I was excited to hear that the new shard bombs had made their way to the test server.

Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to play lately that would allow me to A) Heat anything up to level 10 on there (given my heat is always going to be split at minimum 4 ways for armour, helm, shield, and one weapon.) B) I'm only far enough on missions to get prestige access for the last round of testing Danger Missions, so I can't test these in tier 3 (unless we want to count the new Danger Mission which I've given up on, and didn't find fun.)

These things aside, I think I was able to glean a few insights regarding these new bombs when I got a chance to fiddle around on there a few days ago.

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Regarding the mechanic: I very much like the mechanic. It still feels like the same bombs, and it's rewarding to see it go off.
It doesn't knock everything around crazily, and doesn't interfere with the party as much as blast bombs from the knockback effects, nor does it make as much mess on the screen as DR that your teammates can't see what they are doing.

These things said, I don't think it would really be more effective than spamming a larger blast bomb, in most instances. The shards don't spread very far, so it just gives you a small blast circle that hits a similar total area to the Irontech/Big Angry lines which is to say, kind of poor. The shards actually go a bit farther than that, but I found when using it that it was mostly the inside edge of the shards hitting things, not the outside edge much at all. It doesn't really feel to me that it _spreads_ all that much on detonation, just makes a predictable cluster around where you plant it. If the actual shards stopped a square or two farther away, I think it would be better, especially because of my next point. (On the other hand, with the current spread distance, it makes it reasonably easy to predict enemy movements and corral things in such a way to score hits on that inside edge, so this might make it more difficult to use...)

One of the coolest, and most useful things I found testing the new bomb was how the shards will travel and stop when they hit a wall or barrier. I REALLY liked how you could line the walls in a narrow space with shards. Again, if the shards went farther, there would be some REALLY, REALLY cool things that players working together could do with some high knockback weapons and shard bombs.
The fact that they can't cross low barriers that you can shoot over was annoying, though I presume that that has to do as much with intent behind them as the coding and game mechanics. This detail, I think, would just take more getting used to than anything, as much as I would think a bomb that launches shards should be able to launch them over those low walls that we encounter in levels. Thankfully this should also keep them from launching off of maps with low walls blocking us from the chasm below, so this is a double-edged part of the mechanic.

TBH, if how it worked was up to me, I'd have half of the shards go between one and two squares farther (and leave half the same) to increase how much the shards spread, give the bomb more of a sense of randomness, and give it a bit more utility. If this was done, I think it would still work reasonably well inside of the small radius that it's hitting now, and give it a little bit of reach. Perhaps just having the bomb shoot a few more shards than it does, a few squares farther in random directions could achieve this too, if it wouldn't make it too powerful for what it's intended to do. (They'd be like bonus shards!)

The fact that the shards disappear if you place the bomb close beside any barrier was thoroughly annoying, but if it can't be fixed, I guess I could deal with it, so I assume others could too.

I felt that the bomb charge time was good. Using trinkets and armour to replicate the CTR a pure bomber would get, they were fast enough to be able to stack usefully. I agree with others that either the main fuse time could do with a reduction, or the fuse time on the shards. I felt that it took quite a while for the bomb detonation to actually happen since they effectively have two fuse times. These weren't bad individually, but together they made for some waiting for the bomb to detonate...

I'm not a LD player, but if I was I'd be worried about the niche that this bomb fills now. It's entirely avoidable (probably more so than blast bombs, now) since you just have to avoid blinking shards. It's a little bit random since it takes some experience and knowing when the shards landed to know just when they'll go off, but this will relegate it to "area denial" status like pretty well every other bomb. Offensive LD bombers will be sad.
I think this would be fixed with both a little more range (so that it's more possible to toss a few shards from a safer distance,) and shorter fuse on the shards themselves. It would take much better reactions to avoid the shards even if they just went off faster.

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Regarding Damage: I didn't get to use heated bombs to test, but I did briefly take them into the tier 3 version of the new Danger Mission just to see how they'd work. With level 0 on heat and a Med damage bonus, I found that the Ionized Salt bomb was easily killing both gremlins and jellies with a med/ultra damage bonus and strong damage type. The damage per hit was quite poor, close to half the neutral damage values of the DR, but I'd attribute that mainly to the fact that it was unheated (but it's worth stating to be thorough.)
Even so, with such low damage, it was easy to stack the bomb and clear out areas quite quickly. I'm pretty confident that the damage of the weapons seems good.