Detonate Dead

I thought about using a crit DD build.
Problem : DD is not a spell...
So with gear/gem and passive nodes (18 !), all I can get is about 30% crit chance for a end game build.
It is too low !

What dev think about increase the base crit chance from 4.5% to 6.5% ? Even with this, it will be like 43% crit chance. Not OP but playable.

Yes, definitely not affected by spell modifiers.

just because it doesn't deal spell damage, doesn't mean its not a spell. if it isn't an attack, it is a spell and thus affected by cast speed and spell crit. some totems and traps are the exceptions as they don't actually use spells (but making them is a spell). detonate dead is a spell, it just doesn't deal spell damage, so if it really isn't getting crit and cast speed benefits (hint its quality effect is cast speed) then i don't know what's going on.

DD has the "Cast" keyword, but not "Spell". Yes, cast speed helps, but that's it.

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Chris wrote:

Detonate Dead: This now deals entirely fire damage. It deals 8% of corpse life as well as flat damage. The damage increase per level has been significantly increased. The base cast speed has been increased from 850ms to 800ms. Quality on this skill now offers substantially less cast speed, from 60% cast speed at 20 quality to 20% cast speed at 20 quality.

how much of a nerf is this going to end up being?

8% instead of 18% is a 55% nerf even with The damage increase per level I'm guessing it got a ridiculously huge nerf

Well, I can understand that they want to change the skill because it was not intended to faceroll maps with a lvl 1 gem. Because it it listed under skill reworks and not nerfs, I somehow hope the damage nerf will not be to big at lvl 20, maybe the flat damage will be high enough to make it more viable in big groups after all. But we just have to wait for the numbers.

I hope the % life damage scales. I understand wanting to give incentives for leveling the gem, but I really dislike nerfing the % damage so much. Part of what makes the skill cool is that it scales with the difficulty of the things you fight. Moving so much of the damage into flat damage takes that away.

They also reduced the effect of quality so much on the gem. Was there problems with detonate dead that they needed to change it so much? I guess ele prolif might be problematic.

Why use detonate dead if you have fire trap now? Well 8% form a extra life rare is still big, but overal the identity of the skill seems to be in jeopardy. We will just have to wait and see.