this level in unholy, but blood still has nothing up to this point? I think they should keep the damage low and lower the rp cost, making it a cheap aoe effect if nothing else is available. It would be hard to buff it in any other way without making it exploitable.

For a mechanic that is supposed to work well with a class, they have severely limited the usefulness of this ability, as well as the amount of players that are able to use it.

Yea baseline would be awesome. I'd hate to see this ability go because i love it, if purely for its nostalgic effect.
It was my favorite Diablo 2 ability.

That also is the cause of all its problems. It is a direct copy of the D2 skill, however there is one major difference between the 2 versions.
In diablo 2 you are always knee deep in corpses, In WoW you aren't. Even in AoE situations its really hard to use it. Because of the way trash is AoE'ed down, the moment the first mob starts dying, the rest will soon follow. You hardly get the time to take advantage of the skill.

And as far as i can see its a problem you simply can't solve.

You can not remove the requirement without destroying the ability and its history, and you can't make it a good talent/ability without losing its requirement.

The only way i see this working without breaking the requirement, is to circumvent the requirement through other ways. Something like a reagent (like corpse dust only cheaper), or something like a buff, like: "Every time you kill a mob you get a 2 minute buff, that stacks up to 3 times." These function as charges for a corpse explosion. Its a very crude solution, but it at least allows me to use CE on trash at any time, and even on bosses that require AoE.

I might take it in 3.0.8 since its use actually got somewhat of a boost, and i probably can spare a free talent point somewhere. If only for the nostalgia.

Remove it from the game, or make it a baseline gimmick, I don't really care which. But seeing as there is no reasonable way to use the ability to do anything of value in PvE OR PvP, I say we leave off of this topic and go back to discussing productive stuff: like the fact that Obliterate is bugged at the moment and generates no Runic Power

Try this:

/cast [target=pet:ghoul] Corpse Explosion


That works for my heal macro:

/cast [target=pet:ghoul] Death Coil

EDIT: This did not work for me in the raid last night, I had to revert to [target=pet] Death Coil. I cannot explain the difference.

Corpses go BOOM!

Seems to me you could put out some sick AoE dps every ?? seconds now, by exploding your ghoul at the beginning of a pull, then using his corpse to cast your own corpse explosion. Recast your ghoul, wait the ?? seconds for Raise Dead to refresh, and repeat.

Pondering though.. is this possible? I know you can explode the corpses of your Army of the Dead, but can you explode the corpse of your ghoul? Also curious what the numbers are like now. Haven't had a chance to test it... Server was too unstable to raid last night and I'm at work now : \

Just tested it: yes, what you describe is possible. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble, though. Note that CE has a 5 second cooldown, and commanding your ghoul to explode (when alive) takes 40 RP and activates the cooldown.

I'm actually pretty impressed with CE's current balance. It's a difficult balancing act, to be sure, but as it is seems superior to Death Coil on two or more targets. The cooldown is a bit of a slap in the face though, as if the ability isn't already hard enough to activate.

My observed damage numbers seem to be pretty close to Death Coil (except for the fact that it cannot crit), which doesn't seem to match the extremely low APC listed in the TTT (combined with the identical base damage to DC on the tooltip). I'll run around for a while and see if I can get a ballpark figure on what it may be.



There is no damage range listed and no variance apparent in the testing, so I'll assume I don't need big trials. I was careful to not apply debuffs or have any leftover procs/buffs when casting.

AP	Damage	Nonbase	APC (with Impurity)	APC (Impurity factored out)
3027	967	524	17.3%	13.8%
2917	950	507	17.4%	13.9%
2795	932	489	17.5%	14.0%

I also tried with and without maxed RP, to see if any mechanic like the pre-patch APC bug was in place, but there was no variance.

My DK alt is only 75 right now, but I've been trying to keep up to date on this discussion since the theorycraft interests me. If I get something grotesquely wrong, I apologize in advance.

If you can use the Explode ability on your ghoul, and follow it up 5 seconds later with a normal CE on the corpse it leaves, wouldn't you be able to do this rotation every ~40 seconds using NotD in a deep Unholy build like this?

Using a PS, IT, SS, BS, BS, dump, SS, SS, SS, dump rotation, you get 5 total NotD procs. The "5 procs per cycle" continues regardless of SS glyph procs. So every other cycle you end up with a cooled down Raise Dead spell. At that point you could weave in the pet's explosion ability (is this off the GCD like some other pet abilities?), and sub in your own CE and Raise Dead (and send the new guy in to pound on the boss while you wait for the cooldown) during the next runic power dump.

