Guild Wars 2

Just as the title asks.

Is the firearm trait worth pushing to 30 for the flamethrowers Juggernaut skill or the pistol shots piercing trait? Or should you go for something else? If you go condition damage build is pushing firearms to 30 a must for the 300+ points to condition damage?

Discuss!

There’s plenty of PvE/PvP/WvW builds where 30 Firearms is worthwhile, for all weapons and kits.

If you want to focus more on damage (including condition) and crit, go for it.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any particular advice you would be willing to share? Or how you would utilize the 30 points of firearms to their finest IN YOUR eyes?

only invest into 30 firearms if you find the major traits useful to you, i.e. stacking might with flamethrower, or piercing pistol shots.

I’d say its only useful for flamethower users.

Piercing shots are letting you damage almost 2 times more enemies when they’re grouped up together, it’s insane source of long range dmg in some parts of dungeons and swarm-type events

I found fully stacked might from juggernaut gave me more attack power than my rifle (meaning no longer did switching to rifle to use the grenade toolbelt ability do more damage).

Piercing shots for pistols is amazing…provided you know how to use it.

after a while with coated bullets, and comparing the alternatives.
No Coated bullets is not worth it.
First, note, that it only effects pistol 1 and 2. Static doesnt peirce with it. And blowtorch already was aoe/pierce. glueshot same deal, ground target. doesn’t pierce.

So poison dart volley.
Pierces! nice. but given the arc of pdv, the piercing effect only accounts for 1 or 2 hits actually landing on a second target 90% of the time. There is little to no practical purpose for this. If PDV worked like war volley, etc, where it just shoots in a straight line, you could line up two targets and unload. it does not. it spreads and misses.

Explosive shot. now this gains from coated bullets the most obviously.
It will suddenly now do double hits pretty often as it collides with the ground/walls, max range. these double hits will only apply 1 direct bleed, as its an aoe hit doing the second hit, however can apply the bleed on crit twice. which is frankly a bug. And will get this nerfed even more at some point when its fixed.
Exponential growth! everyone stacked on top of each other!!! ok heres the problem.
There is unit collision. basically you will NEVER get target so stacked up on top of each other, that they will individually take more then 3 hits.
Now, 2 hits is common, and 3 does happen. And this is a large damage gain for explosive shot. But explosive shot sucks. its one of the worst skills in the game.
Hell, it was nerfed in a recent patch reducing the direct damage it deals even more.
You are spending 30 points to buff one of the worst skills in the game? (and only when its firing on targets stacked on top of each other..)

Explosive shot scales at .324 per hit direct. 2s bleed that scales at .05, or .1 per shot.
Grenades scale at .478 per grenade. (you throw 2 default)
Shrapnel grenade scales at .524 per grenade. 12s bleed at .05, or .6 per grenade (you throw 2 default)

Even if explosive shot hits 3 times vs every target, shrapnel grenade deals more damage and applies stronger bleeds.

With coated bullets, you are better of just throwing untraited grenades.
Coated bullets vs grenadier? not even a contest.

A spvp p/p build should stop at 20 in firearms.

The 25 point passive trait that goes along with it applies 5% damage to bleeding targets. The problem is this 5% is only applied to the direct damage portion of your attacks. which in a p/p build is only 40% at best.

^
After reading the above I feel discouraged pushing Firearms to 30…

Well! Off to reset my traits now!

The thing is grenades are the top end damage option. Whether you go condition damage or power, and it is blatantly clear they are outperforming everything else.

So it is safe to assume that either they’ll get nerfed or everything else will get buffed.

But it is worth going 30 into firearms if your running a condition / pistol / flamethrower spec.

For non FT power specs 30 points is a bit of a waste since you’ll get better damage going 10 more into explosives for the power.

So mathematically grenades come out ahead, but the play style of FT and P/P specs are very different from grenade, so if you like them use them. All in all the difference is not game breaking unless if your pushing the limit in tpvp, where your more than likely going to be using a bunker point guarding spec anyway.

I really like doing a 10 30 0 30 0 PP build with elixirs / FT or Bomb kit. Toss in a bit of carrion / rampager gear and it’s a lot of fun to play. It has good damage, good survivability, and your not lobbing grenades all the time.

