Do you enjoy spirit bomb?

[Accendor]

When spirit bomb first was relevant I was very annoyed, because the ability slows gameplay down in many cases. Also, perhaps even more important there is nearly no visual feedback when using it. Comparing it to e.g. Eye Beam, Blade Dance or Demonic Leap, it feels like I'm not even using an ability (from a visual feesback point of view).
It made me stop playing the specc altogether and I was always waiting for that talent to become irrelevant again, but its just not happening.
That talent basically is the face of the whole spec and it drives me nuts.

How do you feel about it?

[Thirtyrock]

When spirit bomb first was relevant I was very annoyed, because the ability slows gameplay down in many cases. Also, perhaps even more important there is nearly no visual feedback when using it. Comparing it to e.g. Eye Beam, Blade Dance or Demonic Leap, it feels like I'm not even using an ability (from a visual feesback point of view).
It made me stop playing the specc altogether and I was always waiting for that talent to become irrelevant again, but its just not happening.
That talent basically is the face of the whole spec and it drives me nuts.

How do you feel about it?

I'm fine with it, conceptually, I don't like how it competes with Soul Cleave so much. I wish they worked better in tandem, somehow. Soul Cleave applying frailty is nice, but it only applies to the primary target. Spirit bomb applies frailty to all targets, but requires a lot more build up, meaning you can't build multiple stacks as well.

I wish they worked more like this - Spirit Bomb applies stack 1 of frailty and then, during the next 3-5 seconds, soul cleave applies additional stacks to all affected targets, or something like that.

A better visual would be nice, but for me it's more that the decision to use spirit bomb feels like a wasted opportunity compared to soul cleave.

[Vakna]

There are too many delays associated with Spirit Bomb for it to ever feel like a satisfying button to press. You first have to wait until the soul fragments leave the enemy and shoot out onto the ground, then when you press Spirit Bomb itself you have to wait again for the soul fragments to be sucked in before it does anything. Soul fragments need to be instant both generating them and absorbing them so that you can press Spirit Bomb without waiting for the fragments to drop and without waiting for the damage to actually occur.

[Thirtyrock]

There are too many delays associated with Spirit Bomb for it to ever feel like a satisfying button to press. You first have to wait until the soul fragments leave the enemy and shoot out onto the ground, then when you press Spirit Bomb itself you have to wait again for the soul fragments to be sucked in before it does anything. Soul fragments need to be instant both generating them and absorbing them so that you can press Spirit Bomb without waiting for the fragments to drop and without waiting for the damage to actually occur.

The souls spawn during GCDs, though, so that doesn't seem like an issue. The delay in absorbing them and putting out the damage is more significant. Does the heal wait for the damage, or do you get the heal as soon as you absorb them? That would be an even more significant issue.

[Vakna]

The souls spawn during GCDs, though, so that doesn't seem like an issue. The delay in absorbing them and putting out the damage is more significant. Does the heal wait for the damage, or do you get the heal as soon as you absorb them? That would be an even more significant issue.

They don't spawn fast enough to immediately hit Spirit Bomb after spawning them though, that's why it feels kinda clunky and unsatisfying. For example say you are at 3 fragments, you press Fracture so you can go to 5 fragments, then you press Spirit Bomb on the next GCD after Fracture - you will only absorb 3 fragments because the 2 new ones haven't landed yet. You need to either delay Spirit Bomb for a fraction of a GCD or use something else as a filler between Fracture and Spirit Bomb - and that can't be a generator or a spender. If you choose to delay for a fraction of a GCD to wait for them to properly land then over the course of a fight you have wasted several full GCD's.

At the end of the day anything that doesn't have an instant visceral or visual effect when you press it is shit. That's precisely the reason why they made most major cooldowns also do something when you pressed them, because just waiting for the next GCD after they gave you a buff felt shit. Playing a VDH with Spirit Bomb just feels like you are playing with high ms or something.

[Auxis]

At the end of the day anything that doesn't have an instant visceral or visual effect when you press it is shit.

Felt that recently. Tried Holy while leveling a priest. Got the talent/CD that makes your next 3 Holy Fires have no CD, instant cast and can stack their dots into a super dot basically. And its name and icon sounded and looked friggin awesome - 'Empyreal Blaze', that's like the coolest name for an ability I've ever seen.

