defense in clockworks doesn't matter much no matter how specialized you are.
I could say these based on my experience. Doing fine with just skolver set on anywhere, even at arena (mecha bot do heavy elemental damage), fsc (shadow + element + fire), etc. Also, I always use one gunner set (seerus mask + shadowsun slicker + swiftstrike buckler), and one bomber set (mad bomber set) everywhere and I could say I am doing damage better than average players, surviving better than average players. There was even a person who finished FSC pre-update (when roof falling hurts you) with mad bomber, post-update is like a bad joke to him. I did try mad bomber set at FSC, one full duration of fire could take up to half of your health (with vitapod 12), without you will be dead.
The main key is to read enemies movement, this game is not really about tanking, but avoiding all kinds of damage by knowing where they attack.

Anyway if you really want to know the detail how much defense affect the damage. Read this
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/User:Antistone

I've been thinking.....
For my Bomber FSC loadout, what should I get?

1: RSS, DBB, VT, VV(my most propsed one).

2. RSS, VT, Glacs, G-Vortex

3 VT, VV, Shiv, Glacs.

4. RSS, Nitro, DBB, VT?

Also, what Bomber set should I get?

Mad?

Mad/Volcanic

Volc

Volc/Bomba

Mad/Bomba

Is Volc/Bomba useful in most situations?

Is merc useful as a all use bomber set?

Can merc be comboed with other demo sets and would they be more versatile?

@Tohu-Adachi, For your first load out, the DBB doesn't seem too necessary, seeing as it's main purpose is to kill trojans but as long as it fit's your playstile, I say go for it.

Full merc and bombastic sets are generally more useful in LD due to their lack of CTR. With trinkets, a full bombastic set is just a freeze resistance volcanic set (with trinkets). The safest and cheapest option for max CTR would be full volcanic although mad/volcanic or even full mad (if you're feeling confident) are also very viable sets.

Have you looked up Eek's Videos, Devilites?
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Bombing_guide#Videos

I got a Haze bomb....

I thinking of getting it to 4*, but..

Is it worth it?

Is there anyplaces it shines on?

Can it be used most of the time?

Can it be a back up in areas where I don't have the right status bomb?

By the way, you may want an Electron Vortex in place of Graviton in FSC, if you don't mind farming Krogmo's. When pure bombing there, I would bring RSS/VV/EV/SB.

The double attack bug occurs with specific enemies, like jellies and lumbers. Stun is extremely effective on enemies that charge for a while; alpha wolvers bite once (I believe?), while graveyard phantoms, mecha knights, flourish chargers in LoA, and possibly Kats cannot attack. Mecha knights can still shock you by shocking themselves. I would bring a SS to graveyards, LoA, and maybe arenas.

No, monsters that start charging an attack while in stun will often time out, if they are continuously stunned until 4-5 seconds later. Kats do not attack if they are stunned before they dash.

The bombs have been really disappointing for me. At this point, I would not recommend them to someone who doesn't already have a nitronome, BAB/irontech, and a DBB.

Even when I kill stuff w/ the bombs it doesn't feel very satisfying. You're basically dealing damage with shards from something you dropped 2-3 bombs ago. The delay between you dropping the bomb and it delivering its main payload is way too long right now.

Bombers need good anticipation but 5-6 seconds into the future? Come on now. It makes guessing where you're going to knockback enemies w/ the outer-ring impossible.

I'll most more detailed impressions once I get more time w/ them under my belt and do some tests/videos but so far a huge thumbs down. 1 out of 5 snipes!

These bombs are meant to be stacked and overlapped in a sort of olympic ring pattern. circle around the monsters to cluster them together while I'm charging then drop the bomb and charge another and over lap the bombs. It creates this sort of... cluster and craziness. I have found this to be the most effective way to use the bomb.

Killing gremlin healers though are a pain, it doesn't cause enough damage at once to really be effective against them. At some point they lay that healing ring thing and start to heal themselves and then you have to fight with that because in t3 they heal themselves faster than the bomb causes damage.

That's great and all but DBB, Nitrnome, etc. are all more predictable and consistent than shard bombs for hitting, knocking, and dealing damage to gremlins.

