Guild Wars 2

I have 4/8 80’s and am slowly working my way through the classes, trying to find builds that I like, mostly for use in WvW.

I would love to run a bomb kit Engie in WvW, but the fuse just seems to render it difficult to do. People move around far too much for them to be effective. (I can see it working in PvE where mob paths are predictable).

Have the devs made any hint they might take out the fuse to make bomb builds more viable inWvW? (Or are they viable in WvW and I’m just missing it?)

I use bombs alot in wvw. When i see zerg throw all my nades on them then change to bombs and put all bombs in middle of it (+ i waanna test slick shooes ) its fun becouse u do lots of condi dmg + blind and with slicks u shouls also knock down alot of em . if u talking about 1vs1 still i use bombs u need just train for bigger range thats all ppl always fall in it

Thrumdi.9216:

I have 4/8 80’s and am slowly working my way through the classes, trying to find builds that I like, mostly for use in WvW.

I would love to run a bomb kit Engie in WvW, but the fuse just seems to render it difficult to do. People move around far too much for them to be effective. (I can see it working in PvE where mob paths are predictable).

Have the devs made any hint they might take out the fuse to make bomb builds more viable inWvW? (Or are they viable in WvW and I’m just missing it?)

I am having the same problem..people move around too much and they end up being more trouble than they are worth.

I’ve been running bombs lately and I feel like they are all about comboing off other abilities. We now have the ability to combo more freely off our movement abilities, i.e. Rocket Boots and Jump Shot. Try doing things like Rocket boots – Glue Bomb – Smoke Bomb – blunderbuss – Leap Shot. Before the self CC was too inhibiting, but its much more reliable and fast than it was before.

Being a bomb user in WvW, I’m loving it. But I think bombs are situational.
Against melee class it’s really a great kit. I also use tool kit and elixir gun, so I manage to switch to the more accurate kit for the situation (that’s what make the engi so fun for me).

I run bombs, and I use melandru food and -condition duration, in WvW. What I do is push in deep with the commander. If you can get through/behind the zerg, then glue bomb, and every bomb just becomes awesome. Instead of people running away from your bombs, they will run right to them.

Okay, we’ll make bombs instant-hit… now to balance it out, we also have to make all the melee weapons do AoE damage in a 120-180 radius—basically just add Cyclone Axe to every melee attack.

That sounds fair, right?

Might be interesting if all the bombs had two activations; one to place it, and another to remote detonate it.
You could use them to control the battlefield, since people would be pressured to avoid them.
If you want to use them like they are now, just double-tap it.
You could even set them in advance and place them strategically.

Weirwynn.2390:

Okay, we’ll make bombs instant-hit… now to balance it out, we also have to make all the melee weapons do AoE damage in a 120-180 radius—basically just add Cyclone Axe to every melee attack.

That sounds fair, right?

You do realize that most melee attacks cleave multiple targets and have a range that is greater than the default range for bombkit 1 and 2? Bombs work great in a large fight where the people aren’t trying to avoid any individual person.

They also work against PvE mobs and melee players who don’t really kite away from you. Ranged players in smaller fights are a problem though. As long as they keep moving, it is very difficult to hit them with the bombs, and virtually impossible without the increased range trait.

Bombs have a fuse because it’s designed to explode at that moment when you have moved a bit further and the opponents that are pursuing you have moved up to your previous position where your bomb is. This is a different use-case from plain melee fighting and it is particularly useful when running away.

If the fighting area is stationary then the bomb should still hit somebody (perhaps not the one you aimed for). If you still have problem, that explosion radius trait makes it pretty darn large.

Outside of the above two, it’s probably not a good scenario to use bombs. Switch to rifle/pistol momentarily or use glue.

Knox.8962:

You do realize that most melee attacks cleave multiple targets and have a range that is greater than the default range for bombkit 1 and 2?

They cleave multiple targets, yes, but basic melee range is 130 units. Bombs, on the other hand, have a 120 unit radius untraited, so yes, melee hits a small pie slice compared to the circle of the bombs.

In the context of fighting people, the effective radius of the melee attacks compared to the bombs is however far somebody can move during the “fuse” plus the attack range. Assuming that the fuse is 0.5s (it seems longer, but I don’t have any hard numbers on hand, and 0.5 works well enough for this example) for the bomb to be equally effective against moving targets, it would need (210*0.5)130 = 235 range. If you add swiftness in to the equation it would be (280*.5)130 = 270.

