Not worth the hit to 3 other bombs.

Freeze offers the best control, but very little damage.

Freezing does more damage than I think most people expect. For fun, I've taken out rooms full of monsters (in T3) using nothing but the shivermist. It isn't the fastest way to clear the room, but it isn't that slow either.

So, when a shivermist is used in the more normal fashion of freezing the crowd, then whacking individuals monsters with swords, all the other monsters that aren't being hit with swords are taking noticeable amounts of damage. The damage from shivermist just isn't as obvious as the swords hit-hit-die, the damage is done where you aren't looking.

Similarly, when kiting crowds with my storm driver, I often see monsters die when I haven't hit them. They are dying because shock causes periodic damage. Again, this damage isn't something that is very obvious, if you aren't looking for it, but it is there. A shock bomb may well be very effective at kiting hordes.

Yeah, what Meta said. There are better bombs for damage when soloing, and when grouping, your team mates usually smack your frozen prey around before the ice expires.

shocked things do damage to everything around them also. If the new shock bomb causes shock with the same reliability as agni causes fire then it will be clearly superior for kiting around large groups of things/

I think the big bonus of this bomb is you can combine it with shiver or the ash. The ash and shiver are probably the most popular, but can't mix because the status cant co-exist. Shock and Fire can mix, meaning the damage will be really nice, you could also mix with shiver, but the shock ticks break the ice.

That being said, Poison Shock and Fire hazes put together will make quick work of anything. It's not so much of "bomb A vs bomb B" but more of "bombs A + B vs A + C"

way i see it freeze is great. but when you cant freeze may consider using shock to still have some cc.

One thing I am wondering - if a mob shocks and you are standing near them - do you get shocked as well? I have had some trouble with shock mecha knights recently (mainly in arenas 3rd room where theres lots of them last phase) - I seem to get shocked all the time but doesnt seem to be due to getting hit . If this is the case - forget the shock bomb.

Been playing with my Plasma Capacitor 4*. It seems to have a profound effect on gun puppies and kats, they just can't operate in a normal manner making them rather easy to destroy. On gremlins, it slows them down enough that you can safely get a blast bomb in front of the horde.

Mixing Ash and the Plasma Capacitor deals damage very quickly. The shock doesn't contribute much damage but it seems to increase the fire tick frequency. Not really sure, going to try doing a recording to see what is going on exactly. The nice thing about this instead of overlapping Ash/Shiver for increased tick frequency is that the mob is will remain mobile so you can maintain aggro and draw more in. Tried this on T3 jellies, wolvers and gremlins... really surprised how well this works.

>Fire
>- becomes a lot less useful in situations with two or more healers
Not entirely true. Out DPSing healers is very helpful. They can only heal single targets at a time so damaging large groups of enemies is a good way to keep them busy while whittling down the amount of mobs in the room.

Shock
+ can be passed from one enemy to another, potentially inflicting a large group at the same time
+ If multiple monsters are suffering from shock near each other, additional area-effect damage will be caused to them and all monsters near them; inflicting shock on a large group simultaneously will cause MODERATE amounts of damage to the entire group
- like curse, it doesn't make it easier to dodge/block attack
- against a single foe the DoT from shock is weak
- supercharges Quicksilvers
situation: small mob numbers tightly bunched together; useful in most normal rooms of normal levels (not Arenas/Danger Rooms etc)

fixed for you. the first two are no longer true due to the patch that nerfed shock

edit: I take it back. Apparently it does have an affect on the attack/movement speed of scuttlebots. So I've found it is good at slaying scuttlebots and mini cubes so far. Very useful bomb.

I've gotten my Tempest to level 10 and have used it in combination with Ash/Shiv as well as a replacement for them in a variety of gates now.

