The wiki has a Bombing Guide, which is pretty good. Make sure you read that. My votes:

• Electron or Graviton Vortex, because they are fun.
• Ash of Agni or Voltaic Tempest, for clearing crowds.
• Shivermist Buster, to help most FSC parties, and to keep devilites under control. And to keep those ninja gremlins in Operation Crimson Hammer under control. Otherwise, Shivermist Buster is often more annoying than helpful, so use it sparingly.

I'm not an expert bomber, but I've used Nitronome and DBB, and I just can't get into these damage bombs, because I can't achieve as high of damage per second as I do with my swords.

It really depends on what you want a bomb for. If you're looking for damage, go with a Nitronome (use with caution in teams, since its pretty distracting and throws enemies around) or DBB (use with caution around things that resist piercing..). If you want to aid swordies by inflicting status, the haze bombs are pretty much the only way to go. Vortex bombs are also GREAT for support (concentrates all the enemies around into one point), but arent really for status/damage and kinda just toss enemies around when they go boom (except the electron line, but only sometimes), which can be pretty annoying.

Hum, I never thought about assessing the break-even point of number of mobs over which bombs are better than swords.

Using Lancer Knightz data, DBB surpass piercing swords at 4 beasts/fiends. I suspect in reality even with 3 mobs, DBB will be better because raw damage doesn't account for the time to move and missed hits of swords. Also, DBB doesn't have the inconvenient of pushing back mobs.

Since Nitronome is normal, it performs a lot worse compared to elemental/shadow alternatives (I'm not going to compare it to normal weapons because no serious swordsman carry a normal sword). Comparing to brandish, assuming brandish only hit 1 mob per swing, you would need 5 mob to have a perfect break-even. Contrary to piercing alternatives, here Nitronome will have issues because of its knockback, and the 1 mob per swing for brandish is quite harsh.

RSS is hard to compare, because its quite unique, but it should break even at 3 to 6 shards hitting something. If you can reliably drop point blank RSS, you effectively have more firepower than a fast sword (still assuming the 1 mob per swing).

All in all, I think damage bombs are perceived as low dps because of the charge time + fuse time : it's going to be a while before you start to do any damage. About 1 sword combo. As mobs don't have a lot of health, it's a lot. Also, if you play with swordsmen/gunslingers, they are generally going to focus on some mobs and do them one by one, whereas a bombers ideal pattern (except RSS) is to damage equally every mob. On the remaining mobs, bombers are at a disavantage, obviously.

Also, a lot of clockworks level don't feature huge crowds, but rather lone or small packs of mobs.

"Yeah, I was worried that this statement would start a fight, which wasn't my intention"

Its all good my friend, I wasnt looking at it as a point of contention. You appear to be about the most knowledgeable knight in the game from your postings and I was just wondering if maby there was a parser or something similar I wasnt aware of.

Though I do not advocate bringing *too much* number crunching and theory craft to this game as I believe its the bobbing, weaving, and bumping that make this such a appealing refreshing game rather than reaching soft/hard caps for avoidance and damage like other mmorpgs, I must confess there have been many times I wish I had a dps meter of some sort for no other reason then to satisfy my personal curiosity...albeit I feel as though the community as a whole is most likely better off without.

~Luke

Often in wolver dens I will have DBB and Callahan equipped, some of my favorite tricks are shield bumping wolver into DBB's radius after I set it or taking potshots at others that look like they may move out of range at the last second for a stun or to knock them up (Hehe).

One more interesting thing to consider is the revalation that certain mobs seem to be attracted to knights carrying certain color crystals (at least this is what I think some of the recently added lore nooks convey). I know if I was a pure bomber I would be looking to always have the hot rock for the strata to make the most of my arsenal.

~Luke

Fradow, I do have DBB (post #3), and I do find it much easier to use than Nitronome (post #8) because of the lack of knockback. In wolver dens, it does hit several wolvers at once. Our disagreement stems from the fact that I have a brighter view of piercing swords than you do. I regularly complete entire combos (not just the first swing) against two or even three wolvers. I've taken out as many as five full-health monsters (two gremlin menders, three wolvers) with a single Final Flourish charge. But it's possible that I'm remembering my performance generously --- for example, forgetting the time it takes me to position myself for such attacks. DBB in a wolver den certainly comes close to 4, 5, or maybe even 8 times its theoretical max DPS. The question is how close a piercing sword comes to 2 times its theoretical max DPS.

And I've tried DBB against fiends, but I'm not very good in that situation, probably due to over-aggression. I need to kite better, or set up a freeze/DBB combo, or something. Any ideas? Anyway, congratulations on your win. ;)

Lukehandkooler, the shield-bumping is definitely a good trick. As for what I know, it just comes from some testing and some talking to people like Fradow. I wouldn't want to crunch the numbers too hard in this game either, but it is somewhat fun to try to reverse-engineer the rules. It's like a puzzle to solve. Cheers.