Guild Wars 2

Q: was wondering your guys feelings on condition damage for the Grenadier? been looking at it lately for wvwvw and it seems too have some nice damage might not been as much as power but might be better all around for taking down toughness builds seeing they are popular, giving all round more stable numbers…. just wanting some feedback thoughts or experiences.

Grenadier is definitely one of the more popular builds for a reason. For sieges, it’s great all around for attacking and defending. I’ve also had a lot of luck with zergs, you’re able to do a lot of damage from really far away, which is handy since you’re not tanky as a grenadier.

Your mileage may vary on things such as roaming and small groups where it’s harder to clump everyone together, but it’s still a very good choice.

I really enjoy the grenadier for attacking people on the walls. However, it is very ineffective when roaming. Another disadvantage with kits is the fact that you lose stats and sigils from weapons when the kit is equipped. These disadvantages tend to get brushed aside when I start to see the decent amount of damage I cause to stationary targets in WvW.

Grenades with grenadier is the best dps weapon engineers have regardless of range for condition spec even single target.

It’s harder to use while roaming but once you get within close range of target they are about as effective as bombs.

Im finding it rather hysterical that nobody has atually answered the OPs question, rather then just saying how great they are in WvWvW with Grenades…

I use a Flamethrower, so I wouldn’t know sadly.

The sad thing is that none of the kits benefit from the gear equipped. They need to scale with the weapons equipped and not just the level that would bring them to being on par with the rest of the professions. They also need to eliminate the clumbsiness of the attacks on some of the kits like making the #1/#2 ability on the grenade kits to be a tab target thing so that at least part of the damage is always hitting our enemies much like the pistol. The other abilities on that kit are basically fine the way they are but it’s extremely clumbsy to try to attack and point with the thing especially when mobs, notably those that like to get behind you in Orr, are just annoying.

Faction.4013:

Im finding it rather hysterical that nobody has atually answered the OPs question, rather then just saying how great they are in WvWvW with Grenades…

I use a Flamethrower, so I wouldn’t know sadly.

+1. Yay for forums.

Since only the 2nd skill does a bleed, it’s a little tough to use as condition damage. Poison (on the #5) is more valuable for the heal debuff than the damage. However, with bleed/burn on crit, it’s not bad, since there are three chances to proc on each grenade throw. Even the 6% bleed chance trait is acceptable because, if you throw into a zerg or have good aim, you’ll get the 6% three times, i.e. 18% chance.

Even with all the additional condition chances, I think power/crit is better. Maybe after they add sigils with kits you could take earth sigil for another bleed…

Faction.4013:

Im finding it rather hysterical that nobody has atually answered the OPs question, rather then just saying how great they are in WvWvW with Grenades…

I use a Flamethrower, so I wouldn’t know sadly.

was there a question in there somewhere?

Grenades are the best bleed stacking option for engineers, oddly enough.
Shrapnel is a 12 bleed x2 by default on a 5s cd.
Going 30 deep in explosives, gives + 30% cond duration, likely 20% cooldown reduction, and grenadier, for 3 grenades.
this then means, 15.5s bleedx3, on a 4s cd.
shrapnel alone then can stack 9 bleeds by itself. (Any additional + duration, will give you 16s duration, and thus 12 stacks.)
Bleeds are: .5*level+ .05*cond damage+2.5 per stack. aka 42.5+ .05cond
9stacks=382dps+ .45*cond damage.
10 in firearms gives sharpshooter. 30% chance of 3s bleed on crit. (10 in firearms or 1o in tools is a hard choice.) But grenades are 3 hits every .8seconds. with 1,2,4. And 8 hits with grenade barrage. 80% crit is .24 chance every hit. or 24%x3 every throw.
A very high chance. Probability says likely at least 1 bleed every throw.
3s duration at + 30% is 3.9. again, another + 10% is a very good idea. pushing you past 4s.

Flash grenade is a blind. gains from + duration, but not damage.
Frost grenade is a chill. gains from + duration, but not damage.
Poison grenade is poison. gains from duration and damage.
Poison scales badly. it drops a field. This field allows aoe application of poison from finishers. That damage is based on the person using the finisher.
4+ level+ .1*cond/sec. or 84+ .1 cond/sec. Same as 2 stacks of bleed. Trivial.
Trying to focus on poison damage is a very bad idea.