Untraited, the bomb auto attack is a 120 radius AoE, which again works reasonably well against people who have to come to you, or are too stupid to kite.

It plays well in zerg v zerg because there is typically too much going on to kite one engineer, and sPvP works well enough because the point capture mechanic keeps people in fairly small spaces, but for wvw small group play/roaming, it isn’t a great tool as a weapon.

The utility on the kit is still pretty good, but it’s hard to rely on the kit as your damage source in a lot of situations due to the limited range.

rocket shoes right into a zerg → Bomb, Big ol Bomb → Gear Shield or Elix S to get out save

The fact of the matter is that in the current state of things, grenades can do almost everything better than bombs with the exception of combo fields, and with grenades you still have the option to attack from long range.

Weirwynn.2390:

Knox.8962:

You do realize that most melee attacks cleave multiple targets and have a range that is greater than the default range for bombkit 1 and 2?

They cleave multiple targets, yes, but basic melee range is 130 units. Bombs, on the other hand, have a 120 unit radius untraited, so yes, melee hits a small pie slice compared to the circle of the bombs.

Bomb and fire are 120, concussion and smoke are 180, and glue is 240. And then you trait them for 50% more, resulting in 180, 270, and 360.

Bombs are the hardest hitting auto attack in the game (except maybe life blast or a transform), it’s fine.

Kamahl.3621:

Bombs are the hardest hitting auto attack in the game (except maybe life blast or a transform), it’s fine.

Or necro dagger, or guardian sword if you count the burning that procs.

That doesn’t even factor in the traited versions of many classes skills, which can drive things like warrior axes ahead of the bombs.

But in a vacuum, the bomb AA is very close to the top.

I think the biggest problem with the current state of bombs is it is fairly difficult to actually increase bomb damage. Bombs attack at roughly 1.5 times per second if you factor in the pulses from the fire bomb.

You can trait for an additional 10% damage, but that doesn’t do much of anything for the 2-5 skills. You can trait for 20% cooldown reduction, which adds some confusion damage, but you’ll be putting up 2.4 × 4 = 9.6 seconds of burning every 8 seconds, so you don’t really add a ton of damage there. At 30% condition duration, you can keep burning up 100 % of the time without the cooldown trait.

Shrapnel is mediocre for bombs, due to the lower attack rate relative to grenades. Incendiary Powder is virtually useless since you can already keep burning up.

You’re basically forced to take the radius increase trait, and then you can pick 2 out of shrapnel, short fuse, or explosive powder, none of which are really great traits for damage purposes.

It is still a useful kit, and I run it on my bar in some circumstances, but as a weapon replacement, it could use some help.

Knox.8962:

Or necro dagger, or guardian sword if you count the burning that procs.

That doesn’t even factor in the traited versions of many classes skills, which can drive things like warrior axes ahead of the bombs.

But in a vacuum, the bomb AA is very close to the top.

Necromancer dagger is single target, and it’s attached to this somewhat useless class called Necromancer (this is with regards to PvE). Their AoE damage output is nearly nonexistant bar in short spurts every 30-35 seconds (Death Shroud 4/5, Wells, Staff 4 as the other marks are terrible damage), and only at those times is it even close to being on par with engineer. However, you are right, it does do more damage per second pre-traiting, post-traiting it is less unless they are at high condition count, which is entirely feasible and I’m not discounting it – but in realistic scenarios, I’d much rather have a bomb engineer.

I’d take your word on guardian sword if I didn’t have one – it’s less damage than bomb kit. Scepter can put out more single target damage than sword actually, but that’s a different bag of rocks involving multiple skills.

Warrior Axe was strong before, and it’s still on par with bomb kit now (as in one or the other may be doing 4-5% more damage than the other), however that’s only due to how many traits that increase damage warrior has access to, and engineer has almost as many.

