Bomb Redux

Suggestions
1

TLDR: Bomb damage progresses poorly, it should have durability increased to help, or some cool forging/skill options.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT BOMB MINING.

So I was really excited about the Rift Bombs, and they’re pretty amazing despite what I’m about to say (with some moderate forging and a mega strength brew, I could one shot vanilla elite wildstock), but after some basic analysis, I’ve determined that there is a serious issue with bombs and their viability as a weapon.

Slingbows progress really reliably, but bombs seem to stay relatively flat when it comes to damage potential during the life of the weapon. This is because all bombs only have 200 durability. This is severely limiting the overall efficacy of the weapon. The above forged bomb only lasted me 2ish meteors, and they weren’t easy meteors, the terrain damage made it difficult to navigate, and the fact that it takes a couple seconds of charging to be able to throw the bomb a reasonable distance made it difficult to win those two meteors.

Compare that to when I went out and solo’d with a Blink Slingbow, also moderately forged, and I was able to easily complete three meteors and only used up about 40% of the bow’s durability.

Here are some charts to show you the progression
image

None of this takes in to consideration that bows have better skills available since you can chose rapid fire or charged shot to be able to increase your damage output per second one way or another and that bows can be forged to have extra durability, but it looks like it’s hard to impossible to forge durability on to bombs.

The way I see it, there are three avenues to help narrow this gap and make the combat experience more dynamic.

1. Increase Durability to bring damage curve in line with slingbows.
By increasing the gem durabilities to 600, and the rift to 1000, I’m able to get a damage/lifetime progression that more closely resembles the slingbows. The bows are still statistically preferable, but the bombs would offer some variance in combat game play while remaining a viable option.

image

2. Add forging options to increase dynamism for bombs.
Some of this could be resolved by creating some interesting forging options for bombs beyond regen and healing. Either they could get some boons that reduce/remove terrain damage but increase mob damage and visa versa (shaped charge), or they could expand further in to the support world by having some buff effects, and debuff options with no damage/healing. So you could have bomb mages that do more to change the flow of battle with buffs and debuffs like speed/slow, weak/strong, or maybe some interesting terrain effects like an area on fire or sticky goo pools.

3. Add skills to increase the functionality of bombs.
Adding skills that either increased action speed/throw distance or area of effect/durability could do a lot to affect viability of bombs. But honestly this is probably something that should happen no matter what since bombs don’t really have much representation in the skill trees.

Ultimately, at this point bombs are not really worth it. The damage over lifetime is just too low, and even for healers, gem bombs are basically just as good and if you had to chose between a exo bomb and a exo bow, the bow would do way more to the damage nets of a meteor raid than your healing would be able to do.

Let’s give bombs some love!

14 Likes
2

Fully supported.

I’ve said for awhile that bombs are statistically unviable (granted I’ve been gone awhile) and they need to stop being overlooked if the devs intend for us to keep using them.

4 Likes
3

I’ll also add, that none of the above takes in to consideration the possibility of hitting multiple enemies with a bomb. However, the radius of the rift bombs is 3m, and I felt like AT BEST, I was hitting two-three enemies about 20% of the time, so here are the same curves with a 1.3x improvement layer to show how often I expect you’d hit more than one enemy.

image

Even if I’m REALLY generous and say I hit 3 enemies 40% of the time, the curve is still not great.

image

3 Likes
4

Fully support this as well, especially the part about forging. It was really disheartening to find out that there’s a really slim selection of boons for bombs after leveling up a bomb-based hunter, no crit chance/damage and no durability hurt. Taking AoE feels bad as well, the excessive terrain damage during a meteor hunt is too chaotic for practical use. Would like to see them buffed/changed so that they can at least be more co-op friendly.

3 Likes
5

There is a big problem with bomb sync between server and client. Most of the time they do not trigger damage on mobs because they are moving, same for healing bomb on players. I think this need be fixed first.

6 Likes
6

I didn’t experience this during my solo tests, but I can imagine it’s an issue with bigger hunts.

1 Like
7

Bombs are pointless, and the game is suffering because of it… the fact that bombs are only realistically ever used for healing or regenerating terrain speaks volumes.

8

I think there should be a way to make bombs not damage blocks but still damage creatures, possibly with a new forge effect as you said, OR by making bombs not damage terrain by default and have damaging terrain be a forge effect

Ignoring the cost vs slingbows, the main reason I avoid using damage bombs in combat is because of the massive craters it leaves, much to the detriment of me and everyone else.

3 Likes
9

Yeah, that makes the most sense. Since we aren’t supposed to use bombs for mining, they should just not damage terrain at all.

10

My instinct is to say we should forge terrain damage off, maybe as an intermediate step to regen. But I could also see having terrain damage be off by default as an option. I just think it makes it too much like an AOE sling bow shot by default if we do that.

But either way, they need a buff.

I guess there’s a case to be made for just make the crafting cheaper. Like if you can mass craft bombs for 1/5th the material cost, then you’d make it a little easier. But then it’s just annoying to forge and carry around all those extra objects.

1 Like
11

Potential solution, apply the same principle to bomb AoE as hammers have. As radius increases, damage to blocks is reduced. That way you can have the best of all worlds:
Default bombs are equally effective vs mobs or terrain. Useful for digging or trapping and hitting small packs of enemies. Small area of effect, no forge cost.
High AoE bombs deal damage over a huge area, but dont cause massive craters unless many are spammed in the same place. Little or no terrain damage is caused, so disruptions on larger hunts are greatly reduced. Damage potential to mobs goes up since you can hit several in an large area. Moderate forge cost.
Bombs can be forged with high AoE and terrain damage, but like when adding damage to AoE hammers, you must overcome the AoE damage reduction first. Perhaps in addition, adding block damage to AoE bombs does not increase damage to mobs? This enables high area AoE terrain damage bomb mining at a high forge cost, but reduces potential effectiveness so that many bombs are still required on high tier planets. Less effective than current forged hammer meta, but still viable for mid-low tier mining and terrain clearing. High forge cost.

Better still, as terrain damage goes up, AoE radius is reduced by a percentage.

Also, restore the original design where ores take standard damage from bombs instead of bonus damage, so you are less likely to vaporize ores.

1 Like
12

That gives me an interesting idea. One of the main reasons why you don’t hit multiple enemies is because your bomb hits the first creature, and then explodes with that as it’s center for the AOE, meaning you’re always wasting half the area. What if we had a forge option to blast in a cone behind the first creature hit. This doubles the area behind the initial target and greatly increases the odds of hitting multiple enemies.

With that, the base weapons still has durability and scale-ability issues. Unless you can essentially guarantee 5 hits per bomb, it’s still way behind it’s bow counterpart.