One question I have is how ghoul health is calculated. I know Ravenous Dead and Glyph of the Ghoul increase your STA contribution to the ghoul, but what is the baseline contribution? I'm trying to get a feel for what I could expect the pet's explode ability to do. Also, is that ability modified by anything, or is it simply a static 25% of ghoul health?

Last question. I assume the pet's explode ability attributes no threat to you, but your CE does. Is this correct?

Foxx2405 wrote an excellent post here, which summarized says:

See the post for the math, but it sounds like you could indeed have 2 explosions (Pet, then you) every 35-40 seconds. I'm actually kind of wondering why nobody did this before the patch, the pet's explosion alone packs quite a punch. Is there a cooldown on the ghoul's explosion that persists through death?

The way i see it is this:

- It will do more damage than deathcoil once 2 or more mobs are involved
- It could synergize nicely with NotD in some situations.

The former is true afaik. Someone did some tests and unless i remember incorrectly he said that with 3000 AP the damage is about 900.
So with 3 mobs and a corpse you do 2700 dmg which isnt bad.

However it still requires that corpse, which is hard in a ton of situations since once 1 mob starts dying they usually all die pretty quickly.

The latter still requires some theorycrafting and testing but with 2/2 NotD and a deep unholy spec your Raise Dead refreshes each 35-40 seconds.
That means that in theory every 40 seconds you can do the following:

- Explode your current ghoul for 25% of its HP, if this HP means current raid buffed it could be around 5k dmg !
- Explode the corpse of your ghoul for another 1-1.2k dmg (raid buffed again), this has been tested to be possible
- Summon a new ghoul

That is 6k dmg each 40 seconds for 80 RP which is much much more than you can get from DC or UB.

However tests need to be done to see if its actually worth sacrificing 3 GCDs for. Since those aren't always available.

Actually to come back on that, on a single target it might be best not to explode the actual corpse, its probably a waste of 40 RP that can be used on a DC or UB.

But still we're talking about 4-5k dmg here every 40 seconds. Thats pretty heavy.

Some quick very abstract napkin math, say it do 4k damage each 40 seconds.
You replace a death coil that could have done 2k dmg. So in fact you gain 2k dmg every 40 seconds or 50 dps

50 DPS, thats quite something for a talent thats widely regarded as useless.

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Main reason is probably that it used to cost an unholy rune, the dps loss is tremendous then since you lose a SS

As said above Corpse Explosion is not that useful for a 1pt. talent. I may drop my one point out of Desecration and throw it in for Shits and Giggles.

My Raid Leader hates it when we blow up the Raid Boss while he is trying to Hand out Loot.

From playing GuildWars where Necromancers had many spells that effected corpses (Raise Minions, Wells (think like a Totem eg. Healing Well, Mana Well, a Well that damages Mobs), Self Heals, Teleportation) there Corpse Explosion was used more for Denial purposes so others could not use it.

I am not sure if it works or not, but can you still raise your Ghoul out of a Corpse that has been Exploded? and if not you could use it to Deny another DK from ressing a Corpse in say Arenas? Though they would probably be Glyphed for it anyway.

Something to figure in the napkin math is that you will be losing some time on target dps from your ghoul between when he explodes, and when his replacement starts smashing the boss.

Also, can someone verify whether or not triggering the pet explode ability requires a GCD? If not, even better.

Slightly better dps:

- Explode your current ghoul for 25% of its HP, if this HP means current raid buffed it could be around 5k dmg !
- Summon a new ghoul
- Explode the corpse of your ghoul for another 1-1.2k dmg (raid buffed again), this has been tested to be possible

The sooner you summon, the sooner you can explode it again :-) (plus one extra hit from the ghoul. woohoo!)

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am wondering why people were not exploding their ghoul every ~40 seconds and immediately resummoning it. My personal guess is that nobody really thought about it and that it would've been too expensive.. not that gold has anything to do with min/maxing your dps.

I'm really just wondering if there's another factor I'm forgetting that would make this a bad idea.

Yes. An exploded corpse is a normal corpse that looks different. Edit: except be exploded again, I presume. Need to test.

I can't believe you're asking, but I'll answer anyways. The glyph is irrelevant. A DK can raise dead without a corpse as long as he has a corpse dust in his inventory.

There's no way a ghoul is going to do more dps in 3 (1.5?) seconds, than by exploding and being immediately resummoned, especially when there's more than one mob.