[Autumn]

Currently I think that Explosion is an incredibly overtuned skill that needs some addressing somehow in some way, shape or fashion. I can't really think of a scenario where Explosion would be a bad skill to ever use, with its low cooldown, high damage, and EXTREMELY high coverage, as well more effects on the skill than most skills even dare to have.

This spell is a base mage spell, with a targetable tile (therefore ignores geist) in 3 range that can be expanded to be tied with LB for the most AoE coverage, being as large as 6 range at max range, but you get some added wiggle room with positioning on top of that. 

Furthermore this spell also can burn things (Reducing their DEF by anywhere from 6-28 in 99% of cases) and knocks back all enemies by 3 tiles from the center of the explosion, and is un-evadable damage. All topped off with a mere 2 round cooldown.

Lets compare this with a class that does effectively the same thing, Lantern Bearer:

Lantern Bearer can have a 6 Range circular AoE that stems from themselves, which is a lot more balanced when you consider that LB is forced to put themselves in danger and is extremely position dependent to get off a lot of their damage, as unlike with Explosion's radius, LB's Radius has falloff damage as well, losing upwards to 40% damage at the very tip of the lantern flames. (Salamander for example doesn't ignore evasion, and only has a lvl 10 burn)

Now if you're faster than most of your opponents are, this ends up being somewhat manageable as now you have the option of avoiding the damage, this gives a degree of agency among your opponents to act, but if the explosion user is slower (Which most are) than most other party members, than at best only one person can avoid the explosion itself.

Another thing going for Explosion is the synergy with Gemstone Staves, particularly those with deploy Talis, as for now an additional 1m you can place a 6 Range AoE spell on any tile within 8 range, this allows you to snipe things across the map with strong un-evadable damage and in an AoE too. This spell is virtually un-kiteable.

This spell is just absurdly overpowered, and it really needs some adjustments to it, I actually have no idea how you're supposed to deal with how much pressure the presence of this spell has, with such a low cooldown too.

People are inevitably going to come in and explain the downsides of explosion such as:

• It does no damage vs fire resistances
  

As can anything else in the game that innately does fire damage, and 'less we forget there is an item belt-able weapon with massive downsides that enables you to ignore fire resistances anyway.

• There's a massive FP cost to the spell
  

This is a decent argument to be had, it has up to a 54 FP Cost at maximum size, but this value can be nearly halved by Evoker's Arcane Tattoo (Which it usually is) and after that, most mages have more than enough FP to sustain this, even if they're not using Arcane Tattoo thanks to the plethora of FP sustaining items that synergize with their builds.

In order for explosion to be as powerful as it is, it needs to be made much more fair to play against, or it needs some of those effects removed and otherwise adjusted.

So now I'll make some suggestions.

My first one and most suggested one is to make it so Explosion doesn't trigger until the User's next turn, instead of on the next round, this would justify a lot of its strength as some of the counter play can be attributed to 'just move out of it lawl.'

My second suggestion that would be accompanying any other changes would be to only make it evasion ignoring in a relatively low range, point blank preferably (within 1 range diamond of the explosion tile), this would make it so that the AoE coverage isn't as vastly overpowered as dodgy characters could maybe get to play the game, it would also make sanctuary able to combat it more effectively too.

My last suggestion, if nothing else from the above, making it a 5 round cooldown instead at least cuts down on the sheer pressure from the ability, as now fire mages will be forced into making a good decision with it, instead of throwing it down every 2 rounds for extremely high AoE damage.

[Snake]

Explosion being the way it is was my bad. I told Dev that "it's a telegraphed move so it's fine to be evade ignoring", but that was not the case. Explosion IS NOT TELEGRAPHED AT ALL.

If only it worked like Setting Sun does, it would be more bearable than its current dated interaction of "on round start". Dodge people cannot avoid an Explosion, since a slower opponent will lay down Explosion, and end their round, so immediately it will proc on the next round's start, making the dodge, who is definitely always going to be faster for building CEL, to eat shit.

So here I humbly request, instead of tampering with numbers or cooldowns, can we please make Explosion a properly telegraphed attack?

Again, use Setting Sun as an example:

- 3M to set it up, cannot use the skill (spell on this case) on the same round.
- On the next round, you use Explosion again to detonate it. Or it detonates automatically once you end your turn.

[FaeLenx]

Make it stick on the board until detonated and you've got yourself an actually useful spell instead of a neutered version of setting sun.

