The Wiki is written by people, people have opinions, what you copy-pasted was an opinion. My opinion is that the VV is a different animal than the SB in that one locks a monster in place, the other raises party damage and decreases monster damage. I use mine all the time when playing with a group, but when I play group bomb-guy, I focus on status effecting the enemies, rather than damaging them straight out with something like a Nitronome.

Another reason I agree with your final statement is that the shiver clouds the lumbers feet, so I am unable to see the 'target' indicator and won't know when he is about to attack or where he is heading anyway. As far as lasting power, none of them last very long, if your goal is to status effect enemies, you will constantly apply these effects, I rotate mine, dropping poison/fire and or shock or stun over and over. Single target damage to constructs, at least, is larger than my nitronome, but it's not level 10 yet.

Not just swordsmen, anyone who attacks. At times I carry a bomb when I wear my gunslinger outfits, usually fire or shock if I am solo, or vv in a party. It increases everyone's damage potential. I have no evidence other than the wiki stating that poison lowers attack on the monsters side, but I do know that MY damage is roughly halved when I am poisoned, so I assume that it works the other away around too.

Freeze is a great status to inflict as well, if lumbers are your main concern, simply freeze, run behind them and pound away, you could even freeze, then leave them to the side while you deal with other monsters.

You have to decide your weapon configuration, if you have all 4 slots filled you need to ask yourself if they are the best weapons for the gate/stratum you are in and could you incorporate a different weapon in a new or better way. For instance, if you are in a Fiend stratum and have a shadow weapon in one of your four slots, yes, a shiver would be more helpful. (In theory, I like being able to see their feet, but you get my point)

TL;DR VV does three things, and none of these things are useful when SK is played correctly.

I'm primarily a vapor bomber so VV was my second 5* bomb after Ash. I used it pretty extensively at first, typically switching between the two so that the mobs stayed on fire and poisoned. Since then though I've expanded my arsenal and now rarely carry the VV. The only time I will use it is if I'm in a JK party and someone else already has an Ash, then I'll pull it out. But that is it :)

Here is the essential issue with VV - it has three features none of which are particularly useful in an expert setting... 1) Greatly reduces healing 2) Lowers Defense 3) Lowers Offense

Greatly reduces healing
Why are the healers alive to begin with? Any party should take down healers as soon as it is safe to do so. Instead of dropping a VV just kill the healer. In arenas where there are two healers and 20+ monsters this should be useful, but I actually find it better to simply out DPS the healer using Ash than to eliminate their healing ability. You can do the Ash/VV pairing... but you know what is better? Ash/Stagger. Vapor bomb times have been shortened so that you can only really keep two statuses going, before you could keep three going but now it isn't really possible.

Lowers Defense
If it increasing damage by 50% then we'd have something to brag about. As it is now, 10% isn't going to be helpful. Example... four party members using swords doing 100 DPS each, so 400 DPS for the entire party. Now one stops to drop VV instead, the damage goes to 300 DPS + 10% so 330 DPS. That extra 10% is so small that it is unlikely to even reduce the number of sword swings to kill a monster. Thus the addition of Poison to the battle makes no difference at all.

Lowers Offense
Now this is finally something that is tangible. If you could die in 2 hits, it will now take about 4 to kill you... very cool. But why is someone getting hit? In SK people get hit if they mess up or lag out. There is no tanking in this game, if there was then poison would make sense. The only time I find poison useful is for the Giant Lichen Colonies, some swordie is going to run up and get hit a few times and possibly die. That is why I carry poison vials, a single vial should be sufficient to take down the colony. No need to waste a weapon slot just for that.

/endrant

One side note on vials... thus far in testing vial strength has never lined up with weapon status strength. They are interspersed. Vials also tend to last longer than the effects from vapor bombs.

unrelated to OP: wow hang on. Didn't poison get a fix? I used VV the other day and noticed that healers who were poisoned did damage again... helped a lot in last stage arena. I guess I'll check.

Actually, Ash of Agni is more of a soloing bomb, and Shivermist Buster is a swordsman's best friend. Fire can be your primary damage source on those low health mobs as you run away from them. Freezing enemies means swords can easily charge-attack their backs.

I never take out my Venom Veiler outside of Jelly Palace, for the most part. Stagger Storm helps more in preventing hits, and utterly destroys certain monsters (phantoms, mecha knights, alpha wolvers). Ash of Agni gives you nice dps. Shivermist lets you focus on certain enemies.