Shard hits are capped at 3. After that, or even if you just chain hit enemies past 3 hits, they gain invincibility. Shards also randomly disappear near walls. Yes it's random. If you stand in the same spot near-ish to a wall and drop shard bombs, some shards will disappear, and some won't. You do realize that something has to be pretty much Vanaduke sized for you to even try to hit them with four shards?

Not when there's a huge dead spot inside the ring of bombs and the bombs to a low enough damage for you to just not care about a hit.

I don't even know what you're saying here.

The shards themselves have small AOE, and again, the bugged hit limit.

I'm not sure you've really been using these bombs. You might have messed around a little but your tactics speak against that.

@Derpules, DBB's lack of knockback makes it even better for hitting multiple enemies.

@Naffle:
Even with max damage, the shards damage doesn't even remotely compare to any other worthwhile killing method, and as a wall/area denial, the hazes still tend to do the job better.

Thank you for your input.

~Naffle

To be fair, this isn't a what-does-every-other-bomb-do-better-than-the-new-shards thread, because, well, derp.

Dark Rep doesn't have a hit limit, but it does trigger invinci frames in pvp which reduces its usefulness there as well.

Hazes are limited by peoples resistances, but if you keep a mixed loadout you can keep on top of that. It's generally pretty easy to find out which players are immune to which and, even if they do catch you at first, you'll know from then on. And this can be further mitigated by cycle-hazing your full loadout; guaranteed to catch people out then, and multiple effects as well stack up nicely.

If/when a bugfix comes out then the debate can be reopened into new possibilities of what tactics can be used, but for right now, many people have tried out various styles and generally not got anywhere. Fact is, it's like trying to effectively use winmillion...the shards are just UP, flat out. They can be used, and they can be used effectively, but not on a level that compares to other, more effective methods. If you enjoy using them, go ahead, nothing's stopping you and they're not broken uselessly, but just don't expect to keep up with other choice weapons, is all~

On the other hand, their knowledge of this game is vastly, incomparably gigantic, detailed, and sophisticated compared to yours or mine.

If you gave me this game's source code, I could fix the stun bug in a day.

There, I can make claims from nowhere I can't back up, too.

They may not care about our shard bomb complaints, but they certainly still care about the game, as they are still devoting financial resources to the game.

That doesn't prove they care about the game. I devote time to my job but that doesn't mean I care about at the place; I just want the paycheck.

Exasperates me when people whine that devs no longer care about their game. Is exhausting, and you get them on every single MMO. I'm sure there's some psychological subtext being portrayed by said whiners, but who am I to say....

Fact is, Zeddy, you have no idea what the devs think or feel about the game that they spent years devising, coding, programming, funding, marketing and maintaining. Just ask yourself; if you spent years making a game out of nothing, you'd (surely?) be one of those people saying "oh, I'd know exactly what to do with my game and do exactly what the game needs" etc etc etc. Then imagine that out of all the people that play, love and enjoy it, you get a dozen people a day QQing that you hate the game and you hate the players and you should just drop dead etc.

How would you feel? Or do you genuinely believe you'd become so jaded that you'd lose all interest in your game and its playerbase? We all know the likely answer, so let's just quit the off-topic tantrum and get back to the topic at hand: "No, you can't use shards competitively until if/when they fix them".

Regardless of what you guys are talking about, limiting hits and making shard disappear when close to walls is pretty stupid and unfair. Brandish charges or DA energy swords have no hit-limit whatsoever stopping them from hitting multiple enemies which should be a bomb only trait, swords should be single target dps. Seriously what weapon in the game prevents you from damaging X enemy X number of times?

They already have hilariously low damage but they go even further by ensuring skilled players can't use them in tight corners to get higher damage pretty much reduces their usefulness to spamming them. Oh lets not forget the annoying random knock-back to make your teammates hate you.

Hail Driver does 88 damage towards neutral targets, 169 towards weak ones and 31 towards resistant ones.

You're getting that from the wiki? Those edits were made to the wiki on February 7. The damage buff to handguns and bombs happened on May 9. So I'm pretty sure that your numbers are not accurate. Of course, we will collect new numbers soon.

As for the speed-stuff, you'd have to ask someone who uses guns.

Who? No player can know this information without extremely detailed study of the outward-facing behavior of the game. But Three Rings knows it trivially, because they made the game, and can simply look it up inside the game.

There was a single programmer working on Spiral Knights for the first 6 years or so during the game's development. He quit the project a while ago. This is why the brunt of the updates this year have been mostly art assets and one very broken weapon.

If it's true, then that's sad. Can you give us any more detail about the level of programmer? You mean, to write the game engine itself? They must still have people scripting atop the game engine. I would love to know more, including a citation.

I myself have actually been thinking about possible ways to re-balance the shard bombs, although I don't think those ideas warrants the creation of a new thread. Seeing as this seems like the most pertinent thread to post them in, I might as well post them here.

First of all, of course, I would remove the bugged hit limit, and at least increase the intended hit limit to 5 or so. Secondly, I would completely remove the disappearing shards. If you placed a bomb right up against a wall, it will place the pertinent shards right against the wall. The increased hit limit would prevent absurd amounts of damage but players would still be rewarded for tactical thinking. I would decrease the secondary fuse time so that shards would explode before the next primary would. The shards would probably also need a radi increase, maybe by something as little as 10%. I'm think knockback should be removed, or at least weakened on the secondaries. Overall damage should be increased.

One big change I would make is the addition of normal damage to all shard bombs, not on top of the damage increase, but something akin to brandishes, while keeping the neutral damage the same. The rationale behind this is simple. As of now, pure specialized weapons have the same neutral and bonus damage multiplier of split weapons, however, the have severely reduced damage against resistant targets. This would also make shard bombs unique among bombs, in terms of damage.

Sorry for stealing your thread.

Anyway, in terms of tactics, I find that shard bombs are decent at taking out turrets. You can place the bombs so that the primary and two secondaries always hit. The hit limit makes this difficult in large parties where enemy health is high enough for it to take effect multiple times.

Provided they are stationary, perpetually frozen, shocked, stuck in a corner or otherwise meet ideal criteria:

Autoguns (15 hits)
Divine Avenger (at least 4 hits, quite possibly more)
Brandish (~2-3 hits, ideal circumstances can see enemies hit by all 6 hits)
Winmillion (4 hits)
Catalyzer (I think around 7?);
Striker (10 hits)
Alchemer (5 I guess?)
Calibur (3 hits)
FoV (4 hits)
Dark Retribution (a whole lot of hits)
Troika (2 hits)
Thorn Blade (10 hits)
Hammer (3 hits, not even a charge attack)

That is probably not all of them.

Can you imagine the outrage if any of these weapons had an arbitrary hit limit?

The hit limit is no doubt from how powerful reprisal bombs were until they got nerfed way too hard. DR isn't too useful anymore, because they both ubernerfed the damage output and the orb rotation speed... so you're forced to use it against massive hordes of enemies or just huge enemies in general, or an enemy could easily waltz through the area and not get hit (if at all, it's poor damage). They should have slowed down the orbs or lowered the damage... but not both. Just look at it.

Now they have a hit limit on shards- can't do diddly squat against single targets, AND they gave them horrid damage to begin with. When a specialized damage weapon deals less against what is weak to it than a normal weapon of a different line, something is wrong.