Crafted Engineering Bombs! Today I’m looking at the two different damage bombs crafted by BFA engineering, F.R.I.E.D. and Thermo-Accelerated Plague Spreader. Like many things in Battle for Azeroth they do have some funky quirks that may or may not be intended, so this may be subject to change. For example, the bombs do not share a cooldown with combat potions when used. However, if you use a combat potion first it will put the bombs on Cooldown. They are unaffected by personal buffs, granted I’ve read some comments saying otherwise. Let’s take a look:

F.R.I.E.D. Bombs: Tooltip “Use: Inflicts 11192 Fire damage to all enemies in a 5-yard radius. (1 Min Cooldown).” Two second cast time. The range is 0-40 yards at the center that uses a targeting circle similar to Blizzard or Heroic Leap. They instantly deal 11,192 to each individual enemy within the targeting circle as soon as the bomb explodes. This means you can use it at range OR simply drop it at your feet.

Thermo-Accelerated Plague Spreader Bombs: Tooltip “Use: Creates an area of poison dealing 2686 damage to enemies inside every 3 sec. Lasts 15 sec. (1 Min Cooldown).” ** There is currently a bug where the damage appears on the combat log to be environmental. On damage meters like Skada and details, the damage will not show. Unfortunately, they also show up on warcraftlogs as environmental and will not show as your personal damage. ** (Test run log of Zul, Reborn lfr) Two second cast time. This bomb also has a range of 0-40 yards at its center and uses a targeting circle. The ticks do around 2.8k damage with oddly only one of the ticks doing the 2.6k described in the tooltip, this means they do just slightly more damage than the F.R.I.E.D. bombs. This does not put a dot on the targets, it instead creates an area of green poison on the ground for 15 seconds that everyone can see. The poison area does put a visual debuff icon on enemies when they are standing in it. Don’t be surprised if you’re using these with a tank who is unaware of their existence as they will probably assume the green is bad and move the targets out of the circle.

Now that we have a better understanding of how the bombs work we can start to metagame their use. If used before your combat potion they will not set the potion on cooldown, and the bombs do not share cooldowns with each other! Another very important factor is that the bombs have travel time. What travel time means is that after the two-second cast has gone off there is a bomb that is thrown and takes just under 1.5 seconds to land at max range (40 yards). If used before you enter combat you can use it again later on after waiting 60 seconds similar to “pre-potting” combat potions so you can have them twice in a fight. Since there is also travel time it gives us just barely enough time to also pre-pot before entering combat. So as long your not already pre-casting there are little downsides to using either of the bombs pre-pull. Keep in mind this gives you very little time to pull off so someone pulling a little bit early could throw off our timing. Unfortunately, I could not find any mention of either bomb in the SimulationCraft API, so it does not appear to be simmable yet.

Raiding

For raiding these have limited but useful advantages. Usage is going to spec-specific based on your cooldown timings. They can be used similarly to “pre-potting” which I’m going to aptly dub “pre-bombing.” They can also then be used later on in the fight, you might want to save them for spawning adds, or for when melee are forced to stay at ranged. For example, Zek’voz warrior adds funneling into your raid or melee waiting for Taloc to return from picking up his Cudgle.

Theoretically, on single target you can pre-bomb> wait for the cast to finsh> pre-pot> then enter combat. You would do this by making sure your raid is using a count-down pre-pull timer. Wait for 3 seconds left to start pre-casting a bomb, this will give you 1 second for the travel time as well as to pre-potion before the timer reaches zero. Right away, or later on, you can use the bomb you did not pre-bomb with as it will not be on cooldown but it will not start its cooldown until you have left combat. You can also use the pre-bomb again after the 60-second cooldown has passed, but again this will not start its cooldown until after you leave combat. At this point, you have used 1 pre-bomb, 1 pre-pot, and 2 bombs mid-combat you can use your 2nd combat potion whenever you prefer. Even if this is viable for your spec, single target, it is probably only a small increase to your total damage, so mostly used for pushing higher DPS ranks or possible help get that last 1% on a progression boss.

For multi-target bosses, these bombs become better and better the more targets are active. For our current tier, T22, on the boss “Zul, Reborn” these bombs can be fairly effective. Any style of a boss with lots of adds or targets immediately on the pull is prime territory for using the Thermo-Accelerated Plague Spreader, assuming the targets are not being moved too much. Keep in mind too that if the adds will be dying faster then 15 seconds the F.R.I.E.D. will be better on the pull.

Mythic Plus and Dungeons

Mythic plus is where the bombs are really going to shine. Along with pre-potting, they are an amazingly effective tool for burst aoe, which is extremely important in dungeons. If you find you’re getting more burst from them then potions you can choose to alternate between the two different bombs. If you’re going really really fast you could possibly use a pre-pot on a 3rd pack before the cooldown on the first bomb is up, effectively allowing you to rotate 3 consumables, really really fast. I’ve been trying to simply pre-bomb + pre-potion on one pack and then use another pre-bomb while waiting for the cooldowns on another pack. Do keep in mind that on most servers it can be a bit pricey to spam bombs as they do require a good bit of expensive ore to make.