You need to re-visit low level engineering bomb damage. It is way too low.
I haven’t really done much low level stuff in a few years, but I am currently working on a new character and leveling engineering, and low level engineering bombs are a joke.
Why did you nerf them to the point of being useless?
Lets use an explosive that doesn’t have an incapacitate that way we are only looking at damage being the balancing factor.
We’ll use Dense Dynamite for our example.
I think a leveling character might be able to make these around level 50 or so if they are lucky.
A level 50ish mob will have like what, 1500 life or something?
WoWhead states the damage is 83. (I only show 63 damage in the game, but whatever)
83 damage is roughly 5.5% of 1500.
Now, I assume the argument of why you did this is you don’t want people killing things (mobs or other players) too fast.
I can see how this would be a valid concern, but lets look at a few things:
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Explosives have cooldowns, and you can’t spam them.
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The amount of time it takes to farm up the mats required to make some of these explosives in most cases FAR exceeds how long it would take you to just kill the mob with your normal abilities. Meaning, it would have been easier for you to just kill it without using a bomb, and you could have sold the mats for gold instead of blowing them up.
So where is my incentive to go through all the work of collecting these mats and leveling engineering if I don’t get a reward from doing so?
It’s LITERALLY detrimental to me to use an explosive.
It’s slower.
It costs me money.
This is a perfect example of bad game design.
Keep in mind, the game is already sped up exponentially compared to how it was in the past. Do you really need to penalize engineers by making the damaging items they make do so little damage as to not be worth it?
You could make the bombs do 1/2 damage to creatures of the corresponding level, ie about 700 damage for Dense Dynamite, and it would still only speed up ONE kill every 60 seconds… Which again is made up for by the time I spent gathering the mats to make that bomb.
Just please go back through ALL engineering bombs from Vanilla up to Legion and look at their damage values when compared to comparable mobs and resources need to construct, and I think you will see they need some buffs.
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Combat perks were removed from professions at the start of WoD. If any engineering bombs, especially those restricted to engineers, did more damage than one of your abilities, engineering would be a “required” profession rather than an optional one. Hence most engineering goods are nerfed for “balance”.
I mean I see what you are trying to say , but I think that was for PvP.
My incendiary ammo at 120 does 20k damage! When that procs, it’s a huge spike in damage.
So clearly engineering stuff can do damage.
I’m going to stick with my original statement and say the values need to be looked at for lower level stuff.
But what is the cast time on the ammo? Is it usable by everyone or just engineers? And aren’t most players doing more dps than that right now?
the ammo is a weapon enchant for guns/bows/xbows. It’s usable by anyone.
As I recall the bombs were never very impressive damage; I certainly never got much use out of them (and back then my main was a gnome engineer, so I’m not just talking BC and later). At the time they wanted mobs to last longer than they do nowadays, and by the time that philosophy changed they were past caring about vanilla consumables.
Even at max level and max engineering, the bombs are a dps loss. Especially because of the cast time
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I’m not reading good reasons to not do as I suggest.
If a system is bad, why accept it, when it can be improved upon?
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Oh, they’re not good reasons not to do it. The only real reason is that blizzard doesn’t want to put in the effort.
For myself, I just remember that the benefits from engineering come from other stuff, like teleporters and gliders and lootarang, and write the bombs off as unimportant.
I am not reading any good reasons to DO as you suggest. Bombs are for flavor and not intended to be better than your class abilities. On the other hand, you are asking the game developers to take time from CURRENT content in order to fix out-dated content that is quickly out-leveled.
@Haspian
I explained why in my opening message.
Fixing older stuff is not taking away from new stuff. Old stuff is part of the overall package that is WoW, whether you can level through it quickly or not.
If you ran a website and it had outdated information on it, you wouldn’t let it set there because you could be typing up new information for other stuff instead.
You’d do both.
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Fixing older stuff DOES take away from the new stuff.
Blizzard only allocates so much developer time and effort to the game. Activision then insists that every minute spent on development has a greater return on investment. Hence the problems so far in BfA and the “recycling” of profession content.
Best case scenario, it takes a day to re-balance the bombs so that they still do less dps then your class does at any given level without screwing up some other unforeseen aspect of the game, which has happened in the past. Why do you think it took so many years to increase the default bag size by 4 slots.
That day long effort impacts 1% of the population of wow, best case scenario. Or, that day of effort can be spent on BFA content that potentially impacts 80% of the wow population.
You fix out-dated information on your website because that is your job. The developers jobs are not to fix content from a game that came out 14 years ago, it is to make the game expansion that came out last year as profitable as possible.
As someone who has been playing since BC I have to agree with OP that the usefulness of bombs is the issue here. I remember bombs at any stage of engineering were useful to an extent (I leveled prof to stay even with the char level so for instance, my tailor could always make herself useful cloth) for me and while they never did extreme damage, they would at least inflict a small chunk and would sometimes stun for a few seconds.
However, now it seems as though the bombs not only fail to stun for more than 1sec but also inflict less damage than a melee strike from a staff lol. I created a 3rd tier bomb using heavy powder and did around 20dmg at level 30+. My numbers may be off slightly as I didn’t record them at the time but the gist of it is that compared to what they used to do, the current bombs available to engineers are so useless they might as well not exist as most anyone will be focusing on literally ANY other aspect.
God, I can’t wait to see if they still offer the “choice” between Gnomes/Goblins Engineering. I remember picking Gnome for the cool items I could make but now I would do the same strictly because I wouldn’t trust the Goblin route to actually DO anything. Anyway, I support the OP idea to have Blizzard revamp the power of low level bombs in the next patch.
Thanks for reading my rant!
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They do still have gnome/goblin separation. The practical difference, as you suspect, is more about the higher level cosmetic items than the combat effects.
There was a period of time when in order to be top dps in an instance, you had to be tossing engineering bombs.
That didn’t fit in with Blizzards philosophy of not having any profession be required.
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