I also forgot to wear boxers today.

Yes, Sealed at 3* has a chance to inflict a random status except sleep and curse. I left that out to allow experimentation. Safe experimentation. Not experimentation using unwilling test subjects who will most likely be turned inside out with chemical snot, experimentation with a weapon to slaughter other unwilling test subjects which are not within our accepted group of beings such as gremlins for the sake of killing them.

No tutorials today for those who care. To compensate for the delay enjoy this.

Someone with a 3* Sealed check on the curse.

The bug for the charge attacks might be fixed at some point.

You forgot to give me my pants back. Stay out of my pockets.

Today you decided you want the expansion pack, the only downloadable content we have so far. Apparently Snarbolax, Jelly King/Royal Jelly/giant-jiggly-purple-box-with-a-hat, and Roarmulus are too simple for you now. Not good enough for you. You have yet to face Vanaduke but you still want more. Be that way. Buy the expansion for six bucks. See if I care. Well, I do care; it means when you complete any tier you get a certain pair of weapons which you probably want to know about. The one most people like is the hammer which has a dash attack and seems to have the heavy sword mechanic on the first and third swings since the second swing is the dash, but it only has element damage. No normal at all. It is not a normal weapon. The other weapon used to be far more powerful with twice the speed and damage, now a shell of its former glory; however, it still has use even after having its legs cut off. We have wheelchairs.

The Seerus bombs are not like ordinary weapons. They do not follow a crafting series at all. In fact, there is no way to craft or trade them at all. If you want it, do the expansion. No wussing out. You get different variants from doing different tiers of the expansion for the bomb: T1 gets you the 2*, T2 gets you the 3*, and T3 gets you the 5*. The mechanic creates a few large purple spheres (two at the T1 version, three at the T2 version, four at the 5* version; for some reason the Wiki says 2* has three and 3* has two) which orbit around the epicenter, but do not affect the center area. The initial detonation does damage the whole area, but the effect following is the main feature of the bomb: giant purple orbs flying around and damaging things for several seconds. All the bombs deal pure shadow damage meaning it is best used on jellies and gremlins, enemies which tend to swarm after you in crowds. It also works against robots and animals which also are prone to swarming tactics, meaning a few of these and their health is spun to dirt. Use spinning to kill things for you. Windmills. Break dancing. Broken dancing. Spin to win.

Obligatory reference.

Unlike Jelly and Skelly lines, Magic has multiple alchemy paths to choose from. Jelly specializes in pierce defense, Skelly in shadow, Magic in element. What does magic have to do with the game? Nothing, everything that does element damage is science related, which means it is actually the Science equipment. Now that you bought your Science armor for the element defense, you probably want to know what you can do with it. You probably noticed robots and gremlins now do less damage to you. You will also notice you have fire and shock defense. You also have slightly more element than normal defense similar to how Jelly and Skelly have more specialized defense than normal. The fire and shock defense helps against the two more common offensive statuses, allowing you to focus on the fight rather than being on fire. Yes, I am walking around ablaze, nothing to see here. No need to worry, I have my Science set on. Magic/Science has three alchemy paths. Only one keeps all the same defenses as previous variants, but the other two are a change of pace for those running a marathon.

If you like having the same defenses, Grey Feather is ready and fluffy. The only difference is you suddenly have stun weakness. Originally the Science armor had stun weakness, Skelly had fire weakness, and Jelly had no weakness. Yet no one wants to make Jelly anyway.

Remember how Dragon Scale has no normal defense? Divine is like that. You get element, shadow, fire, shock, and curse defenses but no normal. The helmet has a +2 fiend family bonus but the torso does not. Weird. It would make more sense to either give both +1 or +2, most likely +1 since it has curse defense. Since the helmet has the bonus and both parts have the same stat, if you have to choose one go for the helmet if you want the family bonus. Also similar to Dragon Scale, be careful while using Divine in close range.

Chaos! Discord! Pandemonium! That is what this is supposed to be. Chaos still has normal and element defense, but not as much as Grey Feather. It has weakness to poison, fire, freeze, shock, and curse; but not stun. You will also notice the +1 universal damage and charge bonus per part. It may not have the defenses other armor have, but you get two major offensive bonuses.