I run 10 30 0 20 10 pure FT build, works fine for me wherever I go. I’m not going to list the traits now, but I can assure you, 30 firearms is worth it with a flamethrower.

Karast.1927:

The thing is grenades are the top end damage option. Whether you go condition damage or power, and it is blatantly clear they are outperforming everything else.

So it is safe to assume that either they’ll get nerfed or everything else will get buffed.

But it is worth going 30 into firearms if your running a condition / pistol / flamethrower spec.

For non FT power specs 30 points is a bit of a waste since you’ll get better damage going 10 more into explosives for the power.

So mathematically grenades come out ahead, but the play style of FT and P/P specs are very different from grenade, so if you like them use them. All in all the difference is not game breaking unless if your pushing the limit in tpvp, where your more than likely going to be using a bunker point guarding spec anyway.

I really like doing a 10 30 0 30 0 PP build with elixirs / FT or Bomb kit. Toss in a bit of carrion / rampager gear and it’s a lot of fun to play. It has good damage, good survivability, and your not lobbing grenades all the time.

yeah, in pve and wvw, grenades flat out, out perform. And this is even with p/p condition build. default grenades are stronger then traited pistols really. traited grenades just ruin pistols.

spvp is a bit different. as its more 1v1 and small scale. The aoe ground targeting is less effective. now, that said, I have argued that even then grenades are still more then viable, and probably could be king if played well. A grenade build can lean on an allies CC to drop people in ways p/p can’t. But regardless, if we are building a p/p build.
the question is what do we get for those 10 points past 20. 5% to bleeding targets, which doesnt effect your condition damage. And likely coated bullets. which has very little use in spvp. helps vs mesmers a bit.
You get more crit and cond damage, which is nice and ideal for sure.
But you would get more from another 10 in tools for kit refine or speedy kits, and its toolbelt recharge. or 10 in explosives. which would give that 10% duration for hitting 50% easier, and incid powder, which is bad aoe, but good single target. or 10 in invent, for the tough/heal

And yes, juggernaut is obviously quite good.

I wonder what they will do about the grenades being so out performing… Probably nerf them. Although I would want a pistol buff, personally.

You can easily trade coated bullets for fireforged trigger for the 20% FT CD reduction.

It might not seem that great but the reduced CD’s on the #3 / #5 if your using an FT as a utility is extremely handy.

I’ve also gotten good use out of the cripple on immobile, and increased pistol range / swiftness on crit / there are a few nice lower tier traits you skip to get the 20% cool down reduction / or vulnerability on crit.

Well the thing with grenade is it does fairly similar damage to what other professions can do.

It’s roughly on par with melee weapons like warrior great sword / hammer dps wise. 3-4k crits on the one in a glasscannon build, solid condition stacking, and the tool belt to get ~6-7k spikes.

For a ranged weapon it’s hard to be effective and it slower than something like the ranger LB or warrior rifle / ele staff. But a lot of those weapons might do about the same dps in a glass cannon spec they are not AoE, and those that are tend to be pierce rather than radius.

So it’s not to out of line with whats out there.

But it just smokes everything else we have to an extent, but our other kits are kind of funky.

You can basically link all of grenade kits strength to the grenadier trait. Most kits simply do not have any trait remotely close to it in effectiveness, and if you look at the strength of other weapons out there it typically comes from 30 point traits. Hammer / sword for guardian for example.

Even flamethrower, which I’d say is closest to grenade dps wise, owes most of that to Juggernaut.

it might be that some of the other 30 points need to be tweaked and buffed.

If you look at tools / alchemy / explosives there really are not any 30 point traits that support tool kit, rifle, bomb kit, or elixir gun game play.

Changing traits could help.

For example what if armor mod gave you retaliation while you were using tool kit?

or

If there was a 30 point alchemy trait that made elixir gun abilities (except the 1 ) into elixirs so it benefited from other alchemy traits.

For what it does the grenadier trait increase the damage of the base skill by 50% by adding another grenade, and it increases the range.

