Glyph of Living Bomb vs Glyph of Molten Armor

[Nekolas]

Hi i would like to know which of these two glyphs is best to use. 3% more damage on Living Bomb or 2% more crit on armor.

Most people use the second glyph to make their Molten Armor give 5% crit but since fire is already so RNG based wouldn't it be wiser to get the 3% more raw damage on Living Bomb instead, especially since LB was buffed?

[Guromin]

Nekolas,

I will update my 4.3 guide to include glyph information for fire. The 2% increased critical strike is always better, however, in AoE heavy situations Glyph of Pyroblast can be replaced with living bomb for increased damage.

Glyphs:

Prime:
Glyph of Fireball
Glyph of Molten Armor
Glyph of Pyroblast

Major:

None provide a dps increase. They are all purely situational.

Glyph of Evocation (Nice additional heal when using Evocation)
Glyph of Blink (When you need to get somewhere faster)

Minor Glyphs:

Glyph of Mirror Image (It's the only one that does anything to help dps as a minor glyph so it's worth having)

Choose anything for the other two.

Is Glyph of Living Bomb better than Glyph of Molten Armor because it provides stable dps?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: It's not a dps gain because 2% critical strike affects every single spell. It's effect is much greater, in terms of dps, than 3% increased damage on Living Bomb. For someone in Full BiS Firelands gear Glyph of Living bomb is only about a dps gain of 200, while Glyph of Molten armor is a dps gain of around 800.

These values assume that it is a single target fight. Fights like Heroic Halfus, where there are multiple targets for a large majority of the fight make it a substantial dps increase. Even in these situations Glyph of Molten Armor is kept; instead Glyph of Pyroblast is removed because it only provides about 450 dps (and serious help with Combusion). Currently, in Dragon Soul I don't see any fights where Living Bomb would be better than Pyroblast except, maybe, Warmaster Blackthorn. Even on this fight that includes lots of multi-doting I'm not sure Living Bomb would be enough of an increase to be worth using over Pyroblast. I would have to run some numbers to know for sure and my guess is that it would likely be really close.

Here is a way to do some approximation math to figure out if it's a dps increase or not. This formula is not exact by any measure, but may give a good idea of the possible benefit to using the glyph.

Consider that Living bomb is normally up 100% of the time. For every other target it is on add on the percent amount of time that living bomb is active. Do not include any adds that do not last long enough to take the explosion at the end. Then multiply this value by the initial dps incrase to determine if it's even close.

Here is a made up fight example. A boss spawns adds every 30 seconds that are must be killed 20 seconds after spawning. These adds are active 66% of the time and there is only ever two targets which increases the benefit from the glyph by 166%. This value is still not better than Pyroblast's. Now consider a fight where the boss spawns 3 adds that last 3 minutes, but only in a 5 minute fight. Now there's 100% from the boss and 60 x 3 (keep in mind LB can only be on 3 targets). This becomes 220% which makes Living Bomb glyph about a dps increase of 440. Now comparing this damage to the 450 of Pyroblast and there is almost no difference. It's so small that it's not worth it. I realize that Living Bomb's explosion will factor into more adds, but this was just to give a general idea of why Living Bomb glyph isn't as good. I know I rambled on there and it may have gotten confusing, but thanks for reading this random tangent.

I hope this clears things up and sorry for the delayed responce (4.3 has be busy!),

-Guromin

[Nekolas]

Thanks a lot Guromin, long post but it indeed cleared things for me so i really appreciate your effort. :)