My friend who is new to DDO, and I, who have played since DDO has been a game, made new, level 1 Alchemists in the DPS caster tree Bombardier.

My main is a sorcerer. His main is a Wizard Pale Master Lich. We have both been on the TR train and took a break to try Alchemist with the idea of adding some lives to our TR.

We decided on DPS caster alchemist because we hoped our experience with Wizard and Sorcerer would help.

We skipped korthos and went to the Boarderlands, level 1, not using any gear, not joining a guild, just to see how the class played.
He went DPS fire. I went DPS acid.

we entered the boarderlands and we could not kill anything - we needed hirelings to kill stuff for us. Wolves killed me as soon as I got close to them, the AOE acid spell I have hit, the wolves all made their reflex saves and I did extremely low damage, and I was incapd. My friend tried to smash a heal vial on us and threw it at a tree instead. The barbarian I hired proceeded to kill the wolves. My friend's hireling healed me back up.

My friend: 'I think we did these builds horribly wrong.'

I looked - we were totally invested in the Bombardier tree. 'This is the build I said.'

He said, 'Is this supposed to be fun? I'm level 1 and I cannot kill anything. In the borderlands, everything is saving. And I am super squishy. This is painful.'

This paragraph sums up our experience: we did no damage, were extremely squishy, impotent beyond impotent - as dps casters. OK maybe this is because we were level 1.

At level 1, I had 35 hitpoints. I was hit by a wolf for 30 points of damage from one hit. I smashed a vial of cure light wounds on myself and healed for 5 points and then was killed. I failed to heal myself before because I forgot to swivel my camera to look at my feet or else I would throw the vial at a tree 20 feet away.

We stayed with it and played bombardier alchemists to level 3.
Each of us died half a dozen times in the borderlands.
we relied completely on hirelings to do almost all of our combat.

No vendor in the borderlands sells alchemist reagants.
In fact I had to spend a half an hour running around to find a vendor.

One of the most glaring issues: the DPS tree has no good SLA. The first SLA you get is a single target damage toss - which is fine, but its single target. I would get rushed by wolves, toss my acid vial, damage one, and get tripped by the other 3 and killed. When I tried my acid vial smash AOE, it did 4 damage - the wolves also made their reflex saves vs 90% of my attacks and I had a 20 intelligence, the highest you can have.

The Bombardier needs to have the other 2 useless non-dps slas removed or moved and DPS AOE SLAs need to be added. Our second SLA is obscuring mist: useless. Our 3rd SL is also useless.

Conclusion, my friend said, 'I would never play this bombardier, never buy this alchemist class; this was not fun, it was painful, and I'm sort of upset now because I was expecting a fun class and it was the opposite of fun. My pale master is amazing, and to switch to play this bombardier thing was just awful. Awful.'

The take-away: Bombardier needs to be re-thought. What is the point of the DPS caster if it is not an effective DPS caster, dies constantly, has all its dps saved even by level 1 mobs, and is not fun to play?