Basic Bomb Mechanics:

• Shock deals actual elemental damage (unlike fire and ice which deal "fire" and "ice" damage). Because of this Construct and Undead monsters take the most damage from ticks, Beast and Gremlin take the least
• Shock ticks do small AOE damage to surrounding mobs
• Same radius/chrage time/mist duration as haze bomb series

Enemy Effects:
Mechaknights - VT triggers shock spasm. This is basically reverse-quicksilver; it triggers a negative effect. This slows down movement and will affect regular kiting patterns. Note that mechaknights can still block while shocked.
Retrodes - They still attack with similar frequency. Their movement may be decreased but the range attack is what is dangerous with these enemies.
Lumbers - Maybe, but maybe not. Hard to tell.
Scuttlebots - Their movement is noticeably hindered by shock. They move forward a lot less than normal. They tend to travel closer together so they shock each other.
Gun puppies - No change as far as I can tell but maybe their movement speed is decreased. This not very significant since they are easy to predict and avoid at regular speed and the shock isn't decreasing their rate of attack.
Jelly Cubes - Their movement seems like it is decreased slightly but now that they have their ranged attack this isn't very significant.
Oilers - Movement speed hindered by shock. Not super significant but allows you a little more breathing room, I guess.
Kat Ghots - Decreased movement, attack interrupt They lunge a lot less, sometimes get frozen in place.
Slags/Zombies - Decreased movement speed, attack intterupt. Note: seems to interrupt their lunge but doesn't do anything for their breath attack.
Gremlin Menders - No change
Gremlins - No change
Wolvers - Can't tell, at least in T3, but I'm assuming no change. They don't go insane while shocked like they do when on fire though.
Devilites - Can't tell any difference. They still throw stuff with no regard for anything.

Bomb Hazards

• Can supercharge quicksilvers
• Enemies that are shocked can activate switches and blow up crates
• Sometimes shocked enemies cannot be knocked back

Possible Use/Combinations
The bomb's strength seems to be against the enemies that are weak to elemental damage. It visibly slows mechaknights, kat ghosts, and zombies. You almost get a two-for-one combo of shivermist+ash of agni against kat ghosts since they take damage over time (DoT) as well as getting nearly frozen in place with attack/movement interrupts. The best use for this bomb seems to be as an AoA replacement in areas where AoA isn't effective (i.e. fire strata) or in areas where VT has noticeable benefits (i.e. undead/ghost levels).

As far as combos go:

• Ash of Agni - The DoT stacks. This is sort of a weak combination since the DoT of the VT isn't very high but if you wanted to slowly whittle enemy health away this would be the best way to do it.
• Shivermist - Shivermist can hold groups of enemies together while shock ticks hit short-range AoE to nearby mobs. This combo seems to be so-so since VT breaks ice and allows a moderate amount of enemy movement.
• Venom Veiler - Since shock deals actual damage, lowering enemy defenses will actually increase the damage for each VT tick. Unfortunately, VT ticks deal minimal amounts of damage so the minor debuff doesn't help much (30 dmg instead of 28dmg against enemies weak to elemental @ D24). The short duration of VV makes the cost of upkeep for this bomb very high and yields very little.
• Graviton Vortex - This combo can almost be pulled off with one person but the shorter mist duration on haze-style bombs makes it hard to put the VT before graviton and the longer charge times on haze-style bombs and short hold of Graviton Vortex make it difficult to place after the graviton. When you do get it working though it appears that shock ticks come 2-3x faster than normal. This combination seems to have too much upkeep required to be useful though.

Gameplay Videos

Conclusion
I almost feel like this bomb was nerfed before it was even released, then nerfed again on the day it was released. Fire ticks could kill you but shock was more indirect. It would lead to your death due to leaving you extremely vulnerable since spasms prevented you from moving or blocking. On top of that, shock used to have a defense debuff which mean that you couldn't move, couldn't block, and when you took damage it was much higher than it should've been. It was an extremely deadly combination that deserved a nerf. That's for players though; enemies can't block attacks and now spasms don't prevent them from attacking the majority of the time either. They're no less vulnerable shocked then they are not shocked.

As a DoT bomb it is good in very specific scenarios that are sometimes difficult to force (i.e. densely packed areas) against specific enemies (undead, construct). Even then, the DoT is only a fraction of the AoA and against other mobs like slimes, devilites it is noticeably worse and then against gremlins/beast it is just plain awful. For crowd control it sometimes works but most often does not do anything at all. Again, it only seems effective in densely packed groups which are often not found in most levels.

For me the VT seems like it's a quarter Ash of Agni and an eighth Shivermist but 5/8ths of a bomb isn't very good. You can't really UV craft this bomb and even if you wanted to, running IMF is a PITA. The bomb itself probably needs a slight buff or a rebalance. As of now, it's really only good on a handful of monsters (kat ghosts, zombies, mini royal cubes, scuttlebots). What I'd like to see is the reintroduction of longer spasms to cancel attacks on more enemies as well as a slight defense debuff to make up for enemies not having shields.

