[Joseph Jostar]

With the new update, I feel that 'Explosion' has become a bit over-tuned for a base class mage skill. The raw scaling exceeds that of its evoker counterpart, Sear, before applying Charge Mind and an utterly MASSIVE effective range given the size of the circle and how many tiles away you can place its center. It can become a bit pricey to cast when silenced, given the increase relative to circle size, but generally remains MORE than worth it. This is further compounded by its ignoring evasion.

The biggest issue, in my opinion at least, is its mechanic of detonating on round end. This counter-intuitively grants a HUGE boon to mages for being slower than their opponents (neglecting one of their class stats) and tends to punish the opponent for building celerity for dodge (which this spell conveniently ignores). This results in being able to bypass the spell's delay mechanic and effectively make it impossible to avoid if you are engaging with the opponent in any way.

I'm not sure if the raw stats need much tweaking, given its brief cooldown, but if nothing else it'd be nice to see the delay adjusted in some way. The first thing that comes to mind is moving the detonation to the start of the caster's next turn, or making the spell function in a similar way to Setting Sun where after a one-round cooldown the spell must be cast again to initiate the explosion. This would not only bring the spell's balance in line, but give the spell a more interesting role of creating a 'danger zone' you must either escape from or be prepared to eat the damage of rather than just a raw blast of damage that can't be avoided or countered.

I'd like to hear everyone else's opinions on this as well, of course, or suggestions on how to make this a little tamer. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.