Hi all, I did a fiery brand build on my DH throughout SL because I wasn’t a fan of using/tracking spirit bomb.
Questions:
Thanks 
I did a number of 15s with this build in S1 no problem. Felt I could have gone higher if I’d wanted to.
I’m sure some here will call it heresy lol, but its easy mode rotation and I felt plenty sturdy enough.
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Probably not the answer you’re looking for but you don’t really need to overthink Spirit Bomb. If you have more than 5 targets, then focus on getting 4-5 souls (2 Fractures) and use Spirit Bomb. If less than 5 targets, you can just spam Soul Cleave.
If you want to min/max it you can use Spirit Bomb while Fiery Brand is spread out on multiple targets. Assuming you’re doing the standard Fiery Brand build.
Spirit Bomb can also be used to chain your existing souls from a previous pull into a fresh pull which gives you good initial threat.
Again, probably not the answer you’re looking for but I think most people overthink the rotation.
you could, but your going to have a very very very bad time with snap threat, aoe, synergies, and general healing/survivability
Not running spirit bomb in M+ will really hold back your potential as a tank, I guess you can do it if you’re dead-set but I’m not sure I would run it as a pug, maybe if you had a group of friends willing to play homebrew builds together. Keep in mind that Spirit Bomb isn’t just for damage, but it’s a core part of your defensive kit.
Soul Cleave is capped at 5 targets, so if you’re doing pulls bigger than 5 mobs you’ll need Spirit Bomb to spread Frailty stacks for your defensive and offensive debuffs to all of the mobs in the pull. Generally speaking, the routes you’ll want to do to time 18+ keys you’ll end up doing some bigger pulls with more than 5 mobs.
Another thing to remember is Soul Cleave only consumes 2 souls at a time, so you’ll need to do 2-3 globals to achieve the same outcome for Shattered Souls healing as you would in 1 Spirit Bomb. So roughly speaking each Soul Cleave is healing 12% of the damage you took in the last 5 seconds, versus 24-30% for one Spirit Bomb.
Here’s some 4-5 soul combos for you to practice if you want, it gets easier the more you keep at it:
A weakaura might also be helpful since Blizz hasn’t introduced and QOL for us to track souls on our player frame like other resources. Mamtooth has a nice simple one uploaded on wago that glows when you hit 4 souls to let you know it’s time to press SB.
Why not just track it? Wait until 4+ souls and press it if you’re standing next to 2+ targets. Otherwise press soul cleave. It’s that easy.
Appreciate all the feedback. I spose I could track it, question tho. I’m confused on soul cleave, as it uses fragments as well. Do I just spam it until 4-5 stacks then hit bomb?
2+ targets you’ll want to use soul cleave as a fury dump after you’ve used bomb to dump souls. Depending on your talents the following abilities will build souls for you to use on Spirit Bomb:
There’s some nuances for single target, but if you’re just learning you can use Soul Cleave normally as your soul dump and don’t worry about Spirit Bomb.
Generally speaking your game play for AoE will be use your builders as they’re available and appropriate (Fracture, Immolate, Sigil of Flame), dump souls with Spirit Bomb, dump fury with Soul Cleave and start building souls again. Using the builder combos I mentioned earlier it could look like: Spikes while running towards pack, drop a Sigil of Flame for Frailty, fury and souls, Immo Aura for fury and souls, Spirit bomb, Soul Cleave until out of fury.
Yes and no.
You can wait until people outgear the key levels then you can chill pull 5 mobs max at a time.
Otherwise, once you have more than 5 mobs, you will lose threat n defense because soul cleave has 5 target hard cap.