Detonate Dead is way too powerful (because of corpse life scaling)

And yes I have played it enough to know what I'm talking about.

The real issue with Detonate Dead is that you can take extremely high HP spectres (such as Primal Crushclaw and Blisterlord from Harvest) into the zone, therefore adding them to the Desecrate pool, which in turn makes your damage output go through the roof.
It really depends on the zone's Desecrate pool however, for example I would insta-phase Cortex boss, since there are NO corpses in there other than the default skeleton (Bonestalker).
In other endgame boss zones, there are a bunch of lower HP corpses, which reduces your damage significantly, however you can combat this by rotating several different spectres into the zone (which admittedly takes some time and effort as well as portals).
I think that the kind of insane DPS you get from blowing up the super high HP corpses, without any special gear investment, is broken and shouldn't happen (similar to how Spectre summoners used to be for a long time).

So, what's the solution here? Well, you cannot and should not apply a general nerf to DD, because that would just make it too weak. What it really needs is simply a cap. For example Primal Crushclaw has an enormous HP modifier of 1200%, and so when you are detonating a corpse, I think the base HP should have an upper limit - just for the purpose of explosion damage, without altering the monster base stats of course. Around 500% would probably be a good start to tone it down.

Why do I care about this? Well, DD is extremely popular right now, and for good reason. The lack of build variety / balance, and a stale metagame, is not good for PoE in the long term. And, I would like to play many different builds, but that's pretty tough when DD is that much superior - especially if you are in any way competitive.

(yada yada standard - dont care)

cocs detonate dead is the most fun and surprisingly tanky build i have. it did not get old even tho i created it like 2 or 3 years ago.

that said - corpse scaling with mobs having between 25k and 300k raw HP is.. strange design choice.

i steamroll endgame (including 10boss fights) having put like ~20 passives into damage (corpse explo is a pita to scale). it just doesnt feel right. fun - YES, 'right' - not really

replacing that desecrate+DD combo in my links with 'proper' spells results in a dud character


solutions:

proper one - fix that damn mess of various mobs being literally 50 times more tanky than others

bandaid one - cap the 'corpse damage' via gem level

or leave it alone. DD while 'stupid' is still tame compared to BV/BB/BF insanity and doesnt really break anything

I agree DD is fun, I have played it and enjoyed it myself.
After my proposed nerf, it would still be strong and plenty viable, just not ridiculously overpowered.

I do not agree that some monsters being more tanky than others is a problem. They are just different, and that's perfectly fine.

I do not agree that my proposed solution is a 'band-aid fix'. If you remember the Raise Spectre gem nerf, where they just slashed the spectre levels - THAT was a band-aid fix. They should've looked at individual spectres instead.
An across-the-board nerf is exactly what DD does NOT need, that would make it generally too weak. Simply a corpse HP cap or damage cap would put it in a good spot, and I do see that as a legitimate solution, unlike what they did to Raise Spectre - it did nothing to reduce the gap between weaker and overpowered spectres.

'Leave it alone' is definitely a bad idea, the DPS with high HP corpses and no gear investment is too much. Look at all the DD players - on multiple classes; Necro, Inquis, Elementalist - when you feel pigeonholed into it because it's so superior, that's not good for the game.
And yea, I'm sure there are other builds that need to be looked at, obviously. But this thread is about DD, because that's what I have played and have experience with.

they will not look into ALL mobs (and they add 10s of them EVERY. SINGLE. LEAGUE) - noone has time for that. this game stands on layers upon layers of unmanageable feature creep. managing that is unrealistic expectation

they have not done that with spectres (resulting in yet another idiotic auto-pick spectre everyone is using), they certainly wont do that for DD

what they CAN do is make all corpses have the same life. until they do that - people will 'smuggle' good corpses into boss fights. heck, people would use a yellow rubber duck performing annoying squeak sound as a spectre if it had good stats.

but having all corpses be the same kinda sucks, doesnt it?

you can cap it ofc - but that in effect is making them all the same - still not ideal. then you go into discussion about 'sure, cap it. but what value should we pick?'

side note: using 'subtle' balancing with 1200% value on a mob datasheet. it has to be a mess inside if doing that felt 'ok' to do