This gun requires intelligence and patience to use. Your basic attack may not be fast or powerful even though it has three shots in a clip, but the real attraction for this weapon is the charge attack. No, it does not make a giant boolit of death or inflict a major status on everything everywhere forever. It creates little sticking explosives. Yes, a sticky bomb launcher. However, the mines only stick to enemies; no inanimate objects, no walls, no dessert before supper. The mines and basic bullets fire at the same slow speed, meaning you have to be able to plan ahead when trying to stick explosives. There is another notable feature of the charge attack: it only takes a second, even without any charge bonuses. You may not be able to move as quickly while charging, but each mine fired only takes a second to fire. The mines stick to the target and may be detonated by the basic attack. Say your buddy is with you and they are also using a Catalyzer. Not any kind specifically, just something which was a Catalyzer at some point and may have been upgraded. Guess what? They can still detonate your mines and you can detonate theirs. While one person distracts the enemy or group of enemies your buddy can tag them, then you switch to your own Catalyzer and blast them to itty bitty pieces you can use in your salad for the picnic next weekend. No one will know what the weird little pieces are. Just tell them it is a trade secret. When tagging multiple enemies, try to keep them close; the explosion of one mine triggers others within the explosion. The explosion also does not differentiate between the target they are stuck to and all the enemies within the blast range, meaning you can tag one target and have them in the middle of a crowd or tag everything and have them all blow up. You probably want to use Pulsar instead anyway, right? Pulsar is used differently. Catalyzer can be used with multiple people to help each other rather than everyone using a Pulsar to spam everything away and making the battle take forever. When using Catalyzer, keep in mind mines will only stick if they impact a vulnerable point; it will not stick to the front of Trojans because they have a shield nor bosses during invincibility stages. The main reason Catalyzer is one of the abandoned weapons is because it requires patience in battle whereas Blitz or an Alchemer would have already cleared all enemies. Technically, that is true; other guns can outclass its damage in ratio to time. However, if you like to play with your food before ripping it into burger meat this gun is for you.

Similar to Pulsar there are two alchemy lines, though instead of the specialized one being element with shock it is shadow with poison. The normal one, if you can consider this weapon normal, is Neutralizer. It has slightly more base damage over the alternative but no status. The specialized damage line, Biohazard, has shadow damage and the chance to inflict poison. Biohazard has a little less base damage but is otherwise the same; it has a chance to inflict poison on any damaging effect, including the basic bullets and detonation of its mines.

This should have been lower on the list due to the scarcity of bombers, but most of the armors at this point and under are all rarely used so derp.

Spiral Demo, as you probably would have guessed by the name, is the weapon specialist armor for bombers. We already went over Wolver and how sword users love it, but for bombers you have one major issue: you can only use your weapon by charging it. With swords damage and swing speed is nice, but for bombers you need charge buffs like Mitt Romney is desperate to appeal to voters without proposing anything. Some of your weapons (Graviton/Electron, Big Angry) cripple your speed while charging, during which moving is all you can do. You have to get that bomb planted now. Not tomorrow, right now. Unless you are a conservative bomber. Unlike Wolver, SDemo has four alchemy paths and only one is Shadow Lair relevant. The rest are crafted normally. They all have split normal-element defense and give bomb charge and/or damage bonuses. For bombs charge buffs mean planting quicker while damage means more damage per hit. Keep this in mind when using different bombs; do you want to plant faster or hit harder? Do you need damage bonuses for a Vaporizer? Demo lines are often used for hybrid gun and bomb users since most are afraid to only use bombs. Nothing is wrong with that. However, keep in mind bombs have various uses; Blast and Vaporizer lines are different.

The most "commonly" used line for this armor is Mad Bomber. "Commonly" is in quotes because very few people actually stick with SDemo to begin with. Mad Bomber is undoubtedly the offensive bomber set, giving +2 bomb charge and damage for a single part. There are two parts of the armor. You can get +4 bomb charge and damage from this. Why would you need anything else? Mad Bomber has less normal defense than the other three lines and has weakness to poison, fire, freeze, and shock statuses. It also has a Mohawk on the helmet. Most people like to be on offense, Mad Bomber is pure offense, most people use it for bombing. Looking at the recipe you may notice something: most of the materials are shadow related, so why does Mad Bomber have element defense instead of shadow? That is what I want to know. That is what many bombers want to know.