It still just looks like the vanilla Holy Fire spell animation. I was so bummed. I hoped that they would have at least updated it by now considering pretty much every spell animation amongst the classes has been updated by now.

[Thirtyrock]

They don't spawn fast enough to immediately hit Spirit Bomb after spawning them though, that's why it feels kinda clunky and unsatisfying. For example say you are at 3 fragments, you press Fracture so you can go to 5 fragments, then you press Spirit Bomb on the next GCD after Fracture - you will only absorb 3 fragments because the 2 new ones haven't landed yet. You need to either delay Spirit Bomb for a fraction of a GCD or use something else as a filler between Fracture and Spirit Bomb - and that can't be a generator or a spender. If you choose to delay for a fraction of a GCD to wait for them to properly land then over the course of a fight you have wasted several full GCD's.

At the end of the day anything that doesn't have an instant visceral or visual effect when you press it is shit. That's precisely the reason why they made most major cooldowns also do something when you pressed them, because just waiting for the next GCD after they gave you a buff felt shit. Playing a VDH with Spirit Bomb just feels like you are playing with high ms or something.

Ah, fair enough!

I hadn't considered these issues, previously, when playing spirit bomb. I mostly didn't mind it until the advent of frailty; I explained my frustrations there in a previous post.

[Vakna]

Ah, fair enough!

I hadn't considered these issues, previously, when playing spirit bomb. I mostly didn't mind it until the advent of frailty; I explained my frustrations there in a previous post.

I think it would just feel better if they simply made fragments a resource like combo points that are on you and appear instantly, and have Spirit Bomb instantly explode when you press it. Sure it eliminates some flavour and uniqueness, but IMO smooth gameplay comes before all that.

[Kehego]

Biggest mistake they made was not just having spirit bomb an improved soul cleave with all the same functionality but as fire damage

Boring but probably 3 times better

[Elbob]

I'm fine with it, conceptually, I don't like how it competes with Soul Cleave so much. I wish they worked better in tandem, somehow. Soul Cleave applying frailty is nice, but it only applies to the primary target. Spirit bomb applies frailty to all targets, but requires a lot more build up, meaning you can't build multiple stacks as well.

Soul cleave applies frailty to all targets via a talent(void reaver), the primary target gets 2 stacks because of Void reaver + soulcrush.

edit: more on topic

For years now I've wished SB was just a passive that just caused you to do minor aoe damage whenever you consume souls. Obviously the damage would have to be tuned down as you would still be spamming SC. Its just felt weird to have 2 spells that both do aoe damage, both pick up soul frags, and both cost fury. Except for a lot of the past few years SB has effectively completely replaced SC without actually replacing the spell.

I understand SB rewards good gameplay by rewarding "stacking" souls without overwriting them and wasting them. But it just feels like slower, more rigid gameplay where you often feel like you "can't" hit a core button because you don't have enough souls out, but its not like you can hit the filler(soul cleave) either because that also will pick up any souls you have down. It just feels clunky AF to me and I do a lot of tanking on pretty much every tank class.

[Thirtyrock]

Soul cleave applies frailty to all targets via a talent(void reaver), the primary target gets 2 stacks because of Void reaver + soulcrush.

edit: more on topic

Huh, weird, the tooltips seem contradictory (I'm not arguing with you, I think I focused more on the SoulCrush tooltip than Void Reaver tooltip). Thanks for the info there!

Void Reaver tooltip - Targets afflicted by Frailty Icon Frailty now deals 4% less damage to you. Causes enemies struck by Soul Cleave Icon Soul Cleave to be afflicted by Frailty Icon Frailty for 6 seconds.
Soul Crush tooltip - Multiple applications of Frailty may overlap. Soul Cleave applies frailty to your primary target for 5 seconds.

[Tech614]

Well let me put it like this, early shadowlands when it wasn't taken and even now in single target where it has limited uses is literally the most mindless fucking gameplay a tank can have. It makes legion guardian look interesting by comparison. So thank god it exists to spice up aoe and make it more interesting. Soul Cleave spam is not interesting gameplay, soul cleave as a fury dump is fine. If anything focused cleave should also apply to spirit bomb to make the single target rotation not dog shit. How anyone enjoys just spamming Soul Cleave and not needing to pay attention to an entire resource in souls is beyond me.

