I'm not sure if the total value of bonus is calculated before the decrease. You could have ctr med in the worst case scenario, or ctr vh because trinkets cancel out the strike penalty and leave you with mad bomber med and bomb base med.

Would you be using sun shards, or radiant sun shards? The 4* is much better, and you need to upgrade if dps bombing in ld is your goal.

Dbb is less useful for ld. No knockback, pierce only, and longer fuse than nitro.

Strike bomber specced for dps is not viable for several reasons. Dps bombers generally use recon, to achieve max ctr with only the base bomb ctr. Then, e. booms for vh damage. Mad bomber is just a bit too risky to use in ld. Usually, this leaves no room for pentas.

Add on the strike mod, and you suffer from the hp penalty. As a bomber, you rely on charges to do anything. You can't boost while charging. Unless you get very good with rss dueling, strike bomber is just not viable.

I have seen strikes use single bombs very well. Usually stagger/tempest. They sit on a point charging, utilizing the alone time to cover the vh decrease. Then they drop it and fight inside the cloud. But dps'ing, no.

My advice, if you still wish to dps bomb, is to go recon with boom trinkets. Or, get some ctr uv/trink and play guardian. Ctr for guardian is not necessary, just a way to boost your ctr to max.

As for armour, bombastic could be decent, since it will get some freeze resist in the future. So a full set and 2 e booms will grant you max damage. But generally, either mad bomber and paper thin defence and pentas, or some sort of piercing defence like platemail or skolver.

Yea, you'll want trinket slots asap, to use either damage trinks or heart trinkets.

My advice is some sort of piercing or shadow set, rss/nitro, damage trinkets, and either recon or guardian.

My pve bomber loadout actually uses different armour sets than when I use rss in lockdown. I use full mad bomber just about everywhere that I do bomb.