Guild Wars 2

I see a number of posts where people talk about grenades as not being very useful in their current state or being difficult. Personally, I love the grenades since I picked them as my first skill back when I was a wee little engineer (Of course, I’m Asuran so I’m still a wee little engineer, but you know what I mean). I understand that some people will never like grenades and I’m fine with that, but I wanted to offer some tips and techniques that I’ve developed during my play.

Build
Everything here is pretty obvious and should surprise no one. If I’m working with a group, I don’t need the Thumper to tank for me, so I’ll switch it out with the Elixir Gun for the additional heal, condition removal, and extra conditions. The last slot skill is really the least important.

Mostly I wanted to offer suggestions concerning technique and usage. I’ve seen people who are displeased with the aiming of grenades and I wonder if they have the fast-cast ground targeting turned on. I know many people like it, but I’ve found that it makes grenades harder to use. I stick to the skill button, aim the target, left-click to fire. It also confirms range and that I’m not inadvertently aiming at a hill in the distance. It also lets you queue up skills in advance.
If you have fast-cast on, try grenades again with it off — at least for a few hours.

Now let’s say that I’m running around in PvE and I see a champion fight off in the distance. As I come running up to the fight, I’ve already got Poison Grenades (5) queued up. I’m aiming for the champion’s feet and I’m just waiting for the target area to turn green. I launch that to get the DoT on him and to set up the combo field for the ranged attacks.
After that, I can run around the perimeter of the battle, launching grenades as soon as the cool-down ends. I can see the whole battle so I can drop my healing turret where it’ll do the most good, I can drop in a supply crate if things are going badly, and I’m available to rez if necessary.

If I’m soloing PvE, it goes like this: See a target, queue up Freeze Grenades (4), and fire. Before they’ve hit the ground, I’m launching 5-3-2-1-F2 to poison, bleed, blind, and damage. The freeze has already slowed them down and since I can see the target area, I just lead them slightly. Remember the cliche: “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” You only have to get close.
Once they start closing the distance, you have bombs, the BoB to knock them back, rifle shots to knock-back and freeze, and there are always more grenades that you can rain down.

Joining in a WvW battle is a lot like a PvE boss battle from a strategy point of view. WvW is also the reason to pick up a bunch of condition damage gear. You’ve already got duration from the Explosives trait and players use a lot more condition removal than MOBs do. Condition Damage will help in WvW and balance out your PvE.
Again, I try to stay in the back because I’m a lot more squikittenhan the tanky engineer builds, but I’m doing AoE and making them worry about conditions as well as supporting my team. Grenades also work a treat while standing on walls.

I hope some people find this useful. If you’ve given up on grenades, maybe this will convince you to have another go. If not, I won’t take it personally. I’ll be watching your back and lobbing explosives over your head.

Definitely have to agree with you, grenades are a great kit for engineers. Only difference with my own eng is that i stacked power & crit damage. The zerg battles in WvW usually involve the people on the front lines retreating when they get too many conditions stacked, extra power/crit damage has really increased number of kills I’m seeing. Overall though yeah I think people are using fast-cast ground targeting so they’re not able to as effectively lead their targets.

To me, grenades are the best way to deal damage as an engineer and pretty much make the other kits feel obsolete. I like the utility of the elixir gun and the idea of the flamethrower, but if I need to kill, grenades are easily the best bet.

Grenades and Bombs combined with Dual Pistols is probably the best hybrid damage build in the game. For WvW I’d probably switch more into Power though.

Grenades have always been the best way for engineers to deal damage. The problem is that we’re practically shoehorned into this since the alternatives simply can’t give a comparative DPS output.

The shoehorning is my complaint. I don’t particularly like grenades on grounds of clumsiness — with or without fast cast they’re a pain to use — and aesthetics, since my awesome looking weapon goes away and I’m just standing there holding a tiny object in my right hand. It’s boring compared to melting face with a flamethrower or unloading with dual pistols, etc.

If there was a more viable way to pump out damage using other combinations, we’d be in better shape. I’m doing it anyway since I refuse to give up the things I find fun even if they’re weak, but it’s disappointing that grenades are the only route to true effectiveness.