[Shujin]

As long as CEL, or rather being faster than your opponent, is a disadvantage in the game and its mechanics, skills that are "telegraphed" will always benefit the more reliable tanky version of a user. Unless its something like Setting Sun of course.
the slow ones will be able to react and most of the time be able to avoid the damage entirely. So it being evade-ignore kinda just adds insult to injury.
I really wish CEL/Turn order was actually beneficial to faster people.

litte side rant:
In my topic of "When is it okay to ignore Evade" I pointed Explosion out as well, like 2-3 months ago. The answer I got was "Mimimi, when one skill is countering your build, your build is shit." So I wonder where those smartasses are now. "just use a Red letter" or some other high-quality comments that totally reflect actual balance.

Little rant aside, glad people catch on to how oppressive this skill really is to a whole archetype.
The only thing I sort of want to say is that maybe number/effect tweaking would probably be the better version, unless you really just want a Setting Sun light version?
Don't know if there might be a more interesting tweak with effects in the vein of
"If target has higher Cel than you, XY effect it not working."
or
"If you are faster than your target your skill gains XY effect."

I think those conditional effects could help the issue of CEL being a disadvantage in future. That way a very fast explosion user might still just get the current iteration of Explosion, when he uses it against someone slower. Though its still telegraphed then.
So I don't know, I think Explosion is just one of the telltale things that shows whats wrong with Turn Order, makes me think that explosion isn't the real problem but just an side effect of it.

[FaeLenx]

Oh, I'm still in the 'when one skill is countering your build, your build is shit' camp. Fire damage has more counters, absorptions, etc than any other element, and elemental damage in general comes with so many opportunities for resistance. Just because no one's commenting on the 10th thread where the same few people complain about the same few things doesn't mean people have changed their minds. It just means I looked back in and gave a new suggestion because the old suggestions of 'make the skill bad because I don't like it' get very tired and I'd rather be constructive toward someone else's ideas than dismiss it outright as pointless complaining as usual. It's nice to have ideas that would change the game, and the suggestion I made seems to hit everyone's needs of 'make explosion not some problem for the niche case of people having too much dodge to survive a skill with a cooldown' and 'don't make it useless because that's what everyone who strives for a 0% hit chance on themselves wants.'

Dodge is just a bad design feature in general. It was at least okay when it was a class feature with some caveats like it was for Demon Hunter. People insisting that they should have a character who is wet tissue paper but has effectively 100% damage reduction in PVP is just silly, and that's what dodge tanks want. I've missed attacks in PVP, specifically NOT used abilities that would 100% miss but would otherwise stomp on a target that's boosted their evasion by that point, but the moment something does them damage they go into chat and say 'dodge is dead.' You know what Dodge should be used for? An ability score tax on people to make sure they invest *some* skill or risk missing a bunch and a way to punish the people who push their hit to some obscene limit at the cost of survivability or other stats.

[Shujin]

Just because something has a counter, does't mean its balanced. Just because fire resistance is in theory one of the more easy ones to counter, it would STILL need very specific items or races.

And fire also has the most things that helps you by pass fire resist, by the by. Good luck building against hell fire explosions. That argumentation is flawed in a game that wants to inspire build variety and not force people to ALWAYS run fire resist else "your build sucks". that has nothing to do with the build, when a skill is simply overtuned and can also by pass you building against it, by simply equipping one item.

Everyone agrees dodge is terrible right now, in either side of the extremes, and most push against it. The reason why it even exists is because the other side of the spectrum pre GR2 of SWA Tanks was ridiculously overpowered as they only needed to build 4 stats in the most extreme cases. Vit,str, def and res. They had so high SWA that "Evasion" didn't even matter cause they still did more damage than those people could ever hope to achieve. And if it mattered they had a bunch of Evasion by pass skills that were more than enough to 1 turn kill most. Cooldown didn't even matter.
It was not fun, cause everyone started to run those. So it was just a slugfest. Everyone basically had the same build with mild alterartions depending on what flavour you wanted to run. Just who could unga bunga the hardest. And well it didn't get much better.

Skills that simply work in the vein of "Yeah I just don't play your game! I am comfortable with mine!" invalidate all the options that do have to build for it. And no that does not mean that someone elses build "sucks", it just means the skill makes it so that it does. You could argue that the other side would need to be changed, but usually changing few skills is easier. But change need to happen either way.