Does CE suck on /players 8?

[Biff Loman]

Does CE suck on /players 8?

I just posted another thread on my difficulty - eventually success - with Baal in normal. But I need another question answered.

Does corpse explosion suck on /players 8? Because I played through normal difficulty on /players 8, and CE never struck me as the great killing spell everyone makes it out to be. It seemed to hurt the monsters some, but wasn't worth the mana.

I'm right, aren't I - something about CE damage and monster hit points not scaling together?

So. . . I'm guessing it'd do fine in Hell difficulty, in /players 1 - 3. Have I got this right?

 

[Everglows]

Well look at it this way:

It does 60-100% of the monster's damage, 50% of which in physical and affected by the curse that doubles physical damage.

It therefore does 90-150% of the monsters life.

I'm not sure how it's affected by the monster's defense but when I use CE half of a pack of mob dies on /player 1 in hell online. And then you have about 4-5 more corpses to explose! I think of it this way: when I get 1 corpse, I get all corpses!

 

[Eilo Rytyj]

Yeah, CE doesn't scale with monster hit points. But neither do any of your other damaging spells, so it's not like it's any better or worse when the player number rises.

On /players 8, monsters have 450% of their base life. CE does 60%-100% of a monster's base life as damage. So it may look like it's not doing much, just remember that all of your other skills are going to take 4.5 times as long to kill something too. So it's all relative.

 

[jkra]

yep i can really notice the slowdown with only a couple extra players in the game. That's why I run key's in solo private games. For example, on the platform where Nihlitak is, I tele in the corner and wait for one monster to drop. When it does, a couple CEs is all it takes to make everything on the platform drop dead. After that, it's pretty much a race between me and Nihlitak on who can blow up corpses faster. Like Russian Roulette, and I usually win.

Now if I were doing this at player's 8. I'd probably get owned by those crazy bugged vipers and their green clouds of death even before I can get a good CE chaing going.

It's best as a necro to keep game sizes below 3 in hell--you're right about that. The extra drops from players 8 isn't worth the time it takes to kill enemies without a godly CE chain.

 

[Damric]

amplify damage +conviction really offsets the 8 player penalty. So if you can afford it, get an infinity mercinary, and have high levels of amplify damage to curse all affected monsters in the explosion.

 

[Eilo Rytyj]

You don't need to spend more than 1 point in Amp Damage, that's a waste. With modest +skill gear, you'll get a good radius (up to half the screen even). All you need to do is cast it twice to cover everything. At 4 mana per cast it's not really a big mana hog.