Guild Wars 2

The 2nd shortbow skill, cluster bomb (and detonate cluster that’s linked to it) seems to have been somewhat nerfed.

It would seem the maximum targets has been set to 5. Now this is all reasonable, only the problem being that detonating the bomb mid air is now completely useless.

Imagine the following situation: 2 mobs standing in melee fighting you. Now, normally, I’d shoot the bomb, explode it almost instantly, and both mobs would get hit 3 times, doing just as much damage as not exploding the bomb would, but hitting 6 times instead of 3 (malice ftw).

Now, when I do the same trick, only 5 hits will go through.
To compare damage, if I shoot 1 bomb right at the ground, it will do 100% damage to each mob, for a total of 200%.
Exploding the cluster mid air will now do only 5 hits max, so 100% on one mob, and 66% on the 2nd mob, for a total of 166%.
This gets worse as the amount of mobs increases, capping at 5 mobs (max targets), where a normal bomb would do 500% damage (5 hits), the cluster bomb will now do 5 × 33% = 166% damage.
This is a massive damage nerf for detonating the cluster, making it’s primary use, to do a lot of smaller hits, completely pointless.

It’s reasonably assumable that the fact that max targets has been set to 5, this now counts for all parts of the skill, including the part where the main bomb gets split into 3 little bombs, this would mean it’s a bug and needs fixing. If it’s intended that the detonated cluster also hits a max of 5 targets, then I might as well stop using the shortbow.

Yesterday I was able to get 6+ ‘hits’ while making a perfectly timed Detonate against multiple mobs or players. I will test this today and rage if this is true where it’s capped at 5.

You have no clue what you’re talking about.

1. Cluster Bomb has always had a target cap
2. You detonate cluster bomb when it’s close to the ground, so you hit the same target 3 times instead of 1, which means you apply 3 stacks of bleed instead of 1.
3. The damage hasn’t been nerfed. Either you hit 5 targets for 3k each or you hit 5 targets 3 times for 1k each, assuming you know when to detonate. And no, if you aim properly all mobs will be hit 3 times.

@Humorless
Please go test instead of theorycraft. There have been stealth nerfs or bugs in these patches. Heartseeker never missed like it does now. If Cluster Bomb, as he is describing – the MINI blasts now hit a max of 5 targets – that is a nerf from yesterday.

The target cap for the non-Detonate is not in question. It’s the mini-bombs where, we all expect that each mini has it’s own target cap of 5 (meaning, potentially 15 people hit if you time it right).

Meaning, you Detonate, have 3 mini bombs, and the 3 together can only hit 5 times between them all. So if you’re fighting 2 mobs, one mob will get hit 3 times, the other only 2, totaling 5 mini hits, reducing total damage a bit (except for the bleeds).

Almost every skill in the game offensive or defensive has a cap of 5. The only nerf afaik was pre-launch and they decreased the rate of fire, and also limited the bleed stacks to 3 per person per application.

@Vexus
I’m ingame right now and just tested it to make sure. Everything in my post is accurate. Max – 5 targets. 3 hits per target (assuming they hit).

Let me demonstrate with a pictureset:

http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w519/mptyspace/gw005.jpg

vs

http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w519/mptyspace/gw014.jpg

Hmm /rage on.

The second screenshot, there should be 3 hits per target with that close of a cluster bomb Detonate. Meaning, all the Centaurs should see 3x 251 damage. But there are only 5. Can you get the Combat log to just be 100% sure? Maybe it just displays 5 total. But if they all die at the same time it’s still ok.

@Humorless…
As explained, 5 normal hits, vs. potentially 15 Detonate hits.

Hmmm. I believe that this has been ninja nerfed, or was unintentionally bugged. I always use a shortbow in WvW to get precision stacks — it now only hits 5 times on 5 targets rather than 15 times. Quite obnoxious, as that means there is literally no point in detonating cluster bomb anymore unless you are condition spec.

Checked combat log, 5 hits at a time.

/rage.

http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee231/Legault_/gw014.jpg

Are we really having this discussion…

EDIT: 2 more

http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee231/Legault_/gw015.jpg
http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee231/Legault_/gw016.jpg

@Humorless
7 hits vs. 3 targets. Where are the other 2? Did one bomb branch off a bit and manage to get out of range of the AOE cap and hit the extra hit? Unless you have multiple cases of 2 mobs = 6 hits, and 3 mobs = 9 hits, then it’s nerfed.

I will definitely be testing this myself as soon as I can.

Perhaps we’re talking about a bug then that doesn’t always occur, or doesn’t happen for everyone, I’m sure as hell confident that my eyes are not deceiving me

fyi, in picture #15 you have 6 initiative left out of 10, it costs 3 to launch, you were using auto attacks before that, you shot twice

I’m running around in all screenshots with mobs that aren’t glued to eachother. So yes, some miss.

And I used infiltrator’s arrow beforehand to limit the amount of initiative I had so I could only fire one or two, because the combat log ends up being a huge mess otherwise.

@Humorless
Thanks. Not so scared now =)