Infernal Blow

I think the explosion damage can and should be buffed. It's only 20% of the damage, which means that it takes at least 6 explosions of the same mob type to kill another (6 due to fire resistance and regeneration).

With ~80% bonus to fire damage (Through elemental and fire damage buffs) this goes up to a decently respectable 36%, but I want to argue that, most of the time, players want to be able to kill mobs in 2-3 hits. So let's put the average damage of infernal blow to be 40% (of a mobs life)

If there are 5 mobs within explosion radius of one another, it will take 3 hits to kill the first mobs, 2 hits to kill the the next mob, and then one more hit to kill one more (and now the explosion damage will be enough to kill the final 2)

This is 6 hits to kill 5 mobs! (if each hit deals 40% damage)

If we move this up, let's say that each hit deals 60% damage, the number goes down to (2 + 2 + 1) or 5! This means a 50% increase in damage only effectively increases killing speed by 20%.

Maybe you could buff the explosion damage to 25 or 30%?

While damage increase for explosions would be nice, I'd rather see the Infernal Blow innate "corpse explodes" effect propagate with the fire damage from explosion. What I mean is that when I kill one mob with Infernal Blow and its corpse explodes and deals damage to mobs around him AND they also die due to this, their corpses should explode too.

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Winenose wrote:

While damage increase for explosions would be nice, I'd rather see the Infernal Blow innate "corpse explodes" effect propagate with the fire damage from explosion. What I mean is that when I kill one mob with Infernal Blow and its corpse explodes and deals damage to mobs around him AND they also die due to this, their corpses should explode too.

that would require the % damage to be a good bit smaller and somewhat larger AoE.

Yes. Im thinking about it too. I would love this skill with chain reaction. But i think that it could be a little overpowered (when reaction start) cause even if exposion dmg is lowered, you could still use culling strike support that could deal last 10% hp dmg. With elemental weakness cast on enemies and increased aoe, culling and ignite chance supports it could be one of the most effective killing skills (on groups of monsters).

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grabi wrote:

Yes. Im thinking about it too. I would love this skill with chain reaction. But i think that it could be a little overpowered (when reaction start) cause even if exposion dmg is lowered, you could still use culling strike support that could deal last 10% hp dmg. With elemental weakness cast on enemies and increased aoe, culling and ignite chance supports it could be one of the most effective killing skills (on groups of monsters).

that is actually already the case though XD

I think its working well now, only i hate exploding skeletors. Only one thing is bothering me. If exposion is counted as spell (increased aoe, concentrated effect gems work with it) i wonder why other supports like added lightning dmg dont work with it.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Dark0mens wrote:

So I added a 5% level 1 Increased Area of Effect support gem which increases the area by another 15% and the only real increase I noticed was in the mana cost.

Are the increased area enhancements additive or multiplicative with each other? Do they effect the explosion portion of the skill? I see the letter on the Infernal Blow skill that shows that Increased Area of Effect is supporting the skill but do not notice anything yet.

Thanks for the report! It appears that increased area bonuses were not being correctly applied to infernal blow. This will be fixed in 0.9.12

I didn't see anything in the patch notes about this, was the AoE increase fixed by this patch?

Hi,
Atm I have 138% inc. fire/elem./AoE damage from passives. So an explosion should deal 46.6% of the monster's HP as fire damage. Is that correct?
If so, what happens if I link this skill to culling strike and inc. crit multiplier? If I then gather a bunch of monsters with equal HP and no fire res., does the whole screen explode instantly as soon as I kill one with diamond flask?
It's a bit tricky to test, but I'll try it tomorrow.

EDIT: oh, nevermind! I misread one of the former posts. So, I guess explosions do not trigger more explosions. Makes sense. Then I'll stick with my combo IB+ignite+elem.proli. That causes really nice AoE burn damage.

This skill needs an area of effect boost badly. It isn't viable in merciless or harder difficulties, i've tried several infernal blow builds using a templar. It increased area of affect but under those characters the damage just never cuts it. Even at max AOE it's not enough for larger mobs. As of right now Infernal blow is only viable as a mid level skill no matter what class you play. If you want to keep it that way then add an arcing blow skill or something that gives more AOE for later use in merciless.


Thanks