Raiding in 7.1: Living Bomb or Unstable Magic?

[Curnivore]

I meant mythic. In most cases normal and heroic versions don't stay up for more than 2 seconds. For the times mythic has them up, it won't be more than 5 seconds either if a few DPSes care for them. It's very unlikely those 10 to 30seconds of the entire encounter that could use LB warrant the use of it. And you may not use it on all of them anyway since they may scatter. And if they don't scatter they'll die fast anyway.

On some bosses it's just wrong. I'm not sure it's wrong on Il'gynoth since there is extra strain to have people caring about adds for more time, being fixated, targetted etc. I haven't seen it in mythic though, I might change my mind if I see the 2nd-2nd phase wiping us but I heard that's rarely the case.

[Weezdion]

There is no serious cleave fight in whole EN. All adds on all fights, where there are adds, will die to random cleave damage. Only fight where it can make some sense to use it is Dragons, on Elethre spiders are just minor part of fight also not a problematic one, Xavius has too far spread adds to reliably spread LB, on Il'ygnoth only adds you can do proper spread are corruptors and they die in less than 8s you need for bomb to trigger. Basically for whole EN you can run with UM and you won't lose anything apart from position on dps meter.

I would say you should run Dragons with LB, everything else with UM.

P.S. With shit quality of talents in this tier whatever you select you won't gain or lose much (at max 1% overall difference)

[Falq]

I doubt Elerethe should get Living Bomb. Those adds are minor parts of the fight. Let alone Ignite alone and other similar effects of other players can almost automatically kill them sometimes.

You also can spread living bomb on adds before someone jump on them so with blow up you top dmg metter and become top parser so other people can look up to you. Can't do it with UM so LB > UM kappa

To be honest I'd always run LB just because UM always do <1.5% your dmg and LB can give you some big numbers for clear raids.

For Mythic progress I ran UM for Il'gynoth (prenerf - because the only thing that mattered was dps on the heart and this 1% could make difference), Ursoc and could be ran on Cenarius aswell depends on tactic. For Nythendra it provided nice burst for MC people, and at one point we always got like 15 ppl mced so would not drop it.

If you looking at talents for regular EN clear I'd go with LB everyday because most time takes trash and LB do significant damage on them so it's way faster to use it rather than UM.

Also LB on Dragons/Xavius/Elereth >>> UM on other bosses so if you don't wanna pay for respec it's better to get LB so you do damage on every boss rather than don't do on any.

[exeed]

I doubt Elerethe should get Living Bomb. Those adds are minor parts of the fight. Let alone Ignite alone and other similar effects of other players can almost automatically kill them sometimes.

You also can spread living bomb on adds before someone jump on them so with blow up you top dmg metter and become top parser so other people can look up to you. Can't do it with UM so LB > UM kappa

To be honest I'd always run LB just because UM always do <1.5% your dmg and LB can give you some big numbers for clear raids.

For Mythic progress I ran UM for Il'gynoth (prenerf - because the only thing that mattered was dps on the heart and this 1% could make difference), Ursoc and could be ran on Cenarius aswell depends on tactic. For Nythendra it provided nice burst for MC people, and at one point we always got like 15 ppl mced so would not drop it.

If you looking at talents for regular EN clear I'd go with LB everyday because most time takes trash and LB do significant damage on them so it's way faster to use it rather than UM.

Also LB on Dragons/Xavius/Elereth >>> UM on other bosses so if you don't wanna pay for respec it's better to get LB so you do damage on every boss rather than don't do on any.

Thank you, finally someone who knows the Game.

[Curnivore]

Trash clears isn't an important factor for minmaxers though. You can use an item to retalent. If you do some basic gold making too it's not a big deal to change each boss.

[Weezdion]

Also being top parser doesn't make you being valuable as much as possible on boss.

[Lahrast]

I doubt Elerethe should get Living Bomb. Those adds are minor parts of the fight. Let alone Ignite alone and other similar effects of other players can almost automatically kill them sometimes.

You also can spread living bomb on adds before someone jump on them so with blow up you top dmg metter and become top parser so other people can look up to you. Can't do it with UM so LB > UM kappa

To be honest I'd always run LB just because UM always do <1.5% your dmg and LB can give you some big numbers for clear raids.

For Mythic progress I ran UM for Il'gynoth (prenerf - because the only thing that mattered was dps on the heart and this 1% could make difference), Ursoc and could be ran on Cenarius aswell depends on tactic. For Nythendra it provided nice burst for MC people, and at one point we always got like 15 ppl mced so would not drop it.

If you looking at talents for regular EN clear I'd go with LB everyday because most time takes trash and LB do significant damage on them so it's way faster to use it rather than UM.