The second most "common" line used is Volcanic Demo. Unlike Mad Bomber, Volcanic has no negative resistances; you have average normal and element defenses, you have a lot of fire defense, and you get +2 charge per part. It may not have a Mohawk, but you get +4 charge for the set. Combine that with a H10 (heat level ten) bomb and you now have max charge for that bomb. Originally the torso for this line only had +1 bomb charge. They wanted Mad Bomber to have all the fun with max charge. This was also before charge attacks were not resettable by being damaged, including from fire; once that charge finishes, only death and use can take it away from you. Herp de derp, walking around with this Barrage and a full charge. What was that? You set me on fire? Nurp, I still have my charge. What was that? You want to try it? Sure, let me shove it down your throat first. What was that? You are suffocating? Now you exploded and your guts are everywhere. Punk.

Oddly enough, the second to least used line is the Shadow Lair one. No questions. Unlike Mad and Volcanic, Mercurial Demo does not give any charge bonuses; instead you get +1 movement and bomb damage buffs per part. Why would you want more running speed over bomb charge? Hit and run tactics. More specifically, Crystal line bombs. You rely on staying in close proximity of the target. While you are playing patty cake with the swarm of zombies, you probably want to be able to step out of their swing range before they slap you in the face. You may not charge a bomb as fast, but you can run circles around those idiots before they can even think of attacking. Yes, this is an exaggeration of the movement speed bonus; but as a bomber it becomes very obvious how beneficial the effect is. Mercurial Demo has the same normal and element defense values as Volcanic, but instead of fire resistance you get shock. For bombers shock is a common fear. Stay close, but not too close; roll around the enemy and shove shard bombs up their a-

Moving on, Bombastic. This also has the same normal and element defense as Mercurial and Volcanic, though similar to Mad Bomber its original materials to craft did not fit to the defense; it used to consume pierce relevant materials to make Bombastic. You also have a couple opposite effects to Volcanic: instead of fire resistance you get freeze, and instead of +2 bomb charge per part you get +2 bomb damage per part. Why would anyone want this? Imagine you wanted to craft one of each of the Vaporizer lines, a Blast, a Graviton, a Spine Cone line, and a Crystal and got +4 bomb charge on all of them; or the ones you plan to use, anyway. When those suckers get H10 they would have full charge without help outside the weapon, meaning further bomb charge buffs would be useless for you. What do you do? Slap a Bombastic set on yourself and headbutt everything with the damage bonus. You may not have more damage than Mad Bomber line, but you have no status weaknesses compared to that maniac.

If you plan on being a primary bomber and do not use any of these, I have news for you.

It sounds like they want to change it into a combination of the Seerus bombs with land mines. Which means I have to update the Crystal stuff in this thread. Hurr. At least the change sounds "nice". It could potentially be a new way to nail Trojan style enemies.

"We’ll even be introducing new bombs during the change to further expand a bomber's arsenal. Additionally, existing shard bombs will finally receive 5 star versions."
"New bombs, Crystal lines will have 5* variants."
New stuff.

MDemo should still be useful for shard bombs, though not necessarily in the exact same use. By the time you have it you should be able to figure it out anyway.

I probably should have done this before Scarlet.

