The current problem with living bomb with 11.05 changes

First of all I think that devs know there is a problem with living bomb. I also want it known that I love living bomb and hope that this current iteration of living bomb stays in some form. It is awesome when it goes off and I love it. The overarching problem is twofold. First it hits like a wet noodle. Second it takes way too many talents to get living bomb to proc frequently enough that it even shows up in your overall breakdown. The solution therefore appears simple either buff its damage to a point to where it is worth it or increase it’s proc rate enough so that it does not take 2 cap stones or close to it to make it proc frequently enough to see its damage impact your overall. I am sure that it is easier said than done as I feel it is one of those moves that can quickly dominate the talent tree unless it is treated with care.

I hope that the devs figure out a way to make it competitive as i cannot wait to play with it when it does!

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Personally I think a proc-based Living Bomb was a poison pill for the spec overall. Firstly it directly competes with our Mastery for passive cleave; it’s ultimately just ignite with RNG and more steps. Secondly the way it works makes it a nightmare to tune - nudges to the dial can make or either insanely OP in large pulls or (where we currently stand) completely useless. Thirdly it adds nothing to the gameplay: there’s zero decision-making or careful choice involved; it either pops off or it doesn’t.

I’d love it if it were more interactive, or if it had some real interplay with Flamestrike that gave us an actual AoE rotation. But really I just see it as phoning it in (with respect to “updating” the spec) by trying to force an existing spell mechanic into the rotation passively.

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All of this, and here’s what I’d do with LB:

  1. Make it a bottom of the tree endgame talent specific to AoE builds
  2. Make the target grow larger and turn fiery red/orange as it gets closer to exploding
  3. On explosion, flame orbs spread out from the target attaching as a new weaker LB on the first enemy they hit. This one does half damage but expires twice as fast and doesn’t have the spread effect.
  4. Any target killed by LB leaves behind a flame patch
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also the flamestrike build is lame and a pain in the @ s s

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It doesn’t have to be… If blizzard just would make Flamestrike on target instead of a placement AOE

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I mean it would be a good bandaid.

Fires bigger issue is mastery. Being forced into mast/vers to not do negative dam in PVP feels cheeks.

Beside the flamestrike bandaid if they are putting off a much needed rework then we need an honor talent that gives you 100% of your haste as mastery. So you can play haste/vers and be relevant and not have to play some gimmicky 3% haste 20%+ mastery build with glass to hurt anyone.

Also delete glass cannon and buff spell damage thx. Fire out here with none of the benefits arcane/frost have doing negative damage and missing 15% health

Hop on PTR and make a full vers/mastery PVP set, the globals FEEL AWFUL and it being the only way to do damage feels so cheese and gimmicky.

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for sure they need to remove glass cannon, who wants to play with 15% hp to still do less damage than every other class.

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Yeah I also love that Druid can spam cyclone but we have to take a talent to have poly NOT heal to full, and we still can’t even poly druids for completely dated and inconsistent RP reasons (umm poly works on beasts, hello?)

Could you imagine how mad ferals would be if we could poly them in form that would be great. However I do also play feral since wrath and its pretty insane right now. During incarn you are very dangerous if they dont trade major cds instantly.

With the new changes and much thought only two problems remain with living bomb and that is the tuning on both the convection talent and blast zone.

At present people complain that living bomb is still to much of a single target loss which can be done by tuning convection. Either increasing the effectiveness or changing it to leave a dot on the main target. I am sure of course the devs are aware of this.

In a similar vein blast zone the talent has absolutely 0 single target throughput and maybe adding a debuff or something that increases pyroblast damage may fix that issue. Or there maybe an even better idea that the devs are cooking up. I hope living bomb becomes viable in 11.05 I really want to use it!

The problem with Living Bomb is that Living Bomb is a DoT and DoTs are contractually required to suck. Or else you might stack Fire Mages with Spriests, Boomkins and Aff Locks in a council raid fight. The horror!

How would yall feel if they just added living bomb to our ignite give it a % to proc on ignite damage? Then they can make that right tree for fire strike and fireball or something like that make FS cast on target if you spec and make fireball cast on move if spec into it and just have Bomb part of our kit since it’s minimal damage already

I mean, it’s unlikely that they’re going to completely scrap/remake 8 whole talents at this juncture. I think the best chance at salvaging that side of the tree would be to rework Convection (or any of the talents really) to add a 10-12s debuff post-explosion that makes the target(s) take a good deal more Pyroblast damage. This way you could reasonably take these talents without completely nuking your ST/boss output.

Poly doesn’t work on Druids because they have the power to shapeshift…

So make them shapeshift lol