Our other 30 points just do not compare.

im a 0/30/0/30/10

rifle 50% crit for swift, increase range of rifle and lastly +10% rifle dmg

oh i use elixir gun
i know grenade is awesome but i don’t want my finger to BREAK

Sometimes the people in the engineering forums confuse me. Just because grenades are capable of doing damage comparable to what other classes put out, they need a nerf?

Their underwater version probably does.

Underwater, grenades are about on-par with what mesmers can do. Warriors can surpass grenade damage if they get on top of you.

And here’s the problem again. Grenades (underwater) are actually decent, a good offensive option in-line with mesmers and warriors, and some engineers want to self nerf them.

Honestly, no other class has individuals that called for a grenade nerf except for some engineers. What is WRONG with you people?

Disagree on that, grenades are clearly the strongest underwater damage dealer in the game. By a significant margin, actually.

Is this a serious issue in need of a fix? No. But is it something I expect will be eventually looked at? Yea, I’m preparing for it.

Well either they nerf the grenades or they buff the rest of the engineers tools to make the choice harder to make instead of just touching the grenade and go WTF IS THIS THIS IS COMPLETELY SUPERIOR TO EVERYTHING I’VE USED BEFORE?! … Yeah that was my reaction by the way. I switched today, and I went from doing 200-400 to doing 1400-1600 when I specced everything into explosives, and 3000 with with the tool belt skill on crit. My Condition Build pistol at most managed to do 2800 with slot 4, and poison darts to 1200. While grenades do 1400-1600 on normal attacks when all three nades hit.

Kind of makes it a no brainer what to choose if you want to kill stuff fast instead of going into a twenty second circlejerk with the enemy before they die.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

Underwater, grenades are about on-par with what mesmers can do. Warriors can surpass grenade damage if they get on top of you.

And here’s the problem again. Grenades (underwater) are actually decent, a good offensive option in-line with mesmers and warriors, and some engineers want to self nerf them.

Honestly, no other class has individuals that called for a grenade nerf except for some engineers. What is WRONG with you people?

If my dreams of kit stat contribution become a reality. FT, TK, BK, and others will move to about where grenade kit is now, but that would make grenade kit OP, and the current build dynamics wouldn’t change.

Also if you look at warrior ((don’t know enough about mesmer)) grenades line up well with melee builds with hammer or great sword. But while most effective in melee range, grenades are not limited to melee. There are a lot of times and places where you can use them from the max 1500, and most skilled players can use them 600-700 with no big issues.

Melee builds should hit really hard. Since there is a dead time where you do not do damage before you get into range. Ranged builds should hit for a bit less since they have greater range and more time on target.

Grenades have really good time on target, and hit really hard. In the right hands they are borderline OP. You might notice a lot of more serious WvW guilds are adding grenade engineers to their setups.

At best you can say they are borderline OP. Any buff to kits as a whole. Lets say sigil contribution or more stats and they’ll be OP.

TwiceDead.1963:

Well either they nerf the grenades or they buff the rest of the engineers tools to make the choice harder to make instead of just touching the grenade and go WTF IS THIS THIS IS COMPLETELY SUPERIOR TO EVERYTHING I’VE USED BEFORE?! … Yeah that was my reaction by the way. I switched today, and I went from doing 200-400 to doing 1400-1600 when I specced everything into explosives, and 3000 with with the tool belt skill on crit. My Condition Build pistol at most managed to do 2800 with slot 4, and poison darts to 1200. While grenades do 1400-1600 on normal attacks when all three nades hit.

Kind of makes it a no brainer what to choose if you want to kill stuff fast instead of going into a twenty second circlejerk with the enemy before they die.

Thing is, grenades are on par with what other classes can generally do in terms of damage. The fact that they’re more effective than many of our other skills speaks volumes about those specific skills, not about grenades.

I really dont think grenades are that much stronger than any other range focused class.

I mean, a condition Necro with epidemic can dish out that same kind of damage.

Elementalists’ AE options are even stronger, and they dont have to hang around and hammer them.

Also, nether of the above have to worry about 80% of keep walls just silently eating their spells either.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

Honestly, no other class has individuals that called for a grenade nerf except for some engineers. What is WRONG with you people?

People are not calling for a nerf, people are expecting a nerf. Thats a difference.