Similar to Scarlet, Swiftstrike only has a 3* variant; no previous variants to upgrade from or later variants to upgrade to. You are stuck with only one to choose from. Unlike Scarlet, Swiftstrike only has normal defense. No specialized defenses, no status resistances, just normal. For a 3* shield it actually has decent defense, but it has no upgrades to aspire to. What do you get out of this shield? A fat +3 universal attack speed. That bonus is so fat it takes up all the lanes on a freeway. That bonus is so fat it has its own area code. The bonus may be universal but it does not affect bombs because the weapon does not have a modifiable attack speed; supposedly their attack speed is the fuse speed, though it seems unaffected by the bonus. For swords and guns you get faster swings and boolits. Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe, maybe. I have yet to meet one who can outsmart boolit. This shield is often used by the elusive strafe-swordsman and volley-gunners. As a sword user with this puny shield you have substantially less defense and health for your shield, meaning you have to rely on mobility and bumping to evade death. For gunners this shield may become a crutch, depending on how dependent you become on the speed bonus. Keep in mind this shield has low defenses, meaning if you are caught in the fray as a gunner you have to bump your way out. How do you avoid this? Stay out of the fray. Avoid the spotlight. Some guns are exceptions to this for occasional attack deployment, but as a gunner you should not be standing in the middle of a bunch of Lumbers for too long. They have another kind of wood they want to hammer you with.

You probably expected Fang of Vog.

Tough tortoises.

Quicksilver is very similar to Jelly. In fact, the normal and pierce defense values are the exact same. However, Quicksilver starts at 3* as a boss token reward from Roarmulus. You have to repetitively fight the giant turrets to get these things while Jelly only takes some quick dumb crafting. Why would you want to work so hard for something with the same damage type defenses? Jelly may have resistance against two statuses, stun and sleep, but Quicksilver only has one and a bonus effect: shock defense and +1 movement speed bonus per part. Quicksilver is based on the shock jelly, also named Quicksilver, which is often referred to as a static pinball. Once one of these little boogers gets a buzz it likes to bounce around. Does that mean this armor does that? No, but the movement bonus is nice. Shock resistance also helps when you want to keep moving and stay alive at the same time, meaning everyone. Shock itself is the hybrid between fire and freeze but plays a few cards of its own. Unlike freeze, shock subjects the afflicted to a spasm at every damaging interval rather than simply keeping them stuck in place. The constant damage may not be as high as fire but the spasm opens the afflicted to attacks since they are unable to shield or move. The movement bonus is often belittled for its insubstantial effect, though little appreciation is given for how useful that miniscule bonus can be. It could mean evading an attack by a hair. It could mean outrunning those derpbillion turret bullets vomited by derpty-herp turrets on the other side of a ditch. It could mean moving out of the way of a zombie trying to steal your internal mechanisms then shoving a bomb down their throat. Whether the miniscule bonus helps you or not, Mercurial and Mercurial Demo are the only things which increase movement speed we have so far. Notice how both have shock defense. This is the kind of bonus befitting people who like to strafe at close and medium range. If you like gunning from as far as possible, use the bonus to run faster. You can still shoot, though while attack animations are going your movement is slowed for the attack. Throw some bullets at them, run a while, throw some more bullets at them, run again, repeat until everything dies from exhaustion.

"Spin to win" has probably existed from several games, but I use it as a reference to Vindictus; more specifically Lann using a spear, one of the attacks allowing the user to spin for a while until their stamina wears out and all you can do is stand there like an idiot. I personally prefer using twin swords instead of twin spears because swords have incredibly dodging ability while spears give up a lot of dodging and evasion ability in exchange for more damage while cutting your own health for even more damage.

Owlite is here, Drake only has specialized defense to protect against projectiles better, Plate can defend against melee attacks well so you can bump them away, Swiftstrike gives you some attack speed but has low defense values, Scarlet gives you some health but has low defense as well, Jelly and Skelly have the normal and specialize defenses as Owlite but with different statuses; go through the shields and find what you want. I am not here to force my preferences onto others, otherwise there would be more bombers running around.

