Spiral Knights - Shard bomb review

Shard bomb review

9 replies [Last post]

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 09:25

Eternity-Terminal

I've seen a lot of rants that shard bombs suck.

I'm surprised...I love my rock salt bomb so much I'm going to get sun shards, crystal, and a dark matter (for T2 PVP) bombs. The rock salt, although damage isn't too great, seems to deal a lot of damage considering you hit with the first explosion and two shards. Although the DPS isn't too great, when I was using my rock salt, I could flinch lock two somewhat distant polyps at the same time while dealing constant damage to the lichens nearby. I'm using a lvl 10 bomb and a full bomber set.

Looking at the bombs now, are they really that bad?

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 10:14

Krakob

No, they aren't. People just assume they're easy to use while they are in reality the hardest to use weapons in the game, tying with Catalyzers.
You know why Shard Bombs are really hated? People suck at using them and expect them to be as easy to use as oRSS and they won't learn.
You know why Catalyzers are hated? They don't work in parties because no one bothers with the three bullets on the slime to the right so they kill that instead of focusing on the slime to the left that is at low health and can be killed while the Catalyzer user can kill the slime to the right who's already doomed by the three surrounding bullets.
return(rant);

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 10:15

Xenonguard

No they are not.

The Rock Salt bomb is my absolute favourite for taking out giant lichen colonies and other shards are good for large enemies, excluding battlepods. With these bombs more than any other, practice is essential to be good at it.

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 11:00

Diamondshreddie

Thank you

For taking the ime to realize that shard bombs are great, all they take is a bit of skill and effort.

Make sure that you coordinate with your team when using them, and also take note that they pair very well with the vortex bombs and the Shivermist buster.

EDIT:

@Krakob

you forgot to initialize your string.
public String setRant(){ String rant = "your rant"; return rant; }
public writeRant(String){ input.out.print(rant); }

Fri, 03/15/2013 - 10:57

Zeddy

Hi, I'm Zeddy! I have dedicated a lot of time ever since these bombs came out to carefully study them from a lot of different angles. I'll give you a point-by-point on the pros and cons of these bombs, as far as I've concluded with them.

+These bombs are fun! They're pretty to look at and mechanically they just feel interesting.

+Theoretically, shards bombs have considerably more damage going for them per charge than any other bombs except Dark Retribution.

+Shard bombs have a decent amount of interruption going for them on the actual shards. It's a little bit higher than on blast bombs.

+The double-explosion, narrow coverage and long fuse time allow for some creative ways to solve switch-puzzles and break things.

+The mechanics are very conducive to hitting deviltes.

And then there's the cons.

-These bombs are highly dangerous to use! It is impossibly to accurately predict how your knockback will affect enemies. This is due to the shards detonating in a random order, thus being able to go at least two different ways for any given position near the bomb they are located. In addition, the amount of knockback exists at a hazardous level. If you try to kit a mecha knight, the knockback is enough to push the knight enough that it can catch up with you, but the knockback is not large enough that it can push things a safe distance away from you. Since all other bombs present a means of crowd control or at least a complete lack of crowd disruption, shard bombs are the riskiest bombs to use by far.

-In practice, shard bombs are often weak. Hitting an enemy with the core + a shard on splinter bomb presents lower damage than simply blasting the enemy with DBB. Two shards would every so slightly out-damage DBB, and core+two shards would outdamage it considerably. However, this is impossible to pull off consistently on anything but immobile and preferably large targets. And even then...

-Shard bombs are terribly buggy. Certain enemies such as Trojans, Battlepods and Vanaduke will make shards disappear if your bomb is planted too close to them, resulting in next to no damage being inflicted upon them. In addition, shard bombs have an overeagerly enforced hit-limit of three hits at a time. I have never legitimately encountered it, and instead, enemies will become entirely immune to my damage if I consistently start hitting them with core + 2 shards. When this happens, enemies take no damage at all from my bombs.

-Shard bombing gremlins is a nightmare until you suddenly get a lucky hit and start juggling them. Their erratic movement pattern, especially when they're low on health, is absolutely horrid to deal with, especially those who're covered in shields.

-The bombs generate a lot of lag for people with poor computers and connections.

-Shard bombs came at a great cost: The old Radiant Sun Shards. The old bombs did twice the damage per shard, had bullets instead of randomized mines with an awkwardly long fuse, and no arbitrary hit limit. A lot of bombers swore by it in PvP and PvE. A lot of bombers had construct bonuses on it due to it being partially elemental. This is as if Alchemers were removed to make Catalyzer and Iron slug. As if Brandishes were removed to make way for Dread Venom Striker and Winmillion.

