Guild Wars 2

So, we all know there’s TONS of projectile hate in WvW, but when you actually manage to land your hits, you’re rewarded, right?

HAHAHAHAHA wrong.

You die to retaliation.

3 grenades x 5 players each x ~300 retal damage each = you very dead very fast.

I go from full health to half in 3-4 grenade throws.

Should’ve played condi. :P Not affected retal, weakness or protection.

Ye this has been a problem for years that we take 3x as much dmg from retaliation than anyone else

Personally, I think they should rebalance grenades to throwing one at a time (including buffing the related traits on the Explosives line). I can see how they thought a trait to throw two grenades at a time was a good idea. I can see the balance reason to switch to throwing two baseline and three with the trait, however ludicrous the idea of throwing three grenades at once might be. Now the trait is out, though… seriously, there’s no need for engineers to continue chucking out grenades by the handful. Revert it to the more sensible single grenade, and buff accordingly.

threw a nade barrage at a group once……took 8k damage

Ah, yep. I was fighting a guild group last night that had retaliation on everyone. I landed a perfect Grenade Barrage – did indeed take 8k+ damage.

Now you know how us Flamethrower lovers feel.

Lahmia.2193:

Now you know how us Flamethrower lovers feel.

i didnt think dead people felt anything

Theonord.6359:

Ye this has been a problem for years that we take 3x as much dmg from retaliation than anyone else

Getting more damage than the one you deal must be the purity of purpose of flamethrower and grenades, i would guess.

draxynnic.3719:

Personally, I think they should rebalance grenades to throwing one at a time (including buffing the related traits on the Explosives line). I can see how they thought a trait to throw two grenades at a time was a good idea. I can see the balance reason to switch to throwing two baseline and three with the trait, however ludicrous the idea of throwing three grenades at once might be. Now the trait is out, though… seriously, there’s no need for engineers to continue chucking out grenades by the handful. Revert it to the more sensible single grenade, and buff accordingly.

No,
Use mortar if you need a single projectile.
We don’t want to have a single attack better than everything else. Thats the great thing about engi, you have a kit for every job.

Nades have multiple hits so they can trigger multiple “on hit” and “on crit” effects. That is what makes them better than bombs for a condi setup (with the on hit/on crit bleeds).

Well, they should put a 1/2 second ICD on retaliation to any given player then. It’s ridiculous to be taking more damage in retaliation than you are dealing to any given player. Hell, they’re projectile-reflected most of the time anyway. That’s retaliation enough in itself.

I really like that idea, but can’t see it implemented as it really only affects one class.

Many classes can destroy themselves with Retal. Engi just happens to have 2 well known examples.

We need a bypass ability imo, if we can leave vulnerable someone by just analyzing it, we should have something for ignore certain boons

Ghotistyx.6942:

Many classes can destroy themselves with Retal. Engi just happens to have 2 well known examples.

What skills compare with FT AA or nades?

Ivantreil.3092:

We need a bypass ability imo, if we can leave vulnerable someone by just analyzing it, we should have something for ignore certain boons

The bypass is that FT and nades are kits…swap out

Mighty Favazz.1546:

Ghotistyx.6942:

Many classes can destroy themselves with Retal. Engi just happens to have 2 well known examples.

What skills compare with FT AA or nades?

Eles complained about Meteor Shower and Ice Bow 4, Guards complained about Smite, Rangers had piercing Rapid Fire, Mesmers had Mind Wrack, etc. They might not hit nearly as frequently as nades or FT, but they were enough for a slew of complaints that helped reduce Retal in pvp and wvw by 33%.

I’ve been a fan of removing that damage reduction and instead limiting the rate at which you can proc Retal from the same source like stab. I feel like Retal deserves to be a real deterrent, but also not get proc 50x(250+ damage) every 2.5s (or faster with quickness). Retal has the potential to be one of the biggest bursts in the game, but always in a negative fashion.

lLobo.7960:

draxynnic.3719:

Personally, I think they should rebalance grenades to throwing one at a time (including buffing the related traits on the Explosives line). I can see how they thought a trait to throw two grenades at a time was a good idea. I can see the balance reason to switch to throwing two baseline and three with the trait, however ludicrous the idea of throwing three grenades at once might be. Now the trait is out, though… seriously, there’s no need for engineers to continue chucking out grenades by the handful. Revert it to the more sensible single grenade, and buff accordingly.