This shield combines several desired features of other shield into one fancy not-wearing-pants defensive tool which everyone will have at some point. At first all it has is normal and shadow defense as a 4* shield from the Vanaduke tokens, but when it upgrades its defenses jump and it gains both shock and fire defense. Before upgrading it, you have to grind for this stupid thing. Once you get enough tokens after about ten repetitions, you probably think you want to grab Fang of Vog or one of the Ancient Plate parts. Stop that. You want the shield. Fang of Vog is one of your priorities, especially as a primary sword user, but this shield is pretty important for most of the more difficult areas. Why do most higher areas have shadow damage? Ask the producers, I have no idea. A lot of Shadow Lair armors have shadow defense, explain that to me. Apparently shadow is the final damage type. Does that mean to drop whatever you are doing and scramble for Skelly/Snarbolax/other shadow stuff? If you want. What am I, your babysitter? This shield is similar to the specialist shields (Owlite, Skelly, Jelly) but has decent normal defense and status resistances. In terms of versatility it still depends on what kind of enemies you plan to face, but this is a decent shield for versatile use against projectiles and melee attacks as well as defending against the two most common offensive statuses. Do you want to burn? No. Do you want to be electrocuted? No. Do you want to be reconstructed by mauling zombies? No. Do you want to die by flying skulls vomiting bullets? N- What did you say? No, absolutely not. Two of the common upper difficulty areas where this shield stands tallest are Firestorm Citadel and the new daily prestige mission, both obese with undead and shadow damage. Zombies are everywhere. Zombies think you are flesh flavored. Apparently breathing on you is a natural means of killing their prey, and there are other types of enemies, but for the most part these are zombies and dead things trying to kill you because you are trespassing in their house. What are you doing in here? Did you find the key under the mat?

You might be weird.

Weirder than I am.

W- I see what you did there, bumping this so I would finish it. I should be able to do Spur soon and Angelic should not take too long. I keep getting distracted by Dofus and Wakfu.

This weapon could have easily been significantly favorable.

The swing mechanic was changed to imitate standard lines, Calibur and Brandish, though the original mechanic was more favorable: every attack would lunge the user toward their swing though the swing area was strange. From the mechanic it seems to be a hybrid between foil and Cutter swords, but with less damage and stops at 4*. The charge attack is somewhat similar to Brandish and Sealed lines, but the projectile is fairly small and has significantly lower damage with absolutely no status. Spur line always has pure normal damage but at 4* the basic swings fire little projectiles on the basic swings. The projectiles do not travel very far and have very low damage, but at least it has a projectile. The original lunging mechanic made it similar to foil swords, but how is this similar to Cutter? The projectile from the basic attack at 4* allows for consecutive impacts, meaning if you are fighting something which is easily interrupted by attacks you can swing and throw at the same time. Spur may not have the same lunging ability to keep you on the offensive, pushing the enemy along with you, but at least it still has the projectile. The charge attack from 2* to 4* is relatively the same, a swing which fires a disk which damages along its path, but if you try to shield cancel before the projectile is fired it cancels the projectile completely. Brandish and Sealed lines let you shield cancel before the projectile is on its way, why does Spur not do the same? Because it is not Sealed or Brandish lines. Similar to Cutter, Spur lines have the ability to chain several impacting attacks on the same target rapidly but lacks in damage; however, Spur is more lacking in damage than Cutter, has no 5* variants or bonus effects such as a status or family bonus, and is favored for its basic attack over charge. The weapon itself has mediocre interruption ability compared to other swords and has low damage; its main use, for the few who do use it, is as a bastardized Cutter. It thinks it wants to be a Cutter and Flourish at the same time, but then it wants projectiles; Spur is all over the place. Supposedly this is supposed to be a fancy sword, but the only redeemable factor which this weapon has over other swords is the projectile on the basic attack at 4*; unlike Pepperbox line it does not have a significant secondary use, but it still has little projectiles. They can be used to interrupt enemies which have attacks easily interrupted, such as Greaver flips or zombie breath; though other swords often do the job better and have more damage at the same time.

Those are all the lines which build up, excluding the dead end 1* weapons and (status)Breaker lines, the latter being obvious what they are intended for and the former being cheap copies of things already addressed. Wait for new stuff to come out. If my engineering stuff with other stuff makes it into the game there will be a significantly enormous update to this thread, seeing as I created them with the forethought of a teamwork based weapon which is fully capable of functioning alone but works far better in teams. Significantly better in teams.

What am I, a wind-up toy?