-Despite potentially having more damag than other bombs, that increased damage is still pretty mediocre, even if you were able to consistently inflict it (which you aren't). Brandish charges do somewhere in the area of 3-4 times the damage while being safer at the same time. Catalyzer is safer just from being a gun and each charge from Catalyzer does about the max applicable damage of a shard bomb (core + 2 shards). Catalyzer is considered too weak to be worth it. Alchemers have no arbitrary hit limit at all. The charge attack can potentially hit the same target 9 times with one of those times doing very high damage and each bounce being about the strength of shards. Shard bombs are the only weapons in the entire game to have an arbitrary hit limit and nothing about it is warranted.

-The bombs are useless in Lockdown. Salt bombs have a certain use in T3, being able to inflict moderate shock, but even then they're mostly easily avoided. I would highly advice you not to get dark matter for T2 Lockdown use. The damage is extremely poor and any enemy you would be able to hit with shard bombs would be much easier disposed of using Nitronome.

-It is 100% impossible to do damage to the Roarmulus Twins using shard bombs.

All that being said, I think Sun Shards, Salt Bomb and Crystal Bomb are decent crafts for damage bombers. They work alright against their intended targets, and Crystal Bomb in tandem with Electron Vortex will very quickly dispatch of zombies. I also swear to Salt Bomb when fighting ghostmanes and other gremlins in tight corridors, as found in certain areas of Operation Crimson Hammer.

I own a guild dedicated to the use and study of these bombs as well as other underrated gear. It's called Shard Squad and you're welcome in it if that's something that interests you.

Sat, 03/16/2013 - 08:49

Aureate

Personally, I like my ISB a lot more than what it used to be

The Shock helps stop enemies from getting knocked around so much; I do have to admit that in a single party, it's quite hard to use the other shard bombs effectively and it takes some effort to keep the enemies from being knocked out of the daisy chains of doom. However, this is mainly because I don't usually have two slots for bombs, and don't take along a Vortex to keep things neat and tidy. I suspect that this, and especially another bomber working in conjunction, would make using shards an awful lot easier.

Sat, 03/16/2013 - 09:14

Zeddy

@Aureate

Pretty much right. Shard bombs work at their best combined with support bombs or even more shard bombs.

Sat, 03/16/2013 - 13:14

Skold-The-Drac

another note...

Shard bomb's total fuse time is almost equivalent to the Irontech series. (shards will explode just a little before the itb does) I attempted timing it with a stopwatch and got an average of a ¼sec difference on the overall fuse.

Sat, 03/16/2013 - 16:55

Eternity-Terminal

Thanks for all the

Thanks for all the info!

Before I say anything else...

Rant=false

If I sounded like I was ranting...I wasn't trying to. :P

I'll contact you in game if I decide to join your guild, Zeddy. It sounds promising!

I have a shock haze bomb, so that would work if I wanted to have shock+a non-rock salt bomb. However, I'm generally using the knockback to my advantage and hitting with the core and the shards, but I'm still T2 so I don't know how it'll be in T3.

I hope they do fix the buggy shard creation and the hit limit. It would make it easier to use and give it some appeal to not-so serious bombers.

On the topic of shard bombs being bad in PVP, that's true only when you want to kill things. When you're goal is point control, it works better than the shock haze sometimes. (The radius of the haze is small and strikers like to dash inside and hit me out of the haze before they get shocked.) With CTR max, I can continually put shards down and then it's close to constant explosions. These do mediocre damage but get a large field constantly. This works until A) I mess up and leave a hole on or B) I take a Kilowatt to the knee. (Which may or may not be fixed by being a guardian.) I assume this would be a powerful tactic with two shard bombers at once, but I've never tried it.

And yes, shard bombs are great anti fiend weapons. I've seen devilites die to my 2* splinter bombs. Having stun, too, would make it even more viable.

One question, though: would a normal shard bomb ever be practical? If I wanted normal damage, I'd just grab a blast bomb.

Sat, 03/16/2013 - 17:41

Zeddy

Normal shard is okay with lots of damage bonuses, but still worse than other options. The only application I can think of for it is if you wanna bombs-only Vana and do the most possible damage to the mask. It racks up a lot of damage if you have a partner handling the watering so you can just spam bomb.

Sharding a control point doesn't work very well, for four reasons:
-The shards are slow, cover a tiny area, and are easy to predict. Strikers eventually learn to just run up to your face and flourish you to death eventually.
-Even if you hit, the damage is abysmal. Strikers can completely ignore your shardfield and just kill you, shrugging off the tiny damage you inflict. Experienced strikers will intentionally walk into shards if you are trying to "assist" another player by shardbombing the area. Your shards grant the enemy invincibility frames they can use to avoid damage from sealed swords and other sources of actual damage.

You read that right! Your shardbombing is helping the enemy!
-Shard bombs do nothing about guns.
-Anything shard bombs can do in LD, blast bombs can do a hundred times better.

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Shard bomb review