People keep bringing up that you can hit a single* target with the small radius of a shard bomb, push it into the outer ring and hit it for 1-2 shards. That works great in theory but in actual usage it doesn't work like that. Stuff moves, there are always more than 1 target, and using the bomb like that for single-target damage is one of the lowest DPS weapons in the game even when you manage a double shard hit.

The fact that you find it annoying to kill stuff when menders are in the area is very telling as to how bad these bombs are for DPS. Almost every other 5* weapon I can think of can out DPS menders but when you're in a situation where you're 1v2 with an enemy, mender vs you? NOPE. Hitting targets is too much of a dice roll; it isn't consistent enough and even when you manage to stack shards and hit an enemy multiple times the damage is way too low.

* The radius is way too small to accommodate more than 2 targets anyway and if you manage to knockback multiple with the initial blast you'll miss some of the enemies with the outer ring.

BAB is awesome now! :D

Suggested list of changes for Deconstructor line:
-Pure elemental
-Drop the construct bonus
-Buff damage to equivalent * Blast Bomb
-Add a 5* version

There, then the Decon line won't be a 4* red Nitro with less damage.

Hey guys,
So I've been forcing myself to use these bombs to get a better idea of what they're capable of and I've basically come to the conclusion that all of them need major tweaks. To preface this post, I've been using the SSS (pierce/stun), SSB (shadow/shock), and DCB (ele). Some of the issues with the shard bombs can be partially overlooked (slow start-up, long double-fuse) but I think the most egregious aspects are the low base damage and small radii of shard explosions.

From my use of these bombs, I'd say that the DCB is the most useful of the bunch followed by SSB (or DDMB). I would not recommend either of the piercing bombs or the normal damage bomb.

Piercing
This bomb just straight underperforms. It's only saving grace is that (with the death of the old RSS), it's probably the second best bomb at taking out greavers safely. For tackling other enemies weak to pierce this bomb just doesn't make sense. Hitting devilites is a lot more tricky than DBB and even with bonus damage we're talking 5-6 bombs to kill a devilite that DBB two-shots on same depths. The bomb is decent at dealing with wolvers but what isn't? Even though it's capable of dealing with wolvers, it's still slower (video) than a nitronome which has no piercing bonus.

The SSS is awful at dealing with trojans mainly because of the stun bug. You have to play so defensively because you can't get close to the trojan or it'll stun and do an instacharge with no animation. My strategy for trojans was to keep my distance and hit it with double shards on the outer-ring. How did it perform? Well, let's put it this way: a dark retribution was able to kill trojans just as fast (DR/SSS vs Trojans).

Normal
I'll start by saying I don't have the normal damage bomb but it's easy to see what kind of effectiveness it'd have when you just look at the killing power of DCB vs neutral targets. The take away here is that I would never use it against neutral targets because the base damage is terrible.

Elemental
This bomb comes ahead in the pack mostly because it has so little competition in the elemental area. The only other options are the electron vortex or haze bombs but they deal very localized damage whereas the DCB can hit larger areas. I mostly found this bomb to be decent against construct. It can hit puppies and cancel their attacks although I don't think it's as reliable with attack cancel as a max ctr nitronome is. For undead it works well enough against zombies (what doesn't?) but even with elemental damage bonus against undead, it's outperformed by the DBB (video) which deals neutral damage. For kats the bomb is very spotty. You're either lucky and you kill them or you miss over and over. There is really no strategy other than dropping and hoping they move into one of the blasts. (see devilite/kat clear for example of killing speed). I'll probably make a kat-specific DCB video later.

Shadow
I'll say this: These are probably the second and third best shadow bombs not behind a paywall. (Graviton being the more versatile and reliable shadow bomb) The main issue with the SSB/DDMB is that it is NOT good at dealing with polyps. Every time I faced a polyp w/ the SSB I knew that I could possibly wipe because of how inefficient these bombs are at dealing with stationary targets. It's almost as if the old RSS was too good vs non-mobile enemies that they overtuned these to be bad against them. It deals with regular cubes and lichen OK but the long double-fuse makes it not very good against faster lichen and it is kind of a mediocre kite bomb. In some of the jigsaw slime levels this bomb is actually decent because shards (when they appear) stack up in the narrow walkways and can actually hit multiple times instead of whiffing over and over. With that said, I'd still take a DR, nitronome, BAB, irontech over it.

