Corpses go BOOM!

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.

I think a more ideal solution would be for Blizzard to allow for the spell to use Corpse Dust as a reagent in the absence of avaiable corpses, just like ghoul summoning. The new minor ghoul glyph removes the reagent cost so you will have a way to avoid needing to carry a ton of the reagent at your disposal.

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?

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.

On multiple mobs, of course. I was mostly discussing the single-mob scenario. My point wasn't that it was bad, but that it was a condition to work into the theorycraft. Assuming a ghoul contributes ~300 dps (probably a pretty conservative number but correct me if I'm way off) then a 3 second loss of time on target means you're losing 900 damage every 35-40 seconds or 22-26 dps loss. Also note that after the first explosion your pet is unlikely to be raid buffed, which also lessens the damage a little bit.

So overall not an insignificant shift in the theoretical gains. I still want to try it out in a practical setting.

You can still rez ghouls from exploded corpses.

If you're 17/0/54 specced desecration is a bad talent anyway, you're using a rotation where you might not have a single plaguestrike for 40+ seconds, depending on your luck. So no faul there.
If you're dual wield spec its different, but still. There are few talents where you can get more than 50 dps out of a single point. Even the new necrosis is around 40 dps per point.

Ill go run some tests on that in a bit.

Although the "dps time lost" on boss is really small, you explode it, and summon a new one right after. However you are right and it should be considered.

So basically the summary should be:

CE dps = Explosion dps - Lost Ghoul dps - Lost DC dps

As for GCD i dont think it matters much, in my 2H unholy spec i have plenty of GCD left, in a DW spec i dont think you can spare many a point for CE.

Totally right

Although for optimal dps, i'd probably just ignore the 2nd exploding. Unless you're using it on aoe trash. Which actually isnt such a bad idea.

PS > IT > PT > DND > CE
Is some insane burst dps.

If you use Horn right before you run in you might actually make enough RP to have both explosion and UB up after 1 rotation.

Actually I did understand what you mean, but i was under the impression that exploding your ghoul also costed an unholy rune from your side.
If it didnt, it makes me curious because, that COULD imply (unless someone can tell me right off the bat) that blowing up your ghoul in this patch doesn't cost any RP either.
That would make this a whole lot interresting, since that means you can pull off some neat combos.

Going to respec today to test some stuff out, just not really sure where im gonna pull the points out of.

You're right and that was my first thought.

But until I read the post I actually forgot that exploding your ghoul takes time as well. The self destruct is just like exploding with Shadow of Death, it's a 3 second cast if I'm not mistaken.

So the time becomes a bit bigger.

And when you lose both ghoul dps time AND 40 rp (that couldve been used on a DC), you have to substract that from the total benefit.

If the conclusion is the corpse explosion doesn't add enough to earn its stripes then it might not be useful at all.

I might still take it for trash though. Or purely for sentimental value (<3 D2 necromancer)

/cast [target=pet:ghoul] Corpse Explosion unfortunately does not work :\ I imagine this is all due to the way the spell works as it doesn't technically cast it on the ghoul, but rather trigger him to explode himself.

Honestly I think anybody that says this spell is still worthless hasn't played with it post-patch. Especially with the miserable state the Gargoyle is in, over the course of a raid it's most certainly worth the 1 point. It's glorious on trash and helpful on bosses with adds. To say you'd rather use the RP on UB is silly - do both.

Sure it's worthless for single targets, but that's not the point of the ability.

My only real gripe is that it can't crit, but I suppose this is balanced out by the fact that it also (to my knowledge) can't miss or get resisted.

Just to give some numbers for a raid setting in clearing trash...

I was running 0/20/51 and I was NOT sploding my ghoul because I am affected by the bug that prevents me from summoning a ghoul without a corpse so I was very protective when I had him alive.

Over the course of the night I cast it 59 times, my average hit was 1518, my max hit was 2102. The main problem I saw with it was that by the time there was a corpse available to blow up, most everything else was dead as well so it would hit maybe only 1 or 2 mobs in a pack. (welcome to World of AoEcraft)

I also noticed that the packs in the military quarter where we pull out the whirlwinders, there would be corpses ready to explode nearby but it would always choose a corpse within range of the mob I was currently targetting. I suspect that it does one of two things:

1.) Picks the closest corpse to your target.
2.) Picks the closest corpse to your player character.

I think with a little more practice and getting used to using the skill I can squeeze quite a bit of damage out of it. Unfortunately this is mainly a trash clearing/novelty spell as I think the extra damage you gain from blowing up your pet ghoul is far outpaced by the DPS that ghoul provides when buffed versus not buffed on later summons.