Guild Wars 2

Sometimes, not all three grenade projectiles will connect with an enemy in the ground-targeted reticle. If an enemy isn’t roughly centered on the reticle, chances are one grenade might miss. Sometimes a stray grenade will even fly out of the reticle. Anytime this happens, the skill loses 33% damage.

Why is this so? The old ‘Grenadier’ trait that added an extra grenade to all grenade skills has been baselined, there is no reason to fiddle around with number of grenades