Unlike OP I would suggest enabling fastcast when using grenades. Spamming when fastcasting already puts some strain on the fingers, so slowcasting must be downright painful in the long run. Learning to fastcast generally makes you a better player.
For PvE I switched to a power rifle/grenade build around level 40-50 and never looked back (grenade barrage+jump shot+blunderbuss = feel like a warrior for a few seconds). Even though I prefer the flamethrower’s look&feel, the damage output (and control with a blind and a chill !) of a traited grenade kit is too good to pass, especially in the Orr zones where mobs have kittenloads of health.

So yeah, like others I too feel shoehorned into using grenades. But hey look at the bright side : at least we do have an option to dish out plenty of damage while retaining good survivability.

Grenades are very easily avoidable due to their travel time and clear AOE designation, and I don’t recommend them for single PvP. Group PvP is useful as long as their attention is not focused on you.

If played, the first shot should always be the frost grenades as the initial surprise of grenades is all it really has.

Grenades are very effective for surprise, able to turn the tide of a fight if the enemy’s attention is focused elsewhere. The problem is, once the surprise is gone and their attention is focused on you (especially if they get within melee range), grenades cease to be effective. If you stand still and toss grenades, you will get owned. Tossing them at your feet may cause a lot of damage to a melee class, but a ranged user can easily avoid your shots while dealing auto-damage and more to you. If they focus their attention on you, then switch to something other than grenades.

Fastcast seems effective, but I would argue against it unless you are confident in your aim. Take some time in the mists against the moving robots. But this will not help you as much as a live player. Without dueling, training with live players is hard. If you have a friend in another server and your servers meet in WvW, then you could train with each other in a remote part of the world. Or you could see which servers one of you have in WvW and switch over to them to practice this.

Grenades are VERY effective in PvE, but in PvP they are predictable and only useful in group fights when opponents are distracted.

Grenades are definitely a love story for me. I usually run Elixir, flamethrower kit and grenade kit with rifle as weapon of choice. I used to run Pistol/shield but as much as I loved the skills, I needed the kiting skills of the rifle far more often. So I ended up sticking with the weapon. The flamethrower I primarily use to support teammates, barbecue massive amounts of mobs or it’s knock-back/smoke screen effect. The grenade kits I use almost exclusively as my main weapon, switching back to the rifle when needed for overcharge shot, jump shot or net shot. Sometimes blunderbuss if I got the time to switch around.

In PvP fights – I intentionally use them to move enemies into kill zones for my teammates as people tend to fear the grenades more (for whatever dumb reason) than my teammates. Often they will do whatever they can to dodge the grenades and usually end up landing smack dab into my parties AoE’s without realizing it.

I used to love grenades until I realised how pigeon-holed we are into using them.

Grenades are good. I don’t like grenades. Everything else is much worse than grenades. I feel like engineer needs something else.

AndrewWaltfeld said:

“In PvP fights – I intentionally use them to move enemies into kill zones for my teammates as people tend to fear the grenades more (for whatever dumb reason) than my teammates. Often they will do whatever they can to dodge the grenades and usually end up landing smack dab into my parties AoE’s without realizing it.”

That is one thing I forgot to mention for WvW. Grenades are very good for guiding folks toward other players attacks. Thanks for reminding me. Yes, there are good things about WvW grenades.

Mif said:

“I used to love grenades until I realised how pigeon-holed we are into using them.”

I disagree with that. There are other kits and abilities out there, and a good player learns to use them either in a 1v1 fight or to synergize the abilities and kits with other players. This is an MMO, not a single player game.

I refuse to use grenades until I have the option to not spam my basic attack repeatedly. It gets a bit tiresome and just feels a bit tedious outside of underwater. I really want to love grenades, but I just can’t get past the everyday use and abuse. (of my 1 key) Instead, I use a rifle crit/power build with static discharge burst and it does quite fine.

I’ve got no problems with the Grenade 1 spam. Get a mouse with a button on the side you can press with your thumb and tada, you’re basically doing nothing while spamming like a mad man.

I just double tap 1,or 2…i double tap every skillshot now..