In response to Necromancers needs to deal supplemental AOE damage in addition to Bone Spirit/Spear primary builds in PVE applications, I think Corpse Explosion could be overhauled to vastly improve players experience.
Corpse Explosion isn’t really a satisfactory complementary skill to Necromancers goals, because it destroys the resources Necromancers primarily need to function, that is summoning from those corpses.
Corpse Explosion should be changed to a charge up Corpse Exploitation ability, that automatically explodes nearby corpses but still allows the corpses to be raised. This reduces the need for necromancers to spam click and swap between bone spirit/corpse explosion that can be quite a headache if those are your primary skills.
If your main source of damage is CE and BS or Spear, you will be doing a lot of finger and mouse work just to have a viable build. Changing corpse explosion to a charge up orb-like attack ability like Assassin’s tiger strike, that automatically explodes corpses then is recharged somehow either by recasting it or harvesting another spirit somehow, would be a vast improvement in player quality of life.
For instance, if you activate corpse explosion, it gives you a corpse “spirit” charge that swirls around the necromancer. Then, when you come near to a corpse the charge goes off and automatically casts corpse explosion. This would happen instantly and function like regular CE if you are already near a corpse. The higher level the CE, the more charges you could carry, and the greater the AOE. You could even have the charges stack, through a synergy, at a higher mana cost. The skill could be changed its name to Spirit Bomb or something like that.
This spirit bomb would begin with the regular single cast trigger, then each body it explodes it would gain some strength and explode the next corpse automatically with more AOE. The Necro would then have the option to ‘release’ the spirit orb (with a regular single cast), which is a collection of exploited corpse’s souls. The Spirit Orb would function as a magnetic ball, a spirit vortex or doorway to another dimension, that sucked nearby units into it. This would give necromancers crowd control, allow them to finish off these monsters trapped in the vortex with Bone Spear, and still retain 100% of the functionality of the original Corpse Explosion.