No,
Use mortar if you need a single projectile.
We don’t want to have a single attack better than everything else. Thats the great thing about engi, you have a kit for every job.

Nades have multiple hits so they can trigger multiple “on hit” and “on crit” effects. That is what makes them better than bombs for a condi setup (with the on hit/on crit bleeds).

Those ‘on hit’ and ‘on crit’ effects are what I mean by buffing the related traits.

Seriously, you’ve got to admit that it’s ridiculous that engineers literally chuck grenades by the handful. It gets defended because that’s what people are used to and stacking the procs from those traits has been one of the best ways for engineers to deal damage in PvE, but that doesn’t stop it from being silly.

Ivantreil.3092:

We need a bypass ability imo, if we can leave vulnerable someone by just analyzing it, we should have something for ignore certain boons

Now it’s a simple matter of making Analyze a 1500-radius AoE that ignores player cap.

draxynnic.3719:

Seriously, you’ve got to admit that it’s ridiculous that engineers literally chuck grenades by the handful. It gets defended because that’s what people are used to and stacking the procs from those traits has been one of the best ways for engineers to deal damage in PvE, but that doesn’t stop it from being silly.

It isn’t though. These aren’t “real” grenades, they’re Tyrian grenades. They don’t have to act anywhere at all like reality. It’s how you get flight sims that load you out with 88 missiles and have you shoot down ICBM silos from the inside, all while flying licensed F-22s and Su-47s in the same squadron.

Grenades are familiar, but physics don’t convert 1:1 between different worlds. Skimpy armor still effectively protects because armor had been abstracted through magic. It’s how Rangers and Warriors can bounce and boomerang Axes and Greatswords. But apparently palming grenades is where suspension of disbelief happens. Not anywhere else in a game that already displays how its physics and natural laws work.

In Tyria physics, you throw grenades 900 units of distance away, then they explode and take half your health bar .. but only if they hit an enemy, and the more enemies they hit, the more damage they do to you!

Makes sense.

Only if they hit enemies with retaliation. Its not like Tyrians have been living without that knowledge for years.

Ranger has the same problem ;-;

Ghotistyx.6942:

draxynnic.3719:

Seriously, you’ve got to admit that it’s ridiculous that engineers literally chuck grenades by the handful. It gets defended because that’s what people are used to and stacking the procs from those traits has been one of the best ways for engineers to deal damage in PvE, but that doesn’t stop it from being silly.

It isn’t though. These aren’t “real” grenades, they’re Tyrian grenades. They don’t have to act anywhere at all like reality. It’s how you get flight sims that load you out with 88 missiles and have you shoot down ICBM silos from the inside, all while flying licensed F-22s and Su-47s in the same squadron.

Grenades are familiar, but physics don’t convert 1:1 between different worlds. Skimpy armor still effectively protects because armor had been abstracted through magic. It’s how Rangers and Warriors can bounce and boomerang Axes and Greatswords. But apparently palming grenades is where suspension of disbelief happens. Not anywhere else in a game that already displays how its physics and natural laws work.

We’ve actually been told that (core) engineers are the profession that doesn’t directly use magic (yes, warriors use magic). It turns up in their devices and concoctions, but unless under the effect of an elixir the engineer doesn’t pull off any magic stuff directly: they use devices which might happen to have magic incorporated into them.

So yeah, engineers chucking out those grenades is fairly equivalent. Maybe they’re magic grenades (they certainly seem to consistently explode on impact), but what the engineer is doing is equivalent to taking a handful of tennis balls and throwing them accurately out to a decent range.

It’s also worth remembering that grenades started as singles. Then they decided to add a trait, and it became two (you could at least imagine the engineer throwing with both hands then). Then the trait was hard to balance (doubling the effect, after all), so they made it two baseline and three with the trait. Now they’ve made three baseline. Each of which was a balance decision… but they’re entirely capable of rebalancing it back downwards.

