Explosive Arrow

Yes, I know the 6% crit chance is for the explosion. However, crit chance modifiers should increase this amount. Nowhere in the character sheet or tooltip can you find the actual crit rate for the explosion with all of your crit passives added in.

-Shaeltal

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Vipermagi wrote:

The explosion is not Bow damage, so Bow-specific modifiers do not apply, far as I know.

I've been trying to get a specific answer from GGG, but so far, it hasn't worked unfortunately. It seemed to work when I tried it in CB, but, I've developed some doubts now and just wanted to make sure before I put a bunch of passive points into a build that I made based on wrong information.

-Shaeltal

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The final damage of the explosion cannot be shown on EA because it isn't known until it happens, because the charges add to the base damage the skill can't say how many charges you'll put in one thing.
What it does show is the base damage per charge, which is labelled as such. All relevant increases (including to area damage) will apply to that base value when it's calculated.

do charges affect the damage? or do they only affect the aoe of the explosion?

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lapetus wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The final damage of the explosion cannot be shown on EA because it isn't known until it happens, because the charges add to the base damage the skill can't say how many charges you'll put in one thing.
What it does show is the base damage per charge, which is labelled as such. All relevant increases (including to area damage) will apply to that base value when it's calculated.

do charges affect the damage? or do they only affect the aoe of the explosion?

Well they affect the dmg, somewhat, each charge does the listed damage, so 5charges is 5x1charge in damage.


As for the crit question earlier, the explosion is a non weapon non spell projectile fire aoe. What that means is bow crit % passive don't work, since it's not a weapon attack. This was explained a few pages back already. Global crit should work fine.

If I understand correctly, support gems such as added lightning, cold or chaos affect both the initial bow attack & the fire explosion? So it would stack twice in theory?

Currently, explosive arrow is somewhat ineffective in some situations :
I can't use this skill reliably with ranged totems because any attempted charge application over 5 resets the charge timer.
ASPD -> damage conversion isn't a 1:1 conversion due to having to pause every time you hit 5 charges.

Proposed changes:
Auto-detonate the moment you hit 5 charges
Auto-detonate on failed application due to having 5 charges already.
Keep timers for each stack of 5 explosive charges, don't auto-reset the timer when you hit the sixth charge, instead start creating a new stack with its own timer from that point on. (and so on)

Also, some questions I haven't found the answers to via search.
Chain/Fork, do they affect explosion damage like GMP and LMP ? I'd expect them to, but the wiki explicitly refers to GMP and LMP only.
Same question in regards to ranged attack totems, does the damage reduction of totems apply to explosive arrow ? (I expect it does, considering it refers to damage and not specifically projectile damage)

Yes to all the damage reduction questions. If it reduces(or increases) projectile dmg, it affects the explosion which is considered a projectile(not a projectile attack, not a projectile spell, but still a projectile ^^).

For the issues not every spell work well with totems, it's like molten shell(which would be amazing on a totem) or skeletons to an extent.

The thing to know when touching on balance of this is that it's an extremely strong ability. Like really really strong. Making it automatically detonate instantly when you reach 5 would make it even stronger. The damage is balanced around the fact you do have to wait. Also, while generally fire is considered to be a bit lackluster, having an ability that can hit that hard is actually a huge advantage of fire when you can proc ignite very easily especially on aoes. Making the ability better in any regard I think would need to come with a fairly large nerf to compensate.

I have fast attack ranger so I try explosive arrow with range totem support gem.
Problem I ran into was that the fuse time kept being rest. From what I under stand is that max fuse it will stack is 5. So my totem can hit 30 times but wont do any more damage then 5 stacks. That only happens when totem dies, duration runs out, or if i cast another type totem.

I would suggest that when the six attack hits and you have 5 fuse stacks. Then six attack will set the fuse timer to zero and set off the skill to exploded. This would make it useful with range totem support gem.

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PyrosEien wrote:

Yes to all the damage reduction questions. If it reduces(or increases) projectile dmg, it affects the explosion which is considered a projectile(not a projectile attack, not a projectile spell, but still a projectile ^^).

For the issues not every spell work well with totems, it's like molten shell(which would be amazing on a totem) or skeletons to an extent.

The thing to know when touching on balance of this is that it's an extremely strong ability. Like really really strong. Making it automatically detonate instantly when you reach 5 would make it even stronger. The damage is balanced around the fact you do have to wait. Also, while generally fire is considered to be a bit lackluster, having an ability that can hit that hard is actually a huge advantage of fire when you can proc ignite very easily especially on aoes. Making the ability better in any regard I think would need to come with a fairly large nerf to compensate.

Thanks for answering my questions.

Re:Balance
This is a skill that has no excuse to be more user-friendly.
Just about every other direct damage skill does more damage if I hit things more, explosive arrow only does a fraction of extra damage for every hit over 5 and in fact cancels out all the saved up damage. This can be referred to as fucking weird.

If you want to balance a skill like this, introduce something similar to damage effectiveness for attack speed.

ASPD modifier would multiply the total ASPD boost with a certain value
Say you've got a couple of ASPD passives totalling up to 40% increased attack speed.
A skill ASPD modifier of 150% would result in a 60% increased attack speed for this skill.
A skill ASPD modifier of 50% would result in a 20% increased attack speed for this skill.

This way you can balance the skills in a better way that doesn't rely on contrived mechanics like the charge timer resetting for each hit over 5.