Vortex + sword charge should be powerful because you are combining the power of two weapons.

Shard bombs on the other hand, require two bombs to be useful. (One bomb to fix the mobs into formation and one bomb to blow them up.)

Shard bombs are cluster bombs. Go wiki cluster bombs in real life, you will see the military doesn't always use it. If they are going to blow up things like railroad or power line, in which there are certain geometric formation the bombs can exploit, they would use that. In this game, shard bombs are similar. There are situation that shard bombs are useful (e.g. corridor or choke point situation in which child bombs would collapse onto each other), but for the rest they are pretty much useless or outshine by other weapons easily.

Combining with the multiple flashes due to child bomb exploding, this bomb is pretty annoying.

Seriously, if I'm Three Rings and I'm to sell this bomb to the customers. I would not have done any of the following:

• release the patch in the middle of a summer and pretend it's a big milestone release;
• combine the decision to remove old RSS and the release of the new shard bombs. Right now, people can easily see the contrast and reason that a good bomb is replaced with an inferior one;
• put shard bombs in the same branch as old RSS. (Old) RSS should really have its own line because it is a frag grenade / claymore mines.
• flashes from explosion. Nitronome's flashes are bad enough. Eight of them blow up together are too much;
• lack of demo and expect customers to "find" a use of a feature. What you could have done is, have a Dev. demonstrates how the bombs are intended to be used. This should be the big selling point. If you can demonstrate this is a "cool" feature, people will look forward to it. Besides, if you eat your own dog food, your customers would be less cautious too.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. Right now, it's too late.

I'm just going to leave this here.

@Eltia, Don't forget their completely botched "compensation" scheme.

@Fehzor, I'm not recreating it, I'm showing that this topic has been discussed to death, and the only action made by OOO is "graveyard 2 all threads criticizing our change" and "lock threads that gain too much support." If I was recreating it I would copy and paste the backup of the thread I have just in case an "accidental self-un-publishing" occurs again.

Just implement the "3 hit+ > Invincible" feature from the nRSS.

You see now why the decision to remove old RSS and the decision to introduce new shard bomb should be orthogonal (independent) of each other?

The Devs appear to suffer overconfident at the time of release. They obviously know about the risk as evidence by their "compensation scheme". They overlooked it and bet on the chance that the changes would not blow up. Unfortunately for them (and for us), the changes blow up together, at the same time, and due to the way the patch couple the decisions, the blow ups amplify each other.

Result: we observe endless "suggestion" about the aftermath. This thread is like what.. the 10th or more thread on this topic?

So unless the Devs come to realize they are very good in something (the technical side of game development) but relatively not as proficient in managing risk, and the two aren't 100% transferable skills, I'm afraid we would be looking at more shard bomb scenario in the future.

This is not to say Devs will not make mistakes. (Mist Well I'm looking at you.) Devs are humans and they will make mistakes. That's why a lot more weight needs to be put onto how to manage the risks when they do make mistakes. From the Shard Bomb patch, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the risks are pretty poorly managed.

Perhaps the COO should consider hiring a risk manager for the SK development team.

I have yet to see more concrete evidence to support the claim that the new shards support teamwork. From what I'm seeing, the flashes caused by the child bomb explosion is already a big teamwork deterrent.

But whatever the outcome of the previous statement would be, it does not change that the Devs didn't properly manage their risk in the shard bomb patch. And this is much more than making poor design decisions.

As customers, we should be a bit worried about how much our investment in SK are as risk. And if the risks continue to go unmanaged, the pricing of this game should be adjusted accordingly.

Link fixed.

We actually do it very regularly outside SLs; it's actually an incredibly fun bomb to use.
And yes, I have said that I'm less than impressed that we have to use tactics to make it work, but it does encourage teamwork, thinking and playing together as a group, which (imo) is a good thing.

It isn't a niche application; this technique can be used absolutely anywhere, especially since shards have all three damage types. We're doing these runs in boss lairs, regular CWs, OCH, SLs and doing them in standard times. That's not niche.

And yes, if you happen to lag then it's not ideal, but if you happen to lag from bombs, the odds are that you're not a bomber (that uses shards) and therefore not likely to be in a shard team, so it shouldn't be a problem. The "teams" i'm talking about consistent purely of shard bombers (and maybe a blitzer, since we've discovered that a gunner on the sidelines works tremendously well, since it keeps the gunner safe and allows them to add dps)

I somewhat lucked out when they made the patch, cuz I am a crystal bomb crafter who goes at it for uvs (got 5 CTR VH back in the day) and I had around 30 crystal bombs sitting in my inventory... Ya, lots of free uv tickets...
Anyway, I've always found crystal bombs and such to be incredibly useful in FSC, assuming u can do it right... I mean, I've practiced with them so much I can take out 2 Trojans with 2 bombs no sweat (not that hard, think why)... This new patch had upsides and downsides to it... The obvious upsides are the uv tickets :3 and the slightly extra damage output if u can use it correctly. The downsides were the knockbacks and the lag... So, I'm almost neutral about this... But recently I was hacked, and now I'm going swordsman/gunner, so I'm not gonna use this too much.

