AoA puts out a TON of damage if you get both the fire and blast affect. It'll out do nitronome bomb per bomb. If we use zombies as our example, the initial blast of AoA does 240 (all damage numbers are from d28) and if it does 4 ticks of fire damage, that is another 97*4 = 388 damage. Giving a single AoA a grand total damage of 628 per bomb which outclasses pretty much everything when it comes to undead.

However, Haze style bombs have a longer charge time. I believe (haven't measured) that the new shard bombs have the same charge time as blast bombs. This means I can place 3 shard bombs in the same amount of time it takes me to place 2 haze bombs (give or take a tiny margin, but it is pretty close). Dropping multiple haze bombs won't multiply the status affect damage, just the initial blast damage, and will extend the time of the status by a slight amount.

Compard to a shard bomb (assuming you can land initial + secondary every time), and you'll be getting ~320 damage (not sure what fully heated at d28 actually gives) for each bomb. 3*320 = 960 damage for the shard bomb, compared to 240*2 + 97*6 = 1062

So, assuming optimal placement, the AoA will do slightly more damage against one of its best targets (zombie). However, for all other mist bombs you won't come close to those numbers. Against any other monster (for example, mecha knights only take 60 damage from fire) and the AoA will also drop in damage output where as the crystal bomb will stay the same.