Blue Post
In the original Blue Post, Blizzard announced the following:
- Updated Affix: Explosive – Fewer Explosive Orbs spawn, but they now have substantially higher health.
Datamining
From datamining, this isn’t the only change that was made to Explosive:
- Â Deals Fire damage equal to 40% targets’ health to enemies within a 60 yard radius.
Cast time increased to 8 seconds (was 6 seconds).
Speculation and Thoughts
History of Explosive
The Explosive affix launched in Patch 7.2, alongside the other affixes Grievous , Bursting and Quaking. Ever since its additional, players have had some complaints over the affix including the ability to target their nameplate, how often they spawn and their original health pool (which scaled with the Fortified modifier. Some of this was addressed in future patches:
While this has helped make the Explosive easier, the number of explosive orbs spawning still can causes issues every expansion on particular bosses and just generally with large trash pulls. This can lead to targeting issues, though players have found success through Weakauras such as this Explosive Orb hide namelate one that you can add a keybind to hide all nameplates except for the Explosive Orbs.
How Much Will This Help – Speculation
The Blue Post unfortunately isn’t very descriptive and leaves a couple questions that still need to be answered:
- How much slower do Explosive Orbs spawn?
- How much health is “substantially higher health?”
But considering this, I believe that a spawn rate decrease on Explosive is warranted and hope it’s significant. On Explosive weeks, when you pull big, it can feel like you’re playing Whack-A-Mole with Explosive Orbs rather than playing a dungeon. Even when you outgear a dungeon key level with Explosive, you still have trouble chain pulling because Explosion deals % health damage rather than a flat amount that scales with keystone level, so you’re just dealing with Explosive and cleaving onto the dungeon mobs itself. Slowing down the spawn rate will probably also help reduce the difficulty of dealing with Explosives as a melee DPS compared to a caster DPS, due to the number of hard hitting instant abilities in the caster kit.
Moving on to the health increase, depending on how much “substantially higher health” is, the best classes for Explosive might shift from players with spammable instant cast damage spells to those who can deal on demand burst. Before the Shadowlands Pre-Patch, melee were highly prioritized during Explosive week because of how hard it can be to deal with Explosive as a caster. With a 6 second cast, casters could only cast a couple times before they exploded and since Explosive spawn randomly and in different amounts, you would need to have certain instant spells available to realistically help with Explosive, so the job was mostly delegated to melee DPS. Even with the cast time increasing to 8 seconds, that’s maybe only time for one more spell, and it can suck for casters to have to hard cast on Explosive, only for it to die right as the cast was about to finish, whereas melee DPS just hit something else with their ability. So assuming Explosive are going to return to how they were, melee classes may become very popular on Explosive weeks once again.
Overall, I predict that Explosive will become significantly more difficult for certain groups with Caster DPS, but depending on spawn rate and health increase, I could absolutely be wrong here. With less Orbs spawning, hopefully it will feel less like Whack-A-Mole and more like a calculated burn on a single Explosive Orb every so often. Maybe Blizzard should even make it predictable on a timer like Thundering so people can save procs to help casters who struggle with random spawns? We know they have that technology now.
However, one thing that should be mentioned is that Blizzard didn’t currently touch the Explosion damage. As such, with a slower spawn rate and an increase on Explosive Orb health, depending on the new spawn rate, it may be possible to ignore the Orbs more, and just “force” your healer to heal through them which I can’t imagine Blizzard wants. In addition, since Explosion can be Line-of-Sighted, the extra cast does also mean that you may be able to ignore the Orbs more and Line-of-Sight the explosion.
We’ll have to see how their new Explosive plays when it’s testable on the PTR!