Bomb Kit does what it does very well – raw damage output. You’re not supposed to be using fire bomb for damage in a raw build, you’ll get more damage out of 1 raw bomb than the burning (in a power build), you just need the fire field. Concussion is admittedly worthless in a power build, but it’s a nice thing to drop in an sPvP / WvW, as confusion is always irritating. Smoke Bomb and Glue Bomb work well regardless of the player’s build – especially smoke bomb. Bomb Kit is an incredibly hard hitting DPS-wise option that can hit in a wide area, and with traits like 10% more explosion damage, 10% more damage with full endurance, and 10% more crit chance while foes are < 50% health, there is a solid damage output option that has it’s own niche, and it does it incredibly well.

Assuming 10 stacks of might for both builds:
Using this bomb build which I believe to be the best possible DPS for the bomb Auto Attack, you’ll have a crit multiplier of 2.0855, assuming that you never dodge, and targets are under 50% 100% of the time, you’ll add (1.05*1.1*1.05*1.1). That’s a total damage multiplier of 2.782.

That puts the bomb AA at 3938 DPS. If you add in the 1-ish stack of bleeding from sharpshooter, you’ll be right at 4000 DPS.

Compare that to this 1h sword build which gets a crit multiplier of 2.0224 and flat multipliers of assuming permanent burning uptime and always non-full endurance (1.05*1.1*1.05*1.1*1.1) = 2.9677. With the guardian sword AA that comes out to be 10348 damage over 2.5 seconds for 4139 DPS. 4335 DPS if you add in the tick of burning you get with 1 chain.

Even before the passive burning, the guardian AA chain will do more damage.

The warrior axes chain should still do more than that after the changes as well, but I’ll let someone else do the math for the current meta warrior build.

So no, in practice, it isn’t the hardest hitting auto attack in the game. Furthermore, in actual damage rotations, grenades will do significantly more damage in full zerker gear (@1500 range) than bombs will.

edit: fire bomb is a pretty significant increase in damage compared to the AA even for full zerker builds (roughly 75% better than the auto) assuming that you get the full amount of burning ticks out of it. If you added it to the rotation for the engineer build above, you’d increase the damage of the rotation by about 5%.

Thrumdi.9216:

I have 4/8 80’s and am slowly working my way through the classes, trying to find builds that I like, mostly for use in WvW.

I would love to run a bomb kit Engie in WvW, but the fuse just seems to render it difficult to do. People move around far too much for them to be effective. (I can see it working in PvE where mob paths are predictable).

Have the devs made any hint they might take out the fuse to make bomb builds more viable inWvW? (Or are they viable in WvW and I’m just missing it?)

Easy. Force them to stop movin to be effective. Use rifle #2 and Bomb #5 and skill the new sitting duck, knock them down by running circles like a headless chicken while using slickshoes and dropping bombs.

I really have no glue of the engineer, but with my new build the bomberman is working well (and it´s a lot of fun).

My Power-Bomberman
(Net turret should also fit instead one of the gadgets)

I feel like that if they set the base range on 1-3 to 150 and traited 225, the bombs would play much better.

I also feel like making the concussion bomb a fairly high direct damage attack instead of confusion would clean up some of the awkwardness of the kit.

So a little testing in the mists and it turns out that the fuse time on the bomb is 0.9 seconds, which allows a normally moving character who is in combat to move 189 units in that time. A character with swiftness will cover 251 units in the same time period.

Strafing and backpedaling will allow 162/215 and 95/126 units with/without swiftness.

With a radius of 120, even if you drop the bomb in the center of the player’s character, they will have time to strafe out of the explosion with no significant effort. A character with swiftness will be able to backpedal out of the explosion.

Traited bombs are in a much better place, and they play well enough in PvE or sPvP, but in WvW, they’re a bit of a struggle to use when enemies don’t have to engage you on the spot of your choosing.

That said, I’d suggest that the base range on the bombs be increased, but the traited version remain the same, or similar. As it stands today, the trait adds 50% to the radius, which makes the area covered more than 2x as large as the untraited version.

A quick example of the untraited bombs being largely useless against moving mobs who don’t have to stay on a capture point or come in melee range to attack you:

Video

Generally speaking bombs have fuses (or remote triggers) so the demolition crew isn’t near the explosion when it goes off.

And neither the enemies, in our case.

@ OP very true and afaik devs are happy with how bombs work

You can never hit a single bomb without some sort of additional snare and/or CC against a opponent that knows to step out.

Theyre apparently intended to be area control but they cant be used as a real offensive option to pressure people who can move freely which btw leaves engi with 1 viable offensive kit. Just sayin…