About the Trojans and the crystal bomb line, think like this:
_
|X @ X

@ is crystal bomb, |X is Trojan
Basically, what u do is tempt one of them to attack, run and plant the bomb right behind, as the second one turns to face u and u head upward... Like the diagram. The two have to be close, with just enough run space between them to place the bomb, and u have to be quick and have perfect bomb placement and timing :3
Hope I helped

~Apop

The only thing I don't like is that the current bomber's arsenal leaves no damage bomb that deals shadow or elemental.

If you're to bring a damage bomb to FSC, you pack a Nitronome or a DBB. The problem with the Nitronome though, is that it's blinding and has very limited use. The DBB on the other hand; which beats the stuffing out of beasts, fiends, and even gremlins; does mediocre damage to undead and virtually nothing to jellies and constructs and doesn't grant interruption to undeads. To remedy this, I propose that an elemental and shadow version of the DBB be created as a completely separate line of bomb. This, to me, should've been the shard's replacement - two more DBB's that would require very little development. If the new shards are to stay the way they are then fine, but we need at least something akin to what I've described.

Nitro's knockback is manageable for the bomber but the issues is your comrades will also have to deal with that. It's always best to use a bomb with no silly knockback so as to not hamper your teammates. Which means shard bombs are a no go for me, not to mention their terrible dps output as someone already did test showing Nitronome beating them even against monsters they are suppose to counter. If there was an elemental DBB I would buy CE for it almost instantly.

If you want to be supportive the mist bombs do better damage and better crowd control than any of the shard bombs while not knocking stuff around, not to mention the range.

I don't know about you guys, but i love the shard bombs. If OOO ends up bringing back the ol' RSS style bombs, then thats fine, but keep these ones as well. That is all.

~Magnicth

I believe this is the video you wanted. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz-8JFrGcfg&feature=youtu.be

@Capt-Chopper:
but I'm completely sure 4 people using brandishes is far more effective.

And my point is....it's not! Thanks for reading.

No, I'm not saying "shards suck unless you team shard, then they suck less". I'm saying "shards suck unless you team shard...then they work". As in, work as well as any regular weapon. They're not good for speedruns, but any regular weapon run, they work.
For example:
Regular players average FSC runtime: 40mins (give or take) (using brandishes or w/e it is you use)
Solo shard bomber: 1hr+
Team shards: <40mins

With me now, or are you still not reading anything?

@Verodius:
every idiot whining that they were OP

It amazes me how many people on this thread are actually reading...nothing at all. No one is "whining" that they were OP. No one is saying that they were the most OP weapon in the game. No one is saying that RSS deserved a nerf but brandishes don't. We're saying that they were OP. But that we'd still happily have them back, and that there should have been alternatives. The fact that they were OP is really neither here nor there in this debate, that's more of a "well, let's face it; they were."

Or are you going to ignore me as well then go on to say something that only proves you've completely skipped almost everything important that's been said on the issue? I'd really appreciate it if you at least read the posts before commenting on the posts.

Well, I can maybe agree with the selfish one (mind, I wasnae the one who said that) since it was the best dps bomb we had. I'd call it more selfish if we had a variety of dps bombs.
However, it was OP. Ridiculously so. /insert long list of monsters it annihilates without problem.
I consider anything that can onehit a target with redundant damage to be OP. Yes, that certainly includes Blitz, and just because RSS took more skill to use doesn't change the fact that when used right, it was still OP.

It wasn't an incredibly painful process that required time and thought to "be used right" and unlock it's full damage. Fact is if you screwed up, it took you all of 1.5 seconds to try again. It may require skill to get it first time or every time, but it didn't take too much for a bomber to get the hang of it, and by that point, it was OP.

However, I have said that I don't think it was OP enough to deserve a (huge) nerf and most certainly not enough to merit it being removed from the game completely, especially not when weapons like Brandish and Blitz continue to receive buffs in one form or another.

That's not "whining about it being OP". That's just stating "It's OP.". It just had to be stated several times because at least one person refuted my claim. Am I not allowed to defend my claim without being considered whiney? If that's the logic, then are you whining right now by defending your point?

The revert would never happen. Bringing the old shard bombs back would never happen even in a new line. That would be the devs admitting they made a mistake.

@Darkbrady, The RSS wasn't OP, it was better than the other bombs. You could still do FSC (the place where everyone agrees it does best) faster with a Brandish.

Brandishes; things they destroy: pretty much everything. Status spreading like nobody's buisness. Rage-craftability; easier than any weapon in the game. OOO response; add more, and bigger explosions to the charge.

Blitz Needle; higher close range DPS than any other weapon, including the old RSS, and it's a gun? Ability to one charge kill any non resistant enemy. OOO response; give it 20% extra damage on its charge shot.

Radiant Sun Shards; Highest DPS available to bombers, giving them a versatile high potential weapon. OOO response; tear it to the ground and replace it with a bugged wanabe.

Let them come back as a new line, fix the new ones so they work properly, tinker the old ones like the new ones to avoid claymore effect, everyone is happy.