Guild Wars 2

Was wondering who uses Grenade Kit in their condition build because I stopped using it for this fractal and I’m having such a good time not button smashing to apply my conditions. Also asking this because most condition builds most people use Elixir B, C and S as their utility.

I’ve always just used my P/P and rocket kick to keep fire, poison, and bleeds on.

So I was all super heavy into a 0/30/0/30/10 build for a long time with Precision/Tough/Condition gear and Power/Vit/Cond Jewelry and Weapons. This gave me a crap load of hit points, toughness and condition damage and huge stacks of crit. It also gave me the point spread to easily rely on Potions for defense/utility (basically immune to conditions) and either go with P/P for conditions or Flame Thrower.

P/P is always a colossal disappointment because when everything lines up it’s wonderful with the piercing explosions (which don’t count as explosions but AOE all the same) but the condition damage is just terrible because the bleeds are a 2s base bleed meaning you’ll NEVER get any condition stackage going on past 10-12 on average. That’s with Sigil of Earth, Veggie Pizza, Haste, +bleed runes, etc. Elixir Gun I don’t find much better with a 3s base bleed other than more consistently getting to 10-12 without haste or other measures.

Flame Thrower constantly disappoints because while it does actually decent damage spec’d like this (burns hit absurdly hard) cause of the constant might stacks (10+ usually) and crazy high Precision it’s so God awfully random what it does and doesn’t hit. I’ve sat there and unloaded into things and it will miss every time then I side step an angle 5 degrees off and then it suddenly hits. The other skills are designed poorly for a group environment or just flat out aren’t useful. I usually only go this if I can afford to go melee and there’s another condition build already in the group taking up all the bleed stacks (which is very common).

Then earlier today I tried Grenades (was doing HOTW which is melee unfriendly in p2 and p3) again. While I definitely hate the smashing button 1 repeatedly got super old I also bound it to a button on the mouse and turned on ground targeting to overcome this. What I found was quite shocking. With a 30/5/0/20/15 build I was applying a stupid amount of bleeds with almost no effort around 15 or so. This was just from the huge crit % proc’ing bleeds (from Sigil of Earth and 5 in Precision) as well as the fact since they are actual explosions they also have a 15% chance to bleed. Add in bleeding grenades and I was watching bleed numbers fly by. Not only was I doing easily 3x the base damage of a P/P but I was also stacking more bleeds and other effects (Chill, Poison, Blind) and due to my gear they were all hitting quite hard (around 130 a tick per in HOTW). I imagine if I had thrown on a veggie pizza I probably could have hit 20+ bleeds.

I mean quality of life wise…I despise grenades. Smashing 1 or a mouse button for hours on end is unbelievably terrible. An hour or so? Fine. A 4 hour session? No. Just no. I also end up forgetting my spells are ground targeted only and waste a lot of cool downs when I expect the targeting reticule to come up cause I change over to auto target. However kitten if it isn’t the best Condition based spec as well. Seems like I can’t escape Grenades which is probably one of the leading reasons I don’t really play my Engineer outside of token farming when needed.

Essentialy you want to be using Explosive Shot as little as possible. In terms of optimizing your damage, one of the easiest ways to increase condition damage output is simply giving yourself more cooldowns to use so you do not use it.

Shrapnel Grenades are pretty good at that and Poison Grenades are good at giving the Poison in an AoE. It really depends on how much you want that extra damage output. In PvE it’s going to matter, in PvP the utility slots can have other uses. In PvE though, conditions have problems applying damage in many situations.

I would disagree with not using explosive shot. Our main conditions that tick for damage are fire, poison and bleed. Fire and poison once applied are constant damage and we just wait for cooldowns to reapply and extend duration. Explosive shot along with sigil of earth is great for adding 7-8 stacks of bleed on top while you wait for cooldowns.

Sigil of earth will proc from other damaging moves you use regardless and the same goes for Incendiary Powder. Technically using grenade autos would probably be better damage in a condition damage build since it’s far more likely to proc regularly. Alone, Explosive Shot reaches maybe 4 stacks of bleeds with +50% duration on it becuase it has a horribly long recovery animation. The bleed damage in this case is lucky to reach 400 damage, and that’d be with very high condition damage.

You are better off using pretty much anything other then Explosive Shot for damage even in a build revolving around pure condition damage. When it’s loaded with on-crit procs the damage output isn’t so bad and it’s obvious you will have to use it when everything else is on cooldown, but as it stands you are far better off using damage cooldowns on other kits when you can instead.

It’s always a tradeoff though, and right now I"m speaking on a pure damage dealing standpoint with conditions.

I would have to agree auto grenades stack condition better than auto pistol with high enough precision. That’s if you have shrapnel and incendiary powder tho. Heck with just sharpshooter grenades might be better. In that case it’d be better to take a rifle for CC to better land grenades. Not to mention blunderbuss stacks bleeds as well. The only thing you’d be missing is the confusion from static shot.