Guild Wars 2

Grenades didn’t need their damage nerfed by 30% to balance the use of sigils. No sigil is worth 30% of your damage. Even on crit sigils, which Grenadiers will now be the masters of, do not make up 30%.

Previously, Grenades were useful even when untraited. Traiting them with Grenadier was extremely recommended, but not mandatory.
This change to the damage is a Grenade Kit killer. The Grenadier trait is now practically mandatory if you want to use them.

The problem with Grenades has never been a problem of damage.
The problem with Grenades has always been that Grenadier is too powerful.
That trait takes one of our strongest Kits and adds 50% effectiveness on top of it.
The problem of balancing Nades is because you have to attempt to make them viable without being traited, while not making traited Nades overpowered. It’s an extremely difficult tightrope to walk. One could argue that it will be impossible to do both with Grenadier in it’s current form.
Reducing the effectiveness of the Kit is not the answer. Reducing the effectiveness of the trait is the answer.
Please make changes where the changes are actually needed.

1.) Revert the damage to what it was (or maybe a 15% nerf at most).
2.) Change Grenadier from always tossing a third grenade to instead allow a 30 to 50% chance for that third grenade to proc (this also helps alleviate some of the on crit sigil issues that the nerf was obviously designed to oppose).
Problem solved.

I’d say that considering the awkwardness of using the kit in the first place, 30% was indeed too steep of a price to pay for Sigils.