After watching those videos the new shock bomb seems really underwhelming :/

One thing to keep in mind is that all of the haze series and the new zappy bombs do MINOR status effects (and themselves do MUCH less damage than any other bombs). That means, compared to certain swords or even guns offering these effects, you really aren't going to be doing all that much. Minor fire is going to take a very long time to kill monsters on its own, minor freeze is just as good as strong for immobilizing monsters so you can do other attacks on them, but the defrost damage is nowhere near as drastic as what you'd get on, say.. the iceburst brandish line (where the strong freeze dethaw does about as much damage as the charge attack itself), minor poison will prevent healing but offer so little of a defense debuff you'll barely notice it, and minor shock? Well I'm not as familiar with the differences between different levels of shock; certainly it won't be doing as much damage but I'm not sure if the spasms are any weaker. other than slowing monsters down a little, I've heard the electrical spasms are good at interrupting certain monsters, particularly gremlin menders.

As for shock effects in general, you're only going to see worthwhile damage come from the status if you get the monsters clustered very close together, so that each one is hit by every other one's shock AoE. In those cases, you could do tremendous damage very quickly to a large group of monsters, but you HAVE to be able to get them clustered in tight. The way eek5 was using those bombs, the monsters were all getting strung out far away from each other and staying outside of each others' AoE. That sort of thing would be fine, if you placed the bomb and then switched over to something more hard-hitting and go to town on the enemy closest to you while the others struggle to catch up, but if you're just running around and dropping the bomb by itself? .. No.

On a related note, you guys should see what happens when you catch a big group of monsters in a Graviton and then immediately hit them with a shock vial. Spoiler alert: You get a lot of dead monsters.

Sad news. I would've picked it up as a replacement for my Shivermist on Ice strata, but as it's basically a poor man's ash of agni, I'll go for that instead.

The thing with Shivermist is when there's an Ash of Agni in the party (used to happen a lot) fire breaks ice status and ice breaks fire status. I used to give Ash the priority since it does more damage and freezing enemies sometimes would cause my teammates to play careless and take a lot of damage for not paying attention to mosnters animation. The only place I'd use Shiver over Ash was at Citadel.

Now, I really liked my poison Bomb(Venom Veil), specially like to use it with fire. Here's the poison effects on monsters, from wiki:
- unable to heal themselves or regenerate health
- will take damage if a fellow enemy (e.g., Gremlin Menders or Wings) heals them.
- It will also weaken the monster's attack power and defense.

Wish they've kept the Venom Veil intact, no need to nerf a bomb nobody uses, and when you use it some players even complain about it being "useless". Anyways I don't even play the game anymore, just crafting my mist energy for now, will check out the PvP when it's out.

>The thing with Shivermist is when there's an Ash of Agni in the party (used to happen a lot) fire breaks ice status and ice breaks fire status.

This is actually a good thing. Enemies are slowed down because they begin to stutter through the ice field and the Ash of Agni's fire ticks speed up to 150-200% of their usual rate. It's basically a combination of higher damage with some form of CC at the cost of visual clarity.

>Here's the poison effects on monsters, from wik
That's no longer true. Enemies no longer take damage from getting healed and some of enemy healing still works (probably a bug). It does debuff enemy attack and defense but I don't think it is significant enough to matter. At least none of my teammates can tell that it does anything when I ask them if they can notice it.

>I think the main place where the shock bomb will help is when a bomber is soloing. They could easily alternate bombs
I disagree. You never really want to kill things purely with DoT. Lighting things on fire and then hitting them with an AoE bomb is a good way to increase DPS but just damage stacking DoT makes for very low DPS. On top of that there is nothing "easy" about alternating bombs; bomb juggling is extremely buggy. Sometimes you'll switch weapons and still be on your same weapon except after you finish charging it, it will be the weapon you meant to switch to so you end up switching to another weapon thinking it was the past weapon. Sound confusing? Yeah it's exactly like that in the middle of combat.