Also LB on Dragons/Xavius/Elereth >>> UM on other bosses so if you don't wanna pay for respec it's better to get LB so you do damage on every boss rather than don't do on any.

elrethe has enough spiders that can't be squished with a feather and your tank will be thankful for every splitsecond they're dead earlier
this logs: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/R2 ... &source=11" target="_blank
show basically 5% (roughly 5m) of my damage from lb, using it roughly 4 times, helping tanks and outdoing UM by a huge marging with basically zero effort

[Curnivore]

It's true that Living Bomb looks better in various top logs but they also seem to be padding or being lucky. e.g. someone doing 95%+ of his LB damage at the 3rd platform which could have no adds at all if the fight was done more optimally, or people doing most of it in 1 drop of spiders and not on the other drops, or on your log above you did a lot more around 4min than at other drops. But, Unstable Magic is also shit. I guess we shouldn't treat LB as weak so easily, not because it's that great usually, but because Unstable Magic is quite shit.

[TehBankertin]

There is no serious cleave fight in whole EN. All adds on all fights, where there are adds, will die to random cleave damage. Only fight where it can make some sense to use it is Dragons, on Elethre spiders are just minor part of fight also not a problematic one, Xavius has too far spread adds to reliably spread LB, on Il'ygnoth only adds you can do proper spread are corruptors and they die in less than 8s you need for bomb to trigger. Basically for whole EN you can run with UM and you won't lose anything apart from position on dps meter.

I would say you should run Dragons with LB, everything else with UM.

P.S. With shit quality of talents in this tier whatever you select you won't gain or lose much (at max 1% overall difference)

This post sums it up nicely. The point being made that 1% damage isn't a lot of damage is the wrong way of looking at it. When you're doing fights like Illy, Xavius, Ursoc what you're dpsing and how fast is pretty important. Doing 1% more damage is something I would always take over something doing less damage to targets that matter.

On Illy the damage to the corrupters should be your instant cast burst spells until you run out of them so LB isn't useful here (neither is UM) so that's a null. The 2nd most important target for dps is inside the heart where UM > LB. (Even if its just 1% better). The third most important target for dps is the 2 dominator tentacles after the 1st heart phase where again UM > LB. The only thing LB does is kills globs at a more random/less reliable fashion when ILLY is about control in the mythic version. Killing one at a time at a certain time so the dots don't stack on you.

Dragons you really need that burst damage on the spirits towards the end of the fight and the rest of the dps isn't as important as survival and doing mechanics properly are so LB > UM for dragons because your raid needs a lot of aoe damage on all those spirits that UM can't provide.

Xavius you have no business taking LB because there are no adds that would be able to reliably affected by LB to a meaningful amount. The spread of adds in phase 3 and the smaller adds in phase 2 neither of which are reliably grouped enough for LB to be efficient.

Elereth you only can living bomb spiders the burst of which isn't as important as being able to do the 1% extra damage on the boss with UM for the other portions of the fight. I would say however if your raid lacks good burst range AoE then you could take LB because of your composition. If you're running with a couple hunters and mages then I don't think LB on the spiders is worth what you're missing out on the boss but I can see this being comp dependent so I will concede this fight might require LB but strictly comp based.

TLDR: UM over LB on all fights excluding Dragons in mythic progression. This will net your guild the best results maybe not your personal leader board status but that's not the point.

[Zeke]

There is no serious cleave fight in whole EN. All adds on all fights, where there are adds, will die to random cleave damage. Only fight where it can make some sense to use it is Dragons, on Elethre spiders are just minor part of fight also not a problematic one, Xavius has too far spread adds to reliably spread LB, on Il'ygnoth only adds you can do proper spread are corruptors and they die in less than 8s you need for bomb to trigger. Basically for whole EN you can run with UM and you won't lose anything apart from position on dps meter.

I would say you should run Dragons with LB, everything else with UM.

P.S. With shit quality of talents in this tier whatever you select you won't gain or lose much (at max 1% overall difference)

I just want to point out that LB only lasts 4 seconds until it explodes. Pretty sure it's been like that since 7.0 dropped.
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=44457/living-bomb" target="_blank

Other than that thanks for the discussion, I'm learning much Pretty sure LB is more useful (and fun) overall unless you are min/maxing for that extra .7-2% pure single target and willing to swap talents often to achieve it.

[Shadra]

I just want to point out that LB only lasts 4 seconds until it explodes. Pretty sure it's been like that since 7.0 dropped.
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=44457/living-bomb" target="_blank

Other than that thanks for the discussion, I'm learning much Pretty sure LB is more useful (and fun) overall unless you are min/maxing for that extra .7-2% pure single target and willing to swap talents often to achieve it.

Generally with LB the first explosion isn't important, which is why it's not a gain to use it on ST. You need both explosions to go off for it to be worth the GCD. Since Ily was the point of that quote, I'd offer the idea that other spells would be more useful on the corruptors over LB anyways since you want to burn them fast one at a time.

[Komma]

Seeing as the original poster clarified he was asking whether LB or UM was better on Ursoc, and that this question has been unambiguously answered (LB isn't used on ST, UM gives a benefit), I see no reason to keep this thread open and get uglier than it already is.

Sorry it took this long to deal with; Staff have been kept busy with all the patch activity.

Thread locked.

As a side note, it doesn't make sense to evaluate UM (And Flame Patch) against active talents such as Living Bomb, based on the percent damage that UM deals. A big part of the passive's value comes from the GCDs spent you would have otherwise spent on casting Living Bomb.