I have mostly seen Canister Bomb being used as a 1-pointer for devotion procs or the stun (with 3 points in the modifier). Based on my own experience, I know that investing more points into it changes it into a wonderful skill to instantly clear an entire room. However, this is mostly based on using it in Veteran and (early) Elite. It used to do considerable amounts of damage even to single targets, which will presumably only increase when you get more hits/cast with overleveling (+fragments and +aoe).
My question thus is, how viable is Canister Bomb when used as a damage skill? Or, alternatively, under which circumstances can it reach at least adequate levels of performance?
CB seems to scale extremely well after the initial 12 points (with more than doubling the damage, as well as more fragments, which leads to exponentially more damage due to being hit more than once). Improved Casing provides very high levels of physical DOT, which seems nice due to the usually low levels of phyiscal resistance on monsters. Ulzuin’s Chosen seems mandatory for the ‘total damage modified by 12%’ (which is great especially in late game, and more valuable than usual +X% damage) as well as the 30% chance to cast it again. The MI for Canister Bomb gives a -2 sec cooldown, which seems nice especially for leveling. The ‘Mythical Mask of Infernal Truth’ can be crafted at level 94 to convert all pierce damage to fire (which often seems desirable), as well as add some more flat fire damage. Thoughts? Experiences?
Damage wise, here is a comparison between CB, Doom Bolt, and Grenado. Max DB (12 points) does 1086 damage (and very little added w/ health reduction), which is almost half of max CB (22 points) with 1914 damage (assuming one fragment hits, +244 per extra fragment, assuming dots dont stack at all). So it seems that for single targets, DB and CB are on-par in terms of damage-per-skillpoint, but CB has a higher ceiling (esp. with Ulzuin’s Chosen) and has a much larger aoe.
Grenado does 2802 damage with 40 skill points, with less than half the cooldown of CB. Assuming 1 cast per fight, Grenado does more damage (but in a smaller AoE) but is a less efficient skill allocation. Grenado and CB both suffer from having 3 damage types.
It seems that in terms of relative power, Grenado > Canister Bomb > Doom Bolt. CB shines with its AoE, and when I playtest more I might be able to get a better estimate to see how many fragments will usually hit one enemy. When an average of 4.6 fragments hit an enemy, a single cast CB does the same damage as a single cast Grenado (the latter having half the cooldown and double the skill points invested). Note that the IT damage of Grenado is longer than its cooldown, thus reducing its DPS in a scenario where you cast more than once.
When we consider overleveling, Grenado keeps it advantage but it it decreases substantially. With everything on max level, CB only needs 2.96 fragments to do equal damage as Grenado. On top of that, it now has 10-12 fragments with 7.7 AoE each. I strongly suspect that an enemy in the center of the cast will always be hit by all fragments, meaning that a single CB does 192% of the damage of a single Grenado (again, assuming that the dots of the different fragments don’t stack - if they do stack, CB would be insane).
I know that this is all theorycrafting, which is why I am interested in hearing from someone who went all the way and overleveled CB.
EDIT: I forgot that the 'nades have +40% Crit Damage, which gives a substantial boost to DPS. This will be less so versus bosses, but still noticeable.
What has this taught me? You absolutely need three items to get the most out of canister bomb: barrelsmiths salvo, shard of the eternal flame and mask of infernal truth. Combined these have modifiers for -3 seconds cooldown which is vital given the very high base cooldown, and the flat damage from the helm is applied to the initial explosion and the fragments, which adds up quickly. There’s really no other options for these items, but they do all offer the same pierce to fire conversion. While this is fine, once, three times is obviously pointless. I wish there was a physical to fire modifer, but oh well. I use both barrrelsmith pistols in my build, which gets me a final cooldown of 3.6 seconds, getting it down further is nearly impossible given the amulet and helm slots are already occupied and an off hand gives roughly the same reduction as completing the set.
So how does it perform? Adequately, but nothing special. It suffers from split damage types, even after converting the pierce part, since converting all the trauma to burn is impossible (you will get stuck at about 70%). The area of effect is indeed impressive and clears trash quickly, but really, many skills can do that. Its single target dps is nothing special either, most melee builds will have no trouble at all doing better. There is an amusing trick with attached devotion skills. Because the base cooldown is so long you can get two guaranteed triggers of skills with 1.5 second or less cooldown, once from the initial explosion, then again from the secondaries, since there is about two seconds between them. The game will use the cooldown of the skill itself to calculate trigger chance, rather than the interval between explosions. So you can, for example, get two fissures every single time you throw a bomb. Amusing, but hardly overpowered.
Edit: actual hard numbers from posted build is 17-20k fire and 17k burn/second in the page 2 tooltip, which doesn’t distinguish between primary and secondary explosions sadly, so I guess this is for the first one only.
It is underwhelming, but you can absolutely build around it. That being said I would avoid doing so until you have some good items, shard of eternal flame amulet being the main one to get.
Thank you, that was informative. I had forgotten about the initial explosion; am I assuming correctly that this does the same damage as the secondary fragments?
If they would be considered different sources that would actually be amazing as that means that they would stack! That is, if the primary and secondary explosions are treated as different sources, you would effectively get double the DOT damage (which is substantial with CB). If every (secondary) fragment would be considered a different source, the DOT damage would be insane. Imagine that you can take the tooltip damage of CB and multiply it by 8x…
I suppose so. Realistically though, demo mastery in this build takes up so many skill points that the second mastery is there just for some support skills. Elementalist made sense when I made this character (before AoM) because as a dot build stormcallers pact is pretty nice with that big crit damage bonus. You could make it a purifier nowadays, but inquisitor also eats up skill points, I always end up short of points when theorycrafting it.
The more I think about this the less likely it seems to me that they are different sources, it would be ridiculous…
Saboteur made a little bit of sense before AoM, when you couldn’t convert the pierce damage on either grenado or canister bomb. Now you easily can though so it makes no sense anymore. So few viable saboteur builds…
Yeah I’m 99% certain that they are not different sources at the moment. I guess it would be one way to fix the skill (but it would need a damage reduction to compensation).
I would much rather see the damage types being fixed though. Baseline should be something like Fire/Burn with either only Pierce or only Physical/IT. Give it a small % to stun as a baseline and use the transmuter to offer a useful damage type change.
By the way, has anyone compared it to Rune of Kalastor? The damage types and mechanisms are highly comparable. RoK seems to do even less damage though?
I’ve never tried the runes much, this one not at all. Suffers from the same triple damage type problem and there’s actually fewer ways to convert them than on canister bomb. Not making me want to try it.
I do have Canister bomb as 2nd or 3rd damage source on my burning sorc. It’s decent, and with minimal investments into Ulzuin’s Chosen and Time Dilation you can chain quite a few of them. As a direct damage skill, you gotta build around it to make it decent. Purifier with Barrelsmiths would be pretty sick damage wise and might be decent Crucible contender since the Crucible nerf.
Yeah it seems pretty bad even on paper. Rune of Hagarrad seems to be quite nice though. It only has two damage types (Pierce and Cold, which has decent support) and, importantly, it comes with -250 target’s DA which is really good (on par with Flashbang). I suppose that you could only take it for the -DA and slower attack. It misses the confuse/fumble/miss from Flashbang, but it’s quite a good substitute.
I have no idea how well it can do in terms of damage though. I’m guess that it’s even worse than CB but is still good enough to clear trash, debuff stronger enemies, and to reliably proc devotions.