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.

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.

That macro has not worked despite me trying everything possible. It claims the pet is a mechanical or elemental creature.

Corpse Explosion is still a dps increase if your ghoul keeps dying (and you have NotD), and if you use it at the VERY end of the fight, for an extra ~5k damage. Assuming everything's perfect if you did 500k damage in a fight that's a ~1% dps increase

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 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.

or maybe give it a 2 min CD and have it refresh the CD of summon ghoul

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.