> Even if it has a low chance to inflict shock, it's still better than stacking fire bombs where the effect is simply refreshed, not amplified.
Again, this works OK if you're killing with DoT but that is rarely the best way to deal with groups of enemies. The only example I can think of where you'd want to let fire take care of everything on its own is in a graveyard where you're spawning zombies at every plot and putting an AoA there then letting the fire ticks fully burn before returning. In this scenario it is a huge waste of time to double up on DoT status since fire usually softens them up enough to get one hit or just plain die from a second AoA. The problem is you can't just think of additional damage as a bonus all the time. It comes down to hits per kill as well. For example it might take 3 DBBs to kill an alpha wolver past basil. If you deployed AoA + VT it might take 2 DBBs but at the cost of dropping 2 additional bombs which have longer charge times than the difference (1 DBB).

The one thing with juggling AoA/VT is that enemies don't stay in their optimal grouping (although worrying about packing enemies densely to maximize shock damage seems like a huge waste of time to me). So on one hand you're maximizing DoT but not maximizing shock's DoT but at the same time you could just be using AoA's DoT and applying more damage with another bomb like nitronome, DBB, etc which would out damage whatever shock ticks would occur even if you maximzied it in a dense area.

iamah: they don't take damage from heals, and someone posted a thread claiming that the poison doesn't even completely stop the heal.

I know the wiki says that, but that's old and probably outdated information. There's another thread here where a guy cornered two gremlin menders, kept one constantly poisoned and constantly taking the low elemental damage from the bomb, and yet it didn't die, which would suggest the other gremlin's heals were at least partially penetrating the poison, and certainly weren't causing it to take damage.

I've never seen a Wing kill a poisoned mob by healing it.

Hey, I want to love my Toxic Atomizer, too, but it's time to accept that it doesn't love us back.

[Partly OT]

The Wiki says that damage to monsters from fire, shock and freeze is considered as elemental damage... but we know that damage from fire and freeze is the same for all enemy families as it was normal damage. I noticed in the videos posted above that damage from shock spasms seems to be elemental instead. Is this only for the bomb or for the other shock weapons as well?

> I guess I'll have to benchmark to conclude something now.

You can't do it by yourself, especially since the latest patch. The increased rate of fire ticks requires that enemies be within an area where both ice and fire mist are active. To do this alone you'd somehow have to be placing both bombs in the same spot over and over which isn't possible to do safely. As a result you'll end up staggering them and ice will put fire out, as you've said, but they won't catch back on fire because the mists aren't perfectly overlapping. This is a teamplay-only strategy unfortunately and even then it is more funny than useful.

VV is a waste especially if you only have high UV on it. The poison basically debuffs defense enough so that the VV is dealing similar elemental damage to the vhigh AoA which means you're only doing more damage every other bomb. VT does cause mechaknights to do their seizures which completely messes up regular kiting pattern meaning you'll NOT be hitting with ele damage on most of your haze bombs and instead you'll be relying on DoT which is slower, not to mention how f'd up a 3 bomb rotation would be. You can only maintain two status fields now so fire would be running out when you're putting up VT and poison would be running out when you're putting up Ash and shock would be running out when you're putting up poison. Sounds extremely inefficient when you could get away with just using AoA and having a regular kite pattern. Blowing 3 weapon slots to do the job of 1? Meh.

>Lastly, the shock effect; do you realize how huge of an effect it is to have a mob occasionally (even rarely) miss an attack? This is huge on healers.

Rarely? More like never. The only time I saw menders stop healing is when I made their pathing glitch out by blocking them and forcing them to run from me. See for yourself

Yeah I saw the wolver elemental thing when I tested my plasma. I don't really think that's right. Why does shock get to be the only status that actually is elemental? [but then again, I'd better be careful with such complaints before they make all status damage elemental >.>;]

I just got my Shock Capacitor today and its my first bomb but I really like it. I did notice the elemental tick damage though which made Gremlins in the arena pretty annoying but just being able to run around and Shock everyone then just move in with a Sword is pretty awesome. I can't imagine how great this thing will be once its radius is larger. One thing I didn't catch was whether or not Constructs took more damage from each tick.

>A sampling from Depth 27 for shock ticks (random depth, since the table is hardly complete yet...)

Beast/Gremlins: 9

Should the ticks be the same damage on each tier? If not then it strikes me as interesting that the Beast/Gremlin damage in T3 is the same as T2. Or might it be that I'm using the Static Capacitor? I assume yours may be upgraded to give out the same damage against stronger enemies?