in my time playing (been playing since there was a 10 energy cost for floors), gunners got a big update to try and make gunplay more of an option, but i feel the most bombs got was a sleep addition, but nothing more. i'll try to pitch some ideas, but all are suggestive.
One; make more armor variants for bomber-oriented gameplay, (like the recent gunner armors)
i feel the amount of armors for bombers only really go to allow speed up bombs or damage, but i thought... what about a smaller medium? Like a small bonus to both that doesn't feel unbalanced. maybe going to allow different resistances, but keeping them balanced to each other. maybe instead of speed for 3rd upgrade, increase one bonus instead.
Two; allow vaporizer variants to deal their damage over time, instead of the small first blast
i fell this could be a way to allow vaporizers to be less meant for status. like going and spending about 30-50% of the damage at intervals withing the cloud. i doubt others will feel the same, but the vaporizer damage area feels to small in my opinion. But if we allow a constant AoE for a percent of total damage, it could help better with crowd control also. and if so, we could potentially allow pure damage variants to the fray.
Again, these are suggestions. i don't plan for them to be heard, but i hope this gives something for those people complaining there's "not enough new content." though a thought, hopefully Grey Haven can allow these ideas to give a "spark of life" to some ideas.
I'd love a bomber update! (since I'm a bomber... duh!).
I have some suggestions too:
1. Make a bomber shield that has MSI increased medium FOR BOMBS ONLY.
2. Make Graviton Vortex have some use over Obsidian Crusher (damage-wise I mean) like adding strong curse status (don't make a new bomb as curse will fit with its design perfectly which is awesome anyway).
3. Make shard bombs act like LODGED shards from Tortofists' charge.
My reasons:
1. There's are 1 gunner and 2 swordie shields already and MSI is the most valuable stat to bombers as we need to dodge all the time and it will help F2P or people who don't have a life long enough to grind to reach MSI max (gunners and swordies won't benefit from MSI as it's for bombs only so that'll make it balanced) the crafting path might start with the Scarlet Shield and goes as follows +2 HP > +low MSI > +medium MSI.
2. Graviton Vortex's look is awesome but its damage is pathetic even compared to Obsidian Crusher it doesn't do that much more damage especially if we take poison in account so why not make it have a use? Make it have the same damage as Obsidian Crusher and add curse. It'll prove to be more useful for bombers than other vortexes damage-wise but it'll still be inferior to Electron Vortex to gunners and swordies as all they care about is that their enemies stay still. There aren't enough curse weapons anyway.
3. More damage options to bombers.
My thoughts on your suggestions:
1. For the armor suggestions I think it's good but may be a little greedy as we already have all our needs covered. We have Bombastic Demo for damage in LD with recon we have Volcanic Demo for C42 and Vana we have Mad Bomber for everything if you're skilled enough we have Mercurial Demo for GitM and RT we have Starlit Demo for JK and LD (piercing defense good against toothpicks also a lot of annoying sleep hazers nowadays) we also have Kat Hiss for LoA and HoI (although it's not common). I'm not saying we don't need more bomber armors for specific scenarios I'm just saying we already got our main needs covered.
2. For vaporizers I think it's a great idea but there's a flaw which is it won't work well with Shivermist Buster and it'll keep breaking the freeze and for Torpor Tantrum it'll probably wake the enemies up if dealt enough damage or you can use it for damage instead of crowd-control or both bit with less crowd-control and bombers don't have enough sources for elemental damage anyway so I think this might replace the "Elemental Nitronome" idea and would make non-bombers have some more interest in bombing. I think maybe 20% the damage of the blast seems balanced because the mist cloud lasts for 5 seconds you'll be able to inflict the whole damage of the blast if it the mist damage ticks every second and this'll make Stragger Storm actually a damage and crowd-control bomb at the same time but this will sadly prevent me from freeze-locking a player in LD for the whole match using Shivermist Buster.
I think it's kinda sad that there're only a few good bombers in the game. I'd like to see more people get into bombing and I think these ideas will encourage some players to become bombers.