Vaal Detonate Dead

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Gemdraco wrote:

Am I wrong in that I should be able to use this skill with dual totem?

Yes.^^ You also get reflect damage with Detonate Dead. The corpse does not deal the damage.

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Caliginosus wrote:

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Gemdraco wrote:

Am I wrong in that I should be able to use this skill with dual totem?

Yes.^^ You also get reflect damage with Detonate Dead. The corpse does not deal the damage.

Yes, I see now that I need to use a support gem such as Trap/Remote Mine for Vaal DD to do damage with AB. Overall, I'm still disappointed with the Vaal gems in general. I really hope the devs tweak them in some way to make them more practical. Now that I have this mod on my shield, I'd like to use it and feel happy about it.

this is based off normal mode invasion league. i typically stand my ground (unless my hp reached 80%) via poor investment of es and eventual investment of shields. scion start regen and spell damage so far only things picked up.

VDD tends to explode VERY rapidly and due to killing roughly 25+ mobs on a relative same spot, this induces a degree of lag. i can tell this is sorta designed for spike damage but thats not necessarily what i wanted it for. while it was very cool to see corpse explode in a chain outward from the casted spot, it means its a little overly specific on "aiming" to hit a unique/boss/rare. i used this for half of the invasion specific uniques to very little effect despite at least 10 corpse at thier feet. this is somewhat expected due to the larger hp values the uniques have but at same time, embarrassing to waste the only charge.

i have used it twice on groups of mobs. both times the "chaining" will detonate recently killed foes that are still in ranges of the explosions. this is a fantastic property which (for me) was expectable and rewarding. i just wish it was slower in order to lessen lag and to cause a buffer for adding more explosions to the mix. right now it feels like the delays are equal to the explosion animation's own speed, roughly 10ms. this delay isn't like storm call's delay where the next waits for previous but sorta "speeds up" explosions. i prefer somewhere in between current explosion "speed" and storm call's speed of detonations.

please note that the client locks up for a split second if VDD is used in conditions players prefer, corpse count > 20. my computer is "falling behind" as its a year old, but it has no problems running most games on relatively high settings.

So I've noticed that if you try to cast Vaal Detonate Dead while you are mid-animation of a different skill cast, it will consume all soul charges and NOT cast.

This is clearly a bug.

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jdonk wrote:

So I've noticed that if you try to cast Vaal Detonate Dead while you are mid-animation of a different skill cast, it will consume all soul charges and NOT cast.

This is clearly a bug.

Currently the Vaal skill design utilizes "Take your money, then give your goods" philosophy. Souls are spent before the gem actually does anything. e.g. I cast Vaal Summon Skeletons in front of Kole, was killed by his bloody wave in the process and my skeletons did not appear while souls were consumed. I think it should be changed into "Give your goods, then take your money".

Once I get the Trap gem and VDD gem leveled up more, perhaps it will be even more fun. It's the kind of thing that you just sort of forget about as you clear an area. It's cool in situations where you can make a big pile of dead guys and then pull a boss to it. Or there may be some situations where you don't have to pull. But a little warning to anyone who tries what I have set up here: make sure you don't waste the trap. You have all those souls built up and riding on the placement of one trap so time it and place it well because it will suck if the trap expires before it gets triggered (or if it gets triggered without getting the main target). I hope they tweak the the vaal gems in some way. Then this may be even better.

This is a mediocre Vaal skill. Good Vaal skills do one of two things: either help deal with powerful threats by killing them quickly, or help deal with them by providing some form of defense or utility. This doesn't provide good utility, because if you want to blow up corpses you can just use Flesh Offering; and it doesn't provide good damage unless you can lure threats onto a huge pile of corpses.

I think the way to fix this skill is not to redesign it from scratch, but to increase the amount of monster health dealt as Fire damage. If it was above 30%, I feel players would be better incentivized to go through the trouble of setting up a corpse minefield, beyond the obviously "looking cool" aspect.

I have switched out the empower gem for fire penetration since the extra levels on VDD only increase the physical damage which seems to be secondary and pretty weak, anyway. I still struggle to find opportunities to make use of this skill, though.

However its gonna be super useful on .

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maxor wrote:

However its gonna be super useful on

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Yes. =)