This thread was designed for me to not only discuss parts of my SK life story, but also to address my feelings (rage) toward this new change/meganerf the RSS has gotten as of late.

I'll just start by getting to my SK life story in the game. I first joined in the sunny days of this wonderful game sometime in late June last year, after the Steam release. I thought the game's playing style, combat systems, and art were the best things I'd ever seen, and started out as a T1 newb. Now, ever since those early days I was already fascinated by bombers, and got my first bomb, the blast bomb, some days later.

By this time I already had an Iceburst Brandish as my main sword, and I quickly came to realize that bombs were very different from what I expected. To start, bombs did equal or lesser damage than swords, and also could only be charged to attack, which made me wonder as to what their purpose was. After reading the Wiki, I soon moved on to a new prospective bomb I had in mind, the Haze bomb line (back when all status bombs branched off the Haze bomb), and (fast forward) was soon fighting my way through Royal Jelly Palace, Glacius in hand with Fiery Atomizer as my secondary. After whacking the crown off the Royal Jelly many a time, I soon took the time to level my shield all the way to 4* to begin my T3 journey some time after the updated RJ boss fight.

Before I did this, there was a time when I would ragecraft two Crystal bombs every weekday for around 2 weeks. During that time, I managed to craft a gem of a crystal bomb, with a "Damage vs. Undead bonus: Very High" UV, and began the long laborious task of alchemizing it up the star levels to the penultimate 4* level with the money I got from running FSC repeatedly. Soon after getting it to Radiant Sun Shards, this bomb quickly became my go-to Slag shredder in FSC, and I quickly learned how to use it in packed crowds to deal incredibly large amounts of damage (over 343 damage per shard on slags in the last stratum), and to use it to its fullest potential.

Soon later, however, there came the forum threads, rumors, and complaints. It all started when news got out from the testing server that the RSS was converted to pure piercing. Although it didn't happen at first, this idea incited fear in the hearts of many bombers like me, who used RSS on almost exclusively undead/constructs. Nick made a thread about this change, which many bombers then replied to with their highly negative opinion on this idea. Some time after that more news came out that there was a new "cluster bomb" idea being applied to the RSS and variants soon, and some bombers (including me) were neutral/curious about such a change. I personally thought it was going to shoot out shards that exploded at short range, and saw that as a pretty cool idea.

Adding to this were a small number of threads complaining about RSS's "unfair spammage/damage/something in Lockdown", which made no sense to me seeing as the bomb's Piercing/Elemental damage was not very powerful if one shard hit a player. Nevertheless, these threads were created and once again bombers including me tried to reason that this was certainly not the case, and that RSS wasn't the evil Lockdown Boogeyman that people made it out to be.

Then came my inactivity. Initially arising from increasingly ridiculous amounts of schoolwork and exams, I stopped playing for about a couple months after the release of missions, only coming back very occasionally. However, when I came back some time later, I found that literally no content was added, which only contributed to an extended inactivity. I began playing once more in the summer, where I beat Vanaduke for the first time, a great accomplishment for my time in SK. Once again, however, I began playing other games and MMOs. Eventually, I began to lose interest in said other games about 2 days ago, and decided to give SK a little try again (the last time I was on I had created an alt account).

I was very happy upon my first seconds of being back to SK, that is, until I saw the mail, which I received more in a way that a child receives news that their pet died or something. At first, I was skeptical yet open minded about the new bomb they had turned the RSS into, that is until I saw the stats. The completely removed elemental damage on the bomb didn't exactly make me happy, quite the opposite, but nonetheless I wanted to give it a chance, and so I took it on a FSC run with my brother.

I had arrived very late to the party (or funeral, rather...) of August 8th, thanks to my inactivity. Needless to say after using my RSS (with Damage vs. Undead Very High, mind you, dear reader) on spookats in the Scarlet Fortress I soon founf that my beloved RSS was rendered nearly useless; a damage number that once would've broken the 200s without a long delayed animation now dealt a puny 81 damage per shard, or a number very close to that. I was, at the moment, incredibly angry and confused as to why OOO would do that (Rant engaged).
The bomb was fine as it was before, and in fact it supported my idea of bombs doing more damage, something that was, in my eyes, the only reason I would use a weapon that requires only charge attacks.

After switching it out in favor of a 3* Lightning Capacitor I had in my inventory, I was annoyed and frustrated all the way through FSC, knowing that I could've killed that group of Slags here, or done maximum damage right there, or...and the list just went on and on as I saw that I now had to use my also beloved Glacius much more to clear out zombie herds. The RSS was a very fun weapon to use as a bomber, and it was, as I stated before, the one I used the most to kill enemies with.

I saw this change as having little reason, lots of disappointment, and larger amounts of anger and confusion which I blew off by posting on the forum. I think that a nerf that not only removed about half of my damage while also changing all damage to piercing (contrary to my undead/construct-killing interests), and also making the attack itself incredibly delayed and broken, all with an incredibly unneeded charge time extension that is making placement of this inferior bomb far more troublesome without any warning was not a very good idea on OOO/devs/whoever handles this stuff's part, and that's the reason I'm writing this thread, for all the community and especially to the currently silent OOO staff/ whoever is supposed to read threads, who have not responded much or at all to this subject. Also, the UV tickets I received in the mail aren't going to bring my bomb back, and I really don't see how anyone could possibly see this change in a positive light.

So, what do I suggest? Fix the bomb, make some kind of workaround to elemental damage without having to waste CE on crafting another bomb for the sake of elemental damage, improve its damage in general (currently abysmal), lower the shard fuse time, charge time reduction, etc...or something at the very least to show that whoever is in charge of weapon balancing is doing their job and not sitting there after issuing the worst, gratuitous, mean-spirited, and utterly-without-community-input-or-at-least-from-what-I-can-tell nerf I've ever seen in a video game.

And that's my thread, tear it up if you must, revile it, do whatever you need to do to see my message.

Little afternote here: does anyone know if there are any rules against copypasting this thread into a support request?