[Thirtyrock]

Well let me put it like this, early shadowlands when it wasn't taken and even now in single target where it has limited uses is literally the most mindless fucking gameplay a tank can have. It makes legion guardian look interesting by comparison. So thank god it exists to spice up aoe and make it more interesting. Soul Cleave spam is not interesting gameplay, soul cleave as a fury dump is fine. If anything focused cleave should also apply to spirit bomb to make the single target rotation not dog shit. How anyone enjoys just spamming Soul Cleave and not needing to pay attention to an entire resource in souls is beyond me.

That just tells me that they should overhaul how souls work. Let us use them in/with more abilities so there's more of a tradeoff between damage and healing. I agree having the ability is better than NOT having it, but it's still not very compelling. It's like when Prot Pallys, in early cata, had Heroic Strike and righteous hammer (I think? Man it's been a minute) and they shared a cooldown. You used one on single target and one on multi target. It was a decision, but not a compelling one. Same with Spirit bomb vs soul cleave as soul spenders. It's just not a compelling choice.

[littlesorrel]

I enjoy Spirit Bomb as an ability, but I dislike the design in SpB vs SC. SpB is basically mandatory, but buried relatively deep in the VDH tree requiring very specific pathing, which is especially painful because of the stolen point in Perfectly Balanced Glaive and the inability to path around it. SpB is just a false choice and another glaring issue with out talent tree (There are a ton of issues with the DH/VDH trees but I won't get into those here).

They should just make SpB baseline if they want it to be necessary for AoE, otherwise they should uncap SC (reduced beyond 5) so the choice is defensives via more frailty stacks with SC or damage via SpB in AoE scenarios. IIRC that's how it was in the prepatch before SC was hard capped and it felt really good to run without SpB in a lot of dungeons, even if it was essentially a 2 button rotation.

[Glensen Harold]

When spirit bomb first was relevant I was very annoyed, because the ability slows gameplay down in many cases. Also, perhaps even more important there is nearly no visual feedback when using it. Comparing it to e.g. Eye Beam, Blade Dance or Demonic Leap, it feels like I'm not even using an ability (from a visual feesback point of view).
It made me stop playing the specc altogether and I was always waiting for that talent to become irrelevant again, but its just not happening.
That talent basically is the face of the whole spec and it drives me nuts.

How do you feel about it?

I very much enjoy it

[shammypie]

I very much enjoy it

same the delay is actually pretty nice because you can press it and then jump into the next pack with a fully charged bomb and have 0 aggro issues along with instant fraility coverage. I do think soul cleave should be able to absorb all the soul fragments and do increased damage because i find myself capping on souls quite often in single target with not enough fury generation. I do agree that them flying around hitting the ground is buggy and shouldn't be so delayed in that aspect. I think it would be better if they just flew around your head and you could carry them with you to the next pack.

as for the visual effects I will admit it's very hard to tell exactly how far it goes. While a more visual animation would be cool, as a tank there is enough going on my screen to begin with. I don't need to be distracted by pretty fire bombs when monitoring for spells to kick and swirlies on the ground.

What i would like to see is the number of souls you can have out increased to 10. It's too easy to cap souls which forces a specific rotation that requires you to estimate the number of souls your generating from immo aura/elysian decree. With 5 stacks i'm often getting to a 4 count and needing to dump them before i cast fracture again.

[Wardonis]

Spirit Bomb hasn't been fun since Legion

[Relapses]

I've been running the Soul Cleave build sans Spirit Bomb and found it to be pretty chill. Tanked all the way up to +23s so far. Damage is good and I get to spend more globals on Sigils which is nice. (Set Bonus + Cycle of Binding really helps with Frailty uptime.)

[Thirtyrock]

I'm fine with spirit bomb. I feel like I can game it for more damage pretty well. I wish there wasn't a delay between the button press and damage/heal, but iiwii

[Vemyr]

I can't post links due to my post count, but you can avoid spirit bomb and still play to an extremely high level. Take a look at Yoda's recent video "Yoda's VDH build compendium" and the spreadsheet he links in the description, the import string is BUkAzqt9tQbK6xteCyjwasgfTCAiIJJCJIJhESSLJSolQSIxBQaJJkkWSIBAAAAkkA