The new patch buffed Exploding Palm in a big way. You hit a monster with it, it starts bleeding. Kill it while the bleed is active, it explodes for 50% of it's maximum health. Needless to say, that's a LOT of damage to be dealing out from a single skill. Use it on two or three monsters in the same pack, and you can often cause a chain reaction that takes out the rest of the pack.
Now, the last rune for Exploding Palm is Essence Burn. The rune text is:
Instead of bleeding, the enemy will burn for X% weapon damage as Fire over Y seconds. If the enemy dies while burning, it explodes causing all nearby enemies to burn for Z% weapon damage as Fire over N seconds. This effect can happen multiple times.
Based on usage, I get the exploding effect on other multiple enemies, but I can't seem to figure out if they take the extra 50% explosion damage on top of the burning effect. If they do, Essence Burn is seriously silly in how you can just apply it to one, and watch the explosions happen.
Best Answer
According the this thread on Diablo's forums, it does not retain the exploding damage. This thread might be of interest to you if you wanna run a EP build.