Volatile Dead

Finally mages have a proper weapon to fight their way through this dark fantasy world of Wraeclast.



I thought unreasoned whine wouldn't be effective enough so I've made a VD build, patch 3.2 Bestiary

Auto-aim skill with aoe and once again fire based.

The x-y damage is way too high for the opportunity cost of this skill, when you use a lazy no need to target attack in any balanced game you get less dps in exchange. Sad in poe this is the invers.

So my feedback>
nerf the x-y damage, lazy skill need less damage for good game balance
Nerf the max distance those balls are following monsters/ players. This skill is a nightmare in pvp unless you have 300 ms.

Yea, remove the damn skill or nerf it to hell.


My main idea is rework it to be the current iteration of Cremation, and rework Cremation to be some sort of burning damage based on corpse life or something.

A skill like this does not deserve to be in a game that calls itself “Hardcore”. No more of this “my game plays itself for me” bullshit.

I'll counter the others and say I found this skill pretty fun (in Abyss) and not especially OP. Don't know about PvP.

Could you please reveal the skill base constants? I'm specially curious about:

Corpse explosion base radius
Orb explosion base radius

Since AoE rework each additional unit matters. It's important to know if that 8% node able to increase the radius or not.

What formula used to calculate Orb movement speed?
How big 'roaming' radius where orbs could move upon spawn without detecting a target in aim range?
How far orbs are able to aim on target?
How does target 'visibility' affect that radius?

One thing that kinda annoys me about this skill is that it not only phases through walls and flies over everything as if those things wouldn't be there, but that it also can't be stopped by placing totems, minions or walls between the orbs and the targeted player and that even skills like blink arrow can't counter it.
Sure, it mostly affects PvP, but since the skill was added, it's basically the only skill used in PvP and the lack of interaction with other skills makes it not just OP, but also kinda boring, for PvP, as well as for PvE.

I would suggest following interactions:

Blink/Mirror Arrow:
random chance that the orbs target the old or the new position, possibly prefering the old position of the target.

Clones in general:
distracting the orbs, so that the orbs change the target to a clone with a certain chance. Means, the more clones are summoned, the higher the chance that at least some orbs change the target from the player to the clones.

Frost Wall:
can't phase through it, but rather flying around it and possibly can't target players/enemies behind Frost Wall (already targeted players/enemies aren't affected). If the Frost Wall is summoned too close to the orbs, they collide with the Frost Wall and explode at their location on the wall, dealing their damage in the area.

Minions and totems:
distracting the orbs similarly to clones, but to a lesser extent. If minions and totems are between the orbs and their target, they don't phase through the minions and totems, nor do they fly around them, but rather explode on hitting said minions/totems as if they reached their target.


I think that changes like this wouldn't affect the current PvE-gameplay too much, but it would open the door for new exiles using this skill without being too OP resp. having more challanging enemies due to their ability to counter this specific skill in more ways. Also, it would increase the skill variety in PvP again.

You also have to look at what Volatile Dead does compared to the other offense-based corpse skills do. VD exceeds them in every way. Detonate Dead has nowhere near the same range as VD, nor does Cremation. Cremation has a hard limit on the amount of geysers, VD has no limits on the amount of active fireballs. Cremation and Detonate Dead require some semblance of timing and positioning needed to make them work, or even hit. Volatile Dead just does the work for you. None of the other skills have any need to be used; they come nowhere near the power of Volatile Dead. It’s the ultimate sleeper skill and really doesn’t belong in the game unless it gets not just hit, but damn near destroyed by the Nerf Hammer.

It seems y'all have never used VD yourself, the skill is disgusting.
I'd say the skill has been perfectly made if the goal was to fuck up everyone except Poet's Pen users.

Initial orb speed is too low, if you trying to clear fast and you able to move fast — all you could think about while looking at bunch of slowly moving orbs is "ffs could you please move there already!". The only case where orb acceleration feels 'ok-ish' is 30%+ packsize Forge of Phoenix.
In every other scenario Spell Cascade + AoE (2 times less damage per hit) Detonate Dead feels a lot more powerful and is a lot faster than VD.

VD orbs AI tends to ignore 'most dangerous' monster and aim on weaker target, if orbs can't find a path to the target they just run up to a corner and sit there until expire.
Thing like a single legendary snake in Alluring Abyss will drive you insane if you try to kill it with self cast VD.
like - here's an op enemy right upon you and you really want to kill it fast (because each hit deals over 6k damage to your 75% chaos res character) aaand there are a bunch of inactive monsters in closed rooms around, what VD orbs do? right, they just ignore the snake and you have to lure it 3 screens away to get the full dps potential.
Same thing with last Elder phase, VD ignore the Elder and spreads around, even with 50k tooltip avg damage VD (65k effective damage per orb) I have to switch to GMP Cremation for t13+ Elder otherwise things goes crazy before VD able to kill him. Cremation deals like 10 time more 'effective single target' DPS than self-cast VD, especially if you can scale projectiles amount.

Even normal atziri can't be done with self cast VD if you don't have reflect immunity, even if you cast VD in a corner opposite to mirror - at least one retarded orb will rush through whole boss room in order to get you killed by 100% reflected damage.

So what we have here summary:
PvP - you able to move at 150 unit/sec speed or you'll die to random VD.
PvE - your build should not rely on VD AI nor VD orb damage (aka using lvl 27 Unearth - VD with dual Poet's Pen) or you'll hate the game after all.

I don't think the skill either fits the game thematically, that 2 screens aim feels equally wrong as if we could use orbital ion cannon to kill 2nd Dominus phase.

its a really cool skill.
honestly, it does too much damage.
there is NO reason not to use it over detonate dead.

id reduced volatile dead's damage by 15%,
or put cast time at .9secs.

also, itd be great if we could get some clarification on the aoe's
of like, the inital copse explosion, the balls targeting range,
possible overlap of the actuall targeting balls.