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These bombs need a major adjustment in damage and it would be nice if they received some love in the radius and fuse departments as well. As of this moment they are probably too difficult to use, too unpredictable, too unreliable and too inefficient for me to recommend to anybody.

I have more information better formatted along with more videos of these bombs in action here:

• Eeks' Shard Bombs Observations, Thoughts, and Videos

tl;dr: stay away from normal and pierce shard bombs, feel free to craft shadow and elemental versions if you hate yourself

Oh yeah. I totally forgot about them. The shard bombs work decently against gremlins in small groups (2-4) but I find the timing to be very tricky. Video here. The strategy for thwackers is to drop a bomb then kite the gremlin on to the explosion. This means that you have to dodge a double swing attack while charging a second bomb. From there things get a little more complicated. You have to keep dropping bombs but you have very little control over whether or not you're going to be knocking them down so you have to keep dodging attacks that may or may not come.

When you compare it to what DBB can do against gremlins it becomes no contest. Even nitronome works well when you push stuff against walls.

Regarding damage: It's still not very good. If you go to 2m18s in the gremlin/ssb video here you'll see me get a best-case-scenario against a thwacker. I basically somehow manage to chain him for like 6-8 knockbacks in a row but it still can't out dps a mender. Oh.. and menders. One of the issues with shard bombs is their inability to aim. I kind of talk about it on the wiki page but the deadzone is so big that you have to position yourself perfectly to aim. If you mess up you're either knocking things away from yourself, towards yourself, or completely missing. With menders, they're always moving around so it makes this even trickier. Then you take into account the fact that they can completely run away from you forcing you to restart your bomb (5.7s from charge to main explosion!) This makes bombing with shards very frustrating. This applies to any enemy that moves around quickly.

I had major problems against thwackers when there were groups of 5+ which is very common in decon zones. Another thing is that mistakes are deadly. I didn't find set-up to be very reliable with shard bombs and at times you'd end up just whiffing on a bunch of bombs and having to try to somehow dodge a ton of attacks. Then there are decon zones where there are mecha knights mixed into the fray (see part two of this post)....

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Another thing that I forgot to point out is that shard bombs are completely one dimensional. Their neutral damage is so bad that you'd never, for example, use a DCB to kill undead or use a SSB to kill construct/beasts. In my comparison videos I mostly only compare shard bombs against enemies that are weak to the respective damage type against either bombs that either neutral to or deal the same bonus damage and it's already skewed so heavily in the favor of other bombs right now that I don't even know what to say. I mean from a technical standpoint is it even fair to compare DCB to DBB against undead? DCB deals elemental damage and gets a huge bonus to damage whereas DBB is piercing and deals neutral damage. But it gets smoked anyway. Imagine clearing the undead with SSS or splinter bomb dealing half that damage. You'd NEVER do it, EVER. It just doesn't make sense.

So when you're gearing up for FSC and you load up your bombs you grab DCB for undead. How do you deal with trojans? Nitronome doesn't have that problem; it can take out slimes, trojans, wolvers, wheels, undead. DBB doesn't have that issue; it can take out trojans, wolvers, and all the undead. So you bring the DCB anyway and then bring a SECOND bomb to take care of everything else. But what's the point? The DCB is a specialty weapon designed to snipe construct/undead but it isn't even better at doing that than the second bomb you're going to bring and it's even worse when looking at evertyhing that isn't construct/undead.

I don't mention any of this in my tests because I wanted to give shard bombs a fair shot but in actual use you're always looking at a two bomb loadout because of how bad they are against their off-bonus damage. I don't think this is really fair to the bombs I've pitted them up against though because if we start talking about 2-bomb loadouts then DBB should get VT on those devilite/kat levels, DBB should get electron vortex in FSC, DR should get AoA in RJP, etc. You get where I'm going with this? All the tests are skewed so heavily in favor of the shard bombs and they're still losing.

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Again if you missed it I have a lot more written about these bombs over on my wiki user page along with some more videos against most enemies.