Particularly if there’s a balance reason, like, say, to pick a completely random example that isn’t related to the topic of this thread at all, grenade users getting annihilated by Retaliation.

I don’t recall Grenades ever being just one. It was always double with a trait for a third.

However, from a design standpoint as opposed to an aesthetic one, Grenades allow for a different playstyle to Bombs. That there are three allows for a better likelihood of that damage landing, as even one or two grenades will be better than the binary nature of a single object. It also provides better synergy with crit and apm effects. Grenade Kit is a middle ground between Bomb Kit and Flamethrower. Just because Retaliation is strong against something its designed to be strong against doesn’t mean anything drastic needs to happen. I’ll agree Retal hits Nades and FT harder than it might need to, but that’s a relatively simple fix. There are plenty of ways to make Retaliation more meaningful while also removing the disparity between FT auto and Gravedigger Spam.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Nade kit is still fine. With all the crazy magic that’s infused in the daily lives of Tyrians, it isn’t unreasonable to create scenarios where tossing three nades at once works. The end result already works and doesn’t need argued. Perhaps its just simple resizing magic, or they’re all on piano wire, or perhaps its a multi-stage casing that releases 3 warheads to its target. Any of those options and more work to satisfy the “how does it happen?”. Not everything needs a good explanation, because Tyria operates on different forces than ours. It’s unnecessary to expect everything to conform.

Here’s the video from the original engineer release showcasing the grenade kit. This video is still on the website, in fact, so anyone looking at the game through the website would think grenades are thrown one by one.

And might also think flash grenades have a much brighter flash than they actually do, for that matter.

It was changed from 1 with 2 on trait to 2 with 3 on trait during the beta weekends, IIRC, or possibly very soon after release. It was certainly early on, but not so early that nobody played it with just one grenade untraited. I’m pretty sure it was explained at the time that having the trait double the firepower was just too strong.

Regarding your design perspective points:

Better likelihood of damage landing can be achieved simply by having a larger radius. In fact, at the moment grenades are a bit weird, since you can’t predict where the grenades are going to land, or where the intersections between their blast radii will intersect.

More synergy with on-crit and apm effects is a better argument, although I am inclined to ask… is it really a good thing that grenades get that much more benefit from those effects? I would argue that if it didn’t, things might be easier to balance between the various explosive weapons if the explosives traits were equal between them rather than having triple effect for grenades.

If you really want grenades to get triple benefit from those traits, though, and you don’t care about the Retaliation issue raised in this thread, then grenades could be given three blasts of different radii, representing the explosion losing power over distance. Targets in the center get three hits, targets on the outer edge only get one.

On the aesthetic aspect: Engineers clearly don’t have ‘resizing magic’ with the grenades, because the grenades are clearly full sized before being thrown (as can be seen in the graphics of the kit). Neither the graphics nor the effect support them being thrown using a piano wire or a submunitions effect: what we’re shown, and what we see from the pattern, is literally grenades being chucked out by the handful, far more accurately than you would expect from what the character is actually doing.

Plus, people will come in with certain expectations from other media. Pretty much anywhere else you see grenades, they’re things that are thrown one by one. Simply being able to spam grenades, rather than having a handful that you use on an infrequent basis for a large effect (seriously, to me, using Blast Gyro or Throw Mine both feel more like using a grenade than grenade kit) is already a pretty big difference – being able to not only spam them but throwing them three at a time when you’re spamming them really is getting to the point of being ridiculous. Yes, there’s magic, but it still just looks silly.

Really, though, what would you say to a ‘three explosions of increasing radii’ proposal? Seems like it would largely retain the mechanical aspects – if anything, it would make them a bit more predictable and user-friendly – while being a lot more sensible in appearance.