"The next Dark Retribution"

This new mechanic is basically the complete opposite of how it originally worked. This new mechanic has six repeats; all have the exact same mechanic, two of those six are the old Radiant Sun and Ionized Salt lines. Before we get into the excessive branches, we need to go over the mechanic all of them are forced to share. The bomb has an average base charge time, including old ISalt. Once planted a relatively small blast radius appears and the bomb detonates upon completion. After this detonation eight shards land a short distance away from the blast radius, in place of the old eight projectiles which would fire in every map direction (north, west, east, south, northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast) which also detonate. When the initial detonation occurs enemies caught in the blast are pushed conveniently to where the shards land, though there is a delay between the first explosion and the shard explosions. The first explosion has relatively low damage, comparable to the initial detonation of the Seerus bombs, and the shards do less damage per hit; which is also comparable to the Seerus bombs. When I refer to the Seerus bombs here I mean the nerfed version. Keep that in mind. In spite of the damage type variation amongst the branches, they all have the same basic purposes: if you chain/constantly plant bombs while staying in the blast radius of the first explosion, enemies who approach you will be repelled into the shards. This does not work if the target(s) can attack while repelled, especially if they have any form of distance attack. For those you are forced to stay mobile, but at the same time you still have to be able to attack. What do you do? Well, first you need to know how to kite. Nearly all weapons are used best with kiting ability, but this mechanic especially relies on it. If you are still chaining with this mechanic you need to direct the enemies to be hit by the shards or at least the initial explosion. Remember, the first explosion knocks enemies out of the blast radius to where the shards land. Do not stand where the shards are if an enemy is about to be bounced right into your face. You need your face attached to the rest of you for face purposes. This mechanic and tactic combined relies very heavily on the enemies staying within attack range and not rolling away. Both of the attacking points of this bomb have small areas of effect but cover an average area. The area near the epicenter is covered by the first detonation followed by the shard detonation which is allegedly designed to accumulate damage against large crowds of enemies. However, why would you want to use this when you could use Nitronome for more damage per target in more area of effect? Actually, that was a bad example. Nitronome is supposed to be the superstar bomb which makes the other ones look bad. Regardless of how "modest" Nitronome is the new shard bombs fail where other bombs already exist. What was the point of the change if it has no offensive benefit? Apparently it was "not bomb-like" even though swords and guns are not sword-esque or gun-esque. Herp derp. Unless these bombs get a damage buff, users of these weird chunks of crystal rely on using it for utility. This is coming from a primary bomber who thinks Winmillion is kind of useful and Valiance is an amazing sidearm. Try to resist the urge to smash your head into your monitor. The knockback on the first detonation allows ally bombers to plant without worrying about enemies who do not use distance attacks to stand with you and chain their own bomb, likely a Vaporizer or something without knockback or suction. With a Vaporizer you can deal constant damage to the crowd while your buddy vomits some status affliction all over their new clean shirt. It may have been washed not too long ago, but now they need to replace it completely. If the Vaporizer happens to be Shivermist line you can safely plant while they are frozen and being constantly refrozen by your buddy, meaning you two can juggle damage in the area for a while. However, this will take longer than using an offense based bomb in place of your shard bomb because of the lower damage rate. Take a Barrage or something. The damage may not be as low as I make it seem, but if you are using a shard bomb as if it were Barrage or a Blast line you are not going to do as much damage.

We have six branches for this. I am not exaggerating. I have heard that they all have the exact same mechanic and the only differences are damage type and status inflicted.

The first branch is the classic Radiant Sun; or should I say Scintillating Sun, the 5* upgrade of it. They took its element damage and kept its pierce about the same as it was before, then slapped a decent rate to inflict stun as the cherry on top. A rotten, maggot infested cherry which has been stepped on. This bomb also has a +4 fiend family damage bonus on it derived from its old +3 fiend bonus on the orignal RSun. Yes, stun is still broken. It appears to work some of the time. More specifically, when something is inflicted with stun and attempts to attack between each second as the status counts down the afflicted performs a double attack; the attack which would occur without being stunned follows through with no animation, then the delayed attack which follows the visual animation occurs. Fortunately for owners of Radiant Sun before the update, Three Rings gave you a triple UV ticket and let you keep the bomb. When I logged in and saw this in the mail I honestly expected it to be taken out of my arsenal but it was still there. Unfortunately for all Radiant Sun owners stun is still broken and has been for a long time rendering this bomb nearly useless. Thanks a lot.