I want to become a bomber/swordsman hybrid, but I can't seem to find a loadout that fit's well into both categories. I'm thinking of volcanic demo helm for ctr with a skolver suit for the damage, and get a trinket slot for ctr swords (electron vortex / brandish), so what I have now is:

Trinket 1: CTR Swords
Trinket 2:
Helm: Volcanic Demo Helm
Amor: Skolver Coat
Shield: GOS with shadow med
Weap 1: Brandish
Weap 2: Electron Vortex
Weap 3:
Weap 4:

So, what do you suggest for my second trinket and my 3rd and 4th weapons, and should I fix anything?

I'm an aspiring swordmaster but am considering using one bomb in my load out for CC. Namely, when I am cornered due to high volume of monsters or low volume of space, I need something that will buy me either time or space. The scenario that comes most to mind is Legion of Almire, where there is a party pad in a VERY tight space and two of those shielding skeleton warriors spawn right next to you. There is no room to kite, the enemy has a functional shield, and he relentlessly chases you down with powerful, quick, and gap-closing blows so my heavy sword can't push him out of reach. This actually happens frequently throughout the level, where free space to move to is limited, and you are pretty much instantly cornered as soon as you hit the party pad. Sometimes there is a fat Juggernaut or a pair of turrets to boot.

Should I:

a) Use a Shivermist
b) Use a Vortex bomb
c) Use a different bomb
d) Use one of the bombs above but only if I fulfill certain conditions (ie. have specific bomb related UVs, not playing in certain levels)
e) Not use a bomb (possible idea on what I might do instead?)

I am not a 5* yet (current 4*), so perhaps the tactics change later in a manner I don't expect. If you feel that's what I am missing, state answer e. Thank you for your advice!

Thanks for such a thorough response. This was more than I could hope for.

My question was for solo play, btw. I will view their links later as I am in a rush atm. Have a good day!

I rather kill them in half the time than just knock them around, but its mainly user preference. Though I guess the knock down would be more important when soloing, though Nitronome would probably be better.

The various shard bombs can also knock down gremlins in danger rooms as well as mecha knights. You can kill things faster with DBB than with Shivermist, does that make DBB a better bomb than Shivermist?

I've got test server access at the moment, and intend to conduct further tests with it during that time.

I'm not, per se, defending the bombs here. I think putting out 6 shard bombs was incredibly sleazy, and I agree about the one-dimensionality. However, slags and jellies are kind of unfair families to make comparisons with these bombs with, as they can't even be interrupted or knocked down as far as I'm aware.

Also think you're overstating the extra time required to kill wolvers using splinter bombs. I practically breezed through shadow lair wolvers with Splinter Bomb.

Zeddy
Also think you're overstating the extra time required to kill wolvers using splinter bombs. I practically breezed through shadow lair wolvers with Splinter Bomb.

Oh, it's usable for sure. How competitive it is is up in the air though especially since you sacrifice damage against 4 families instead of 2. The clears are still slower than DBB though. I did a side-by-side-by-side comparison of them here: dbb vs nitro vs sss.

As for knocking down gremlins in danger rooms, I'm not sure how useful that is when actually hitting them is very tricky. I gave up on SSB really quickly against gremlins. I did 15 runs into OCH w/ SSB only and it just wasn't effective at all. Thwackers move way too much to reliably knock them down with the outer ring. Sometimes you get multiple knockbacks but it doesn't matter when menders can easily avoid the bombs. In between the time of bomb drop and outer explosion, the mender is gone. I don't think it's good against gremlins at all.

As for shiv vs DBB. I think that comparison is really lousy. We're talking about very similar weapons here. Both these bombs do pierce damage and their main function is dealing damage. There is really no reason why the SSS/DSB should be consistently slower to kill against all enemies weak to pierce. You can look at stuff like DA vs Combuster and see strengths and weaknesses; the shard bombs are just weak.. period.

The only bomb vs bomb tests I conducted where shard bombs actually won were SSS vs DR against trojans (and only by 1-2 sec while tying multiple times) and DCB vs VT/Electron Vortex (those aren't even pure damage bombs) and it only won by several seconds.

The bombs need a huge rework; I'm not sure there is a lot to defend and let's get one thing straight: I never said you couldn't kill stuff with them. I have like 15-20 videos of me doing clears with the bombs so it's not like it's impossible, it just isn't optimal.