And yet we’ve seen “on hit” and “on crit” effects get repeatedly nerfed during these years, with internal cooldowns put on them that deny any meaningful advantage with the aforementioned skills. All it’s left are some traits…that are already balanced over the use of those multi-hit skills, and end up being rather useless with anything else.
So, what’s the point of having multi-hit skills, if anything gets toned down or is balanced as not to be strong with multi-hit skills? It strips them of any advantage they were supposed to have, while still retaining the weakness to retaliation. So what’s the point of them being multi-hit now? Even grenadier is gone, and they already balanced everything over 3 grenades – more precisely, over all of them hitting the same targets, as we could see by their nerfs over the years – so they could as well just make them a single hit now and make those other traits more functional with the rest of the weapons.

Even worse, we have a trait that is designed to make us camp a kit – Juggernaut – along with some other traits that complement it…and yet we can’t do it due to a single, common boon. Yet somehow this is considered acceptable just because we can switch it out (thus denying us any advantage those traits were supposed to give us).
So much for purity of purpose, eh.

Oh yeah, those pre-beta videos. I remember that fan of arrows Ranger skill that never actually existed.

Regarding the triple blast grenade idea, it seems fine on the surface. Mechanically it would do very similar things. However, unlike other 3 radii skills (Wash the Pain Away or Nightfall), it would be more difficult to represent that. Considering teh skil aesthetics GW2 already uses, how do you visually represent how all those areas interact? Especially when you start adding in walls and other complex geometries. Underwater too. Once you go through all that design, is it actually worth spending that development time? Are the improvements of the triple blast worth all the investment compared to tossing 3 current grenades? And of course, if you’re going to do that with Grenades then why not with Bombs, Ranged Bombs Mortar Kit, Turrets, Mines, etc etc. I think the idea works mechanically, but its just not worth the investment compared to the reward.

You make the point about resizing magic, but Bombs definitely support that. The Bomb basket is massive, but could only hold maybe 2 bombs. The actual bombs, which are just smaller objects than the basket, are obviously not the same kind of thing as what you’re holding. (Note, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Basket scales based on race. I’m speaking from a Charr standpoint where the Bombs are about 60% the size of the basket). I mean, Rangers have infinite arrows without quivers. Nothing requires ammo. It isn’t unreasonable in a world such as that to come up with any random explanation to describe what is happening.

But here’s the real fun thing. I decided to see if I could toss grenade-like things with similar accuracy. Ranges in GW2 are abstracted. Grenades can be thrown 900 units, whatever that means. However, I think those units most closely resemble our centimeters. 900 centimeters makes 9 meters, which looks like it fits pretty well. That’s what I assumed to be the case during my test. With three grenade-like objects and a ripcord concept (separation from the cord upon leaving my hand), I could throw those objects 9 meters and they consistently landed within a 1.8m radius (180u) circle. I couldn’t test the frequency of how fast I could throw a second volley, but If we assume the grenade kit’s bunch of grapes are 3 grenades tied together by a single ripcord, it shouldn’t be unreasonable to get close to a character’s fire rate. So that was fun to try. Given that magic exists in Tyria, I can let any weird oddities like that slide because I know there are different rules of nature. Its the same when I play Ace Combat. You regularly equipped with upwards of 88 missiles and maybe 16 bombs. That doesn’t fly in the real world, but its commonplace and expected over their. I don’t let those differences bother me, because when I play those games I’m visiting their world.

Now, back to retaliation. I think the best fix is to increase the per tick damage, but limit the amount of procs per second. I haven’t been able to find really good numbers for that idea yet, but I think that’s the design direction the fix should go. Retal is generally considered worthless until you start getting extremely high hits per minute in an aoe. Then it’s completely ridiculous. For engineer it unfairly targets Grenades and FT (especially FT holy cow), but other than those instances, it isn’t seen as threatening or something that could be built around. If its supposed to be a reactionary defense, then it needs to pack more punch. If its supposed to be an almost permanent boon, then it can deal less damage as its DoT potential will be the focus. In any case, it isn’t in a good spot as is.

