Deadlock

You're sleeping on truly insane damage potential.

With the buffs to time bomb, you can now get up to eight pulses out of it (improved duration+magic carpet). Improved range plus the T3 growth now makes is enormous. Throw in mystic slow, slowing hex, or mystic pulse to make it harder to get out of.

Escalating exposure stacks with the damage amp it already gives, and an echo shard lets you drop two for double damage or larger coverage. The pulse damage scales with spirit, of course.

And the damage amp it then provides on anyone hit with it means your gun and kinetic carbine are no joke either.

My problem with building into the carbine is that the damage never gets truly stupid. It scales with gun damage, but even when min-maxing that, it doesn't come close to what I've been able to achieve with the time bomb.

Hence I almost just use the carbine as yet another stun to make sure people eat the time bomb, along with strats like swapping people into narrow corridors.

Another trick that works way too often, is dropping the time bomb at your own feet, and then staying within its AOE while using a time wall to defend. Close range heroes that try stay close to you like shiv, yamato and abrams will have to eat a truly dumb amount of damage if they want to get anywhere near you.

Also, unlike kudzu bomb, the time bomb AOE is a sphere, and it works through walls. With the larger size, clever placements can do damage in ways people really don't expect. It's also an insane combo with anything that stops movement. Including enemy ults. When enemy seven ults I literally just drop a time bomb within range of him, and he basically has to choose between dying or stopping his ult so he can move. Same for an ulting haze or dynamo.