It's an assumuption I made based on what we have. The bombs primarily do damage and I think their cumbersome and unpredictable knockback make them bad support bombs. In the case of DBB vs SSS/DSB, for example, DBB can deal damage without disrupting the battlefield while the SSS/DSB is completely chaotic. Maybe if stun gets fixed (hah) and becomes a great status to have then things can change but then we're going to make even more assumptions.

I found it really bad against shielded enemies, especially large ones where shard collisions prevent shards from wrapping around enemies. Against trojans, for example, bombing just didn't work. I tried it against mortafires it ALMOST worked but agaisnt walls shards don't reliably appear.

I think making these damage-support bombs is an interesting idea but if DCB had freeze with larger explosions, why would you ever use shivermist? If DMB had grem+poison why would you ever use VV? In fact, I think that would make VV the worst bomb in the game.

I'm not really sure how to fix these bombs. I think the most straight forward band-aid that we could get as soon as possible would be to adjust the 2nd fuse so that you can combo on single bombs, fix/remove shard hit limits, buff damage slightly, buff neutral damage majorly, increase inner radius and increase radius on out-shard hits, tone down knockback on outer-shards. This stuff is pretty pointless to discuss though because I have a feeling OOO is going to do nothing or we won't see changes for 8-12 months (see bomb feedback thread to see how long it took them to even mess with DBB/BAB/etc).

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Re: Gremlins

I think you need to work on your bombing vs gremlins. DR is a good against gremlins because it can snipe out menders and will quickly break their shields. You can use it to kite with as well since thwackers will never hit you as long as you're moving away from them and they'll keep running into the rings. For the DBB you need to circle strafe around so that they're all facing the bomb. DR is great for the section of OCH with the machine that has a shield since the DPS on it is so high you can snipe it out really fast. I was unable to even get past the first part of OCH with SSB after 15 tries then soloed the entire 5 depths with DBB and DR so IDK.

We have Shocking Salt Bombs right now and I still find myself using Voltaic Tempest depending on circumstances. The radius buff I had in mind would not be particularly large. The VV is a pretty valid point. OOO needs to stop treating all statuses as equals and give that one a longer duration or a larger radius or something. Besides, statuses on these bombs aren't a certain thing. With haze bombs it's pretty much guaranteed, and you get a persistent status carpet lasting for a while. During this while, other weapons can be used whereas with shard bombs you pretty much just have to stick to them.

I agree on the bombs being pretty horrid against mortafires, but I found them to be very effective against Thwackers. For some reason, I can walk nearly unharmed through Devilite levels on a 2-bar connection using Sun Shards, too. There's something about the rate of explosions going off and the exact spread of the shards that almost always makes devilites get constantly interrupted by them in a way DBB does not.

Re: Re: Gremlins
When I tried DR on battle pods the orbs did not damage them in the slightest. I concur on it being pretty useful against shielded menders, but they usually just run away from it otherwise. I'll do a shard bomb run of OCH right now and see how it works out.

Edit:
I did that now. Only brought Shocking Salt Bomb as I don't have Deadly Crystal Bomb on my regular server character and OCH wasn't available on the test server. At first it went horrible. I trapped a mortafire into a corner, and the shard that popped in behind him didn't hit anyway. The initial explosion stops short of the barracks so you have to run into the steel wire and take a bar of damage to destroy them if you want to use the bomb for it. It kinda sucked against turrets.

I honestly can't tell you how, why or when it started going right, but at some point it suddenly did. It wasn't concious, but after a bit of trying I was able to herd mortafires around so that I killed them faster than I could've done with a sword. Crowds of Thwackers and Knockers shred up like paper before a flamethrower. Sometimes I'd manage to destroy a barrack with a shard but mostly I just ran up to them and took a hit. It was okay against turrets.

I didn't go any further after the first stage, 'cause I only had the ME for that one floor. I'll do a full OCH run when I get my DCB. Have a feeling the battle pods are going to be awful.

Another edit:
If I was to give one general advice for the shard bombs, it's that there is a very good reason for the long fuse time on the outer shards. You can use the core blast from the next bomb you plant to bump enemies into the shards of the previous bomb. It's not about predicting where the enemy will be. You have to control them. The result is that enemies knocked about from shard to blast to shard will be unable to move or retaliate. Unfortunately, it only works that well on gremlins, devilites and to some extent wolvers.