The second branch, Deadly Splinter, is closely related to Scintillating but has no status to inflict and higher pierce damage. Why make a new branch instead of having this be the new Radiant Sun? People who already had the original would have little/no use of the "improved" version, meaning if they still want it but without stun they have to spend for a new weapon. Imagine going to the grocery store and buying the same kind of bread you usually do. Now imagine, one day, you go home with that bread and find the entire inside of the loaf was hallowed out and filled with wadded paper. You go back to the store demanding a refund but you do not have the receipt. The manager says you messed with the bread and if you want a replacement you have to buy a new loaf. That is what this branch is. That second loaf.

The third branch which technically should be the second is good old Ionized Salt, or Shocking Salt in its 5* form. This baby had its split normal-pierce damage traded in for pure shadow, its old jelly/slime family bonus bumped from +3 to +4, and keeps its amazing rate of shock. The rate is the same as stun for Scintillating, but shock is not broken and has a lot of benefits with this weapon mechanic. Imagine Nitronome combined with Voltaic with less damage but longer lasting shock. And shadow damage. And if you owned this at 4* before the update you got another triple UV ticket, just as with RSun, and the bomb is now amazingly useful. I find it strange that the significant rate of shock was kept in spite of its original function on the old ISalt, designed to creep up behind someone and shove an electrical chunk of salt in their pants and run away flailing your arms in the air while making gibberish noises. If you absolutely need to have the new shard mechanic but only want one of the many branches, go for Shocking Salt. If you are deterred by the shadow damage make one of the other specialized damage ones or skip Shocking Salt and just get the normal damage one.

The fourth branch which appears to be somewhat common now is Deadly Dark Matter, the spinoff of Shocking Salt with more shadow damage, no status, and no family bonus. Honestly, the only reason to get this over Shocking Salt is if the status bothers you. Want to use the new shard mechanic against Quicksilvers? Okay. Shocking Salt has a fat jelly/slime family bonus, but whatever. You do what you want to do and I do what I want to do.

The fifth branch is a lazy attempt to make the "damage DPS" bomb people have been crying for. Do we need it? Not really, but the same applied to branching Graviton to make Electron. Think about it. How many people would use Graviton over Electron these days unless they had it before the update which added Electron? Me. Punk. This branch is named Deadly Crystal and imitates Deadly Dark Matter and Deadly Splinter but with element damage. No status, no family bonus; just pure element damage. Boring.

The sixth branch is yet another lazy attempt to create more versatility options for bombers. We already have enough branches of these, stop making more. This one is similar to the three specialized damage branches but in normal damage rather than a specialized type. Unlike most normal branches from the same mechanic, this branch has the same amount of damage as the other three specialist branches. These four have slightly more damage than Shocking Salt and Scintillating Sun lines, but with no family bonuses or statuses to inflict.

And now for a small rant/moment of whining.

Why are there six branches of this? Why does Scintillating Sun have stun? Deadly Splinter would be pointless if there was no stun on Scintillating Sun. The deviation for the two shadow branches is acceptable because of Quicksilvers, but with the pierce branches Three Rings is just trying to sell us that punk bread. Is this how you get your sick kicks? Selling us bread full of wadded paper? The element line is barely tolerable, but since they made a normal line all they really need are the two originals and the normal. Why did they make six branches anyway? More variation means more crafting, more crafting means more energy spent, more energy spent means they make more money. Do not buy the fake loaf. Get the one or two you want and get out of this nonsense. This is coming from someone who has all the Vaporizers except Stagger because stun is still broken and I have no intention of making any of the new branches because I already have the two originals. Before the update Ionized Salt was one of the weapons always put down for how useless it was. With this new update it trumps its past superior and has become an amazing utility bomb. When I heat up my old Ionized Salt to beat it into 5*, unless either no UV pops up or I get a bad UV, I am going to slap one of the triple UV tickets on it. Even if my Scintillating Sun had no UVs on it I would not so much as spend a single UV roll on it now.