One thing to remember about sizes was that the kits were originally giant backpacks that got removed because of complaints about “hobosacks”. I think it’s actually reasonable to say that, according to the lore, characters do have backpacks, quivers, scabbards, weapon harnesses, and other items to carry things that aren’t represented on the model. Heck, our inventory has us carrying a backpack and up to eight bags with Runes of Holding! What we’re shown carrying is, I think, a fair representation of the size of what we’re using (grenades or whatever): however, we have additional storage capacity, possibly including bags that are larger on the inside than they are on the outside, that we can draw from.

Range is, as you say, an abstraction. However, I really don’t think you can claim that a ‘unit’ is a centimeter. Otherwise we’d have mortars with 15m ranges and shortbows with 9m ranges, and that’s clearly ridiculous. I suspect if you were to convert game units into sensible real units, you’d need to use some sort of exponential system: 150 units or so is within sword range, while at 900-1500 units you’re looking at ‘effective range of a bow’ range.

That said, on a quick google search, it seems like most people consider the effective range of a bow to be about 30m. That’s still ridiculously short range for a mortar, but if we think of the mortar kit as more of a crude grenade launcher, it might be more within the realm of possibility. So we might be able to get a linear relationship if we assume that a ‘unit’ is [i]two[i/] centimeters. On that basis, within sword reach is about two and a half meters – which, having done training, is not actually that unreasonable when you consider the possibility of footwork that isn’t represented in game. On this basis, you’d be looking at needing to throw your ripcorded grenades accurately at 18m.

And that’s assuming that 1500 is the equivalent of 30m. My quick search picked up anecdotes of people making accurate shots (and by ‘accurate’, I mean ‘bullseye’, not ‘center of mass’) at about double that. English longbowmen practise ranges were generally at around 200m with lighter, longer-range arrows. I’ dare say that a ranger, who may be using magical assistance to improve their accuracy, would be closer to the upper end of the scale than a casual archery hobbyist.

So, do you think your ripcord arrangement would hold at 36m? What about the very limit at which it is possible to accurately throw a single object like an axe, which is probably what 900 units is intended to be?

At the bottom line, while I’m willing to accept compromises, I think the game would probably be better if multi-throwing grenades was done away with. As I intimated at before and Manuhell expounded on, currently on-hit and on-crit traits are either limited by internal cooldowns anyway, or are balanced for triple grenades and thus have been rendered inefficient when used by anything else. Return to single grenades, and these traits can be rebalanced so that they’re worthwhile for bombs and mortars as well, rather than being really intended for grenades and least-bad-option picks at best for other types of explosives.

And really, whatever “maybe it’s done this way”s you might be able to come up with, or comparisons with obviously unrealistic arcade flight sims you might make, wouldn’t it be more intuitive to not have to resort to such arguments because grenades are used in a way that intuitively makes sense?

You can tell within the game that you are not firing an object at its actual max range. Rifle being an often quoted example. There are so many abstractions intentionally put, or required, that you can never pick them apart enough. Messing with the number of grenades might be a singular fix, but affects so many other systems it is definitely not worth the change.

2cm per unit is interesting though. That makes grenade toss length at 20yards which I can definitely do, and also means out of combat running speed (300u/s) would be 13.4mph (21.6km/h). But at 2cm/u, why not 1 inch per unit? 900 units would then be 25yds (22.8m), and ooc run speed is 17mph (27.3km/h). All those numbers are relatively within what can be plausible. The abstracted ranges don’t make sense because you can still run 300u/s. That would mean you can run exponentially faster the longer you keep moving.

The discussion has certainly been interesting so far.

The way triple-grenades affect other systems is actually part of the point. Traits like Steel-Packed Powder and Shrapnel are effectively grenade traits: they’re balanced for use with grenades, making them significantly weaker when used with other explosives.

Reverting to a single grenade could allow those traits to be buffed so they’re stronger when used with bombs or the mortar. Or, as you commented on, bombs and mortars could be given multiple explosions with different blast radii so they catch up that way.

I picked 2cm/u because my quick research indicated that 30m was roughly the range at which people hunting deer with a bow and arrow were happy to take the shot: possibly aiming for a quick painless death rather than just an injury. Other abstractions are certainly possible, but all have their weaknesses. The point being that we do need to keep in mind that 900u is also the range of shortbows and other projectile weapons.