So, grenades are the best bleed damage weapon for engineers.

But, they scale with power/crit even more.
Power innately scales better though toughness.
skill coeff*weapon*power/armor+toughness
The equation isn’t balanced. Power is divided by armor+toughness.
So power is almost twice as effective.

Grenades themselves have insanely high scaling. .478×3 for g1, .524×3 for shrapnel, .478×3 for frost, and .357×8 for barrage. Rifle is .599 for rifle1, grenade1 is 1.434
Vulnerability.
Another reason grenades are so insanely good is vul. 25 point explosive trait gives + 1 vul per explosion. Grenades are 3 stacks of vul EVERY throw. and 8 stacks with barrage. at 6.5s duration, and .8s attack speed, 8 attacks in 6.5s duration. 8×3 is 24 stacks of vul, or +24% direct damage. vul doesnt effect conditions.
Toughness can’t compete with that.
400toughness will decrease damage taken by 17% iirc. 400 power will increase it 35% or so. (off the top of my head, based on numbers I mathed in another thread. may not be 100% accurate) Then vul increasing that greater damage scaling even more, and crit and crit damage. toughness will do very little to stop a grenade onslaught. dodges, evades, etc is a larger danger. but that is what CC is for.

Runes of the centaur.
+ 15% bleed. power. + 20% swiftness duration, and aoe swiftness on heal.
God mode in wvw. Engineers make great use of the bleed duration. and power. And aoe swiftness man.

Casia is pretty much the best person to get solid info from on the Engineer boards.

Consider your question answered when he/she replies.

…my question was answered and I didn’t even ask it yet…

I actually leveled pistols+grenades. At the time, I had not did the math on cond vs power/crit. and was leaning more on cond/toughness. In hindsight that was a mistake.

My leveling build was spread out, as you cant go 30 firearms at level 40 for example, max at 40 is 20 points in a line.
But, moving to 80, was 30 firearms, 30 alch, 10 tools. For discharge.
I was using grenades just for barrage which is by far the strongest toolbelt on use from a kit. Wasn’t even using grenades really. just pistols, with barrage and discharge.

Now, if I were to try and pair grenades and pistols now, I would STILL go power. As even pistols scale with power better then cond. Despite obvious, decent cond scaling/multiple sources.
Secondary factor here would be pistols vs rifle. while swapping to grenades.
Rifle much like grenades scales with power very well. And also has 1 skill that can apply a strong bleed. Blunderbuss can apply 4 4s bleeds, on a 10s CD, at melee range.
While pistol damage is more 50/50.
Alot of the problem comes from pistol 1 being pretty much terrible unless you have coated bullets. Weak bleed, weak direct damage. Coated bullets has the potential to double or triple its aoe DIRECT damage. but not its bleed. very important when talking about its damage potential. The aoe damage is direct only. sharpshooter can be applied on each aoe hit. however, sharpshooter is very small in the overall damage %. And as I noted, grenades have more chances of applying it anyway.

p/g combo has a real weakness in pvp. No stun/kb/kd. you can’t interrupt a stomp, or aoe KD a stealthed thief.
most grenadiers go rifle then for the KD option. And the focused power scaling.

I wonder if the damage formula is a mistake.
your character sheet lies. it says “attack” is power+weapon damage. it lists this completely irrelevant number. while armor is listed correctly as tough+defense. Defense being armor on gear. lol in poor naming department.
But like I said the formula is: coeff*weapondamage*power/tough+defense
Maybe its supposed to be:
coeff*(weapondamage+power)/(tough+defense)
That would make weapon damage and gear armor negate each other nearly 1to1, while power and tough do negate each other 1to1.

So, by your math, Casia, having Rampagers gear for Grenade use is probably the best OR CLOSE of both worlds, as it has Power, Prescision, and Condition Damage? I just ask in case someone switched from a Heavy Flamethrower build (like me) and still be perfectly viable with at most, switching out Runes and main-weapons. Because the new patch coming out is most likely bringing some RELEVANT changes, its mostly a “just in case” thing. Also, which Runes would you recommend for PvE Grenades? Centaur?

I only ask because, like I say, you know ALOT about the class, and while you’re here, I can get my questions out too.

I have not actually done the math on that yet. But it might be. or a mix.
crit damage is not valued evenly on all gear.
ruby orbs in all trinkets. But look at ammy vs rings.
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8109-ruby-orichalcum-amulet
90/64/5 power/crit/crit damage
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8193-ruby-orichalcum-ring
67/48/3
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8151-ruby-orichalcum-earring
56/40/3%
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Exquisite_Ruby_Jewel
25/15/3% crit damage

vs coral
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8110-coral-orichalcum-amulet
64/90/64
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8194-coral-orichalcum-ring
48/67/48
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8152-coral-orichalcum-earring
40/56/40 power/crit/cond
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Exquisite_Coral_Jewel
15/25/14

So look. 3% crit damage on earrings and rings. while coral is 48 cond, and 40.

% values might be getting rounded in the tooltip. 40 cond + 60% is 64. 3% crit+ 60% is 4.8. Rounding up to 5? same with 40-48, 20% increase. 20% of 3 is 3.6… though, that ought to show 4 then huh? Dunno.
But look at the orbs. 14 cond damage vs 3%. Wait a minute. we just saw 40 cond vs 3% crit on the earrings. Ruby orbs blow the coral orbs out of the water.

Base crit is +50% damage. a 100 damage hit, will deal 150 on a crit.
Thus, at base 1% crit chance is on average a .5% damage increase. aka 100% crit will increase your damage by 50%. (barring on proc traits)
crit damage adds into that 50%. 1% crit damage will give you +51% damage crits. a 100 hit will crit for 151. Thus, 1% of crit damage will increase the value of crit chance 2%.

Might gives free power and cond damage. This means might scales with crit chance best, both cond on procs, and raw damage with criting.

Taking all that into consideration. Coral ammys/rings/earrings with ruby exquisite orbs is probably a better choice then pure ruby gear. Its, focusing on crit chance. still has high power. and has cond damage. If we are HGH, we’ll have lots of might stacks, and in pve, getting might from allies as well probably.

Centaur is amazing for wvw. But if just pve. there are other options, that you dont need that aoe perma swiftness so much. Str would be great. mixed with a 2peice bleed rune, centaur, krait, afflicted maybe.

Quick look on main gear.
http://www.gw2db.com/recipes/8023-rampagers-emblazoned-coat
72/101/72
http://www.gw2db.com/items/57332-berserkers-emblazoned-coat
101/72/5% crit

Again, looking at ammy, we got 5% crit on amulet vs 64 cond damage. Here were are getting 72 cond, vs 5% crit.
hrm. looks like each piece varies. 12-15 cond per 1% crit damage. again, orbs break this at 4.6cond per 1%.

Cond will scale better at a base, and poor gear level. Crit damage becomes way way more powerful when its being applied to a 90% crit rate, with fury up, and into 2800 power, and an exotic 1205 rifle, and 25stacks of vul on target for example. But 10% crit damage is significantly less powerful if you only have a 50% crit rate, and 1500 power, and a level 76 1067 rifle, on a 2600 toughness target with no debuffs.

If you are wvw focused things are more, or perhaps less? complicated.
Siege, doors, etc only get hit by direct damage. No crits, no cond damage. so power, and only power matters on them.

also, just fyi. discharge and retaliation scale with power.

Interesting. Since I wvw a lot I was thinking the power/tough/vit gear might not be too bad, because of how siege equipment takes damage. The long range aoe makes taking out siege a primary job. I was thinking of getting berserkers/rampagers before, but I think you convinced me to just be a little more tanky. In my experience having an engineer who can stay alive and disable the enemy with supply drops and nets and such, can help your team take people out. Probably wouldn’t be as good for roaming 1v1s and such, but I dont do that anyway unless I get jumped. Wonder how much if at all it will change my effectiveness at bombarding walls when we attack.

Ive tried Grenadier with a crit/tough/cond setup. And now im using it with a power/tough/crit (+critdmg on trinkets) setup.
It is much better with power/critdmg then it was with cond.dmg.

Here’s the thing. Grenades are for the most part direct-damage and scale very well with power/critdmg because of this.
If instead you focus on cond.dmg you’ll find Bleed on Shrapnel Grenade (and bleeds are the worst scaling conditions) and poison on Poison Grenades. But this poison requires enemies to stand in the field for it to stack up.

Most of the times people move out of the big green cloud, so you get just a few seconds of poison on quite a long cooldown. Again, not very effective condition damage-wise.

The only time it worked really well was in big clusterkittens, especially when attacking walls. Enemies wouldnt move out of the poison AoE, and with a little luck id get them to stand in 2 or even all 3 fields. The poison would stack up to absurdly long durations of a minute or more.
And in general, with inc. powder procs and more bleeds procs, you could really see someone go down after they already pulled back.

But thats the thing, they might go down but they still got away and will no doubt be rallied by their allies.
Because when they go down they lose all conditions. And ofcourse the poison can be removed aswell, so that 1min of poison sounds great but not if its so easily removed.

So in short, no Grenades are not amazing for condition damage. There isnt much condition damage on them, and it requires targets to stand in a poison field for a while. And when you switch to your grenade kit, the conditions you already have stacked will start doing less damage because you lose the condition dmg from your weapon.
Which is an akward development really because 30explosives = +30% cond. duration, and thats really nice to have.

“Even the 6% bleed chance trait is acceptable because, if you throw into a zerg or have good aim, you’ll get the 6% three times, i.e. 18% chance.”

It’s not 18%, it is three separate 6% chances. They are not one and the same. Yay for math!

If conditions aren’t good with grenades, and the 6% x3 chance isn’t good either, why are we using it? Why not Incendiary Powder instead? Isn’t burning damage pretty much always better than a bleed unless you can stack bleeds to 3+?

Conditions are good with grenade, but I think it depends what your are doing / where you are playing in my opinion.

If your fighting 1v1 or if your doing a lot of keep / tower fights in WvW, or PvE I think grenades are great.

But bombs do just as well if not better if your going to be using a melee playstyle.

And if you want to stay ranged for WvW roaming, I’ve found P/P to work better. It’s easier to hit moving targets while your moving, faster projectile speed, and you get far better damage from burning opposed to bleeding.

But p/p + grenade with elixirs is an easily doable build that I see many using at the moment.

or p/p + FT elixirs

Bleeds.4029:

If conditions aren’t good with grenades, and the 6% x3 chance isn’t good either, why are we using it? Why not Incendiary Powder instead? Isn’t burning damage pretty much always better than a bleed unless you can stack bleeds to 3+?

its a bad trait. I dont know anyone that uses it.
Powder is worse honestly. its single target. In an aoe line.

Is IP really single target in an aoe line?
I can’t remember correctly, but I thought I had been able to apply burn to targets from coated bullet splash damage in the mists. But on the other hand… it has a hidden CD, so even if it gets applied by splash damage…. its still single target. Yeah…. its kind of meh, I guess.
But if it wouldn’t have the CD, it would be good, but since it has, it isn’t.

Why are people posting numbers from target dummies in a perfect world? I have to ask that question.

While i do enjoy reading the concepts of the engineer, the reality is the numbers do not baseline on mobs in pve or players in pvp like they do verse target dummies. Charts and math are great for the target dummies, which also varies to some degree but in actual use the variance of damage numbers whether condition or direct damage vary wildy.

The numbers folks want, are the numbers people will have to go out and see for themselves. Reading this board they will get one thing, a huge ballpark answer, the same thing you would get from reading the tootip, because what one person gets for damage verse a player or mob is not what another will get, the damage varies that much in real play.

Also understand the variance while changing levels from area to area, one would think the the math and charts work as they should, fromt he lowest to the highest. A person might think the damage scales properly but it does not, nor does is scale properly from the same area of the same level. More things to add to your variables, and more proof that a person will have to go out on their own and get their own data to see where they sit.

Before someone tries to make a play on the condition damage being the same everywhere,s caling per area, even the same levels, differing maps. It is not. Do not try to tell people it is. This is something you will have to go out and experience yourselves, which does not include farming or grinding one type of mob on one map at one level.

Just some stuff to think about while you search for that awesome build.