Cast on Death: What am I not understanding?

Right, so this has dropped for me a couple of times, and leaves me baffled. Obviously there is some incredibly interesting synergy available here, but it escapes me. Why should I want to utilize a precious socket for when I am dead?

Cast on death + portal has some (limited) uses (maybe).

PvP can be a final "screw you".

Only real use I had found for it, was to build a MF character with nothing but MF gear (so no defenses) and bring the character in as culler back when boss runs where useful. I did some cast on death discharge MF runs on Dominus a long long time ago. If it's just to MF, you don't care about exp on death, and cast on death was able to do millions of damage back then (when people weren't already doing it like now).

I'm sure someone found better uses. Possibly involving animate guardian?

It's almost a troll by GGG. This is not a gem intended for power-players. The only time its use is potentially optimal is in Team PvP.

Because of the very large more damage multiplier, you can use it as a form of boss-killer in Standard League.

Chris did a Build of the Week video on it: True Glass Cannon

A high level player in global chat (Advesperate? Mwaahaha?) explained that he used it to cheese past the bosses in Atziri runs (switching characters - do most of the run on one character, use CoD other character, switch back afterwards) when he was feeling lazy.

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Namcap wrote:

Possibly involving animate guardian?

It won't cast animated guardian for you, and animated guardians themselves can't have gems socketed, so you can't use Cast on Death or even the broken Crown on a guardian either.

It's a trigger gem too, so it can't be used with totems or traps. It's definitely a good troll gem for Sarn Arena though. You could even use it on CI with a caustic mana flask and just explode yourself next to an enemy.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

You could even use it on CI with a caustic mana flask and just explode yourself next to an enemy.

Does that still work?? I thought that got patched out!

(Doedre's with low-life or Life would probably give higher Damage anyways :P)

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dudiobugtron wrote:

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Namcap wrote:

Possibly involving animate guardian?

It won't cast animated guardian for you, and animated guardians themselves can't have gems socketed, so you can't use Cast on Death or even the broken Crown on a guardian either.

It's a trigger gem too, so it can't be used with totems or traps. It's definitely a good troll gem for Sarn Arena though. You could even use it on CI with a caustic mana flask and just explode yourself next to an enemy.

Snapshotting is removed, so adding Cast On Death gem after summoning Animate Guardian should work. However, you need to be dead to give the Guardian the 300% multiplier.

Cast on death can't support minion gems.

Full MF gear+nothing but hardhitting spells like Firestorm+cast on death in every socket+portal gem in one CoD setup. Obviously this is SC only, but you suicide into a boss, the CoD nukes go off, and you take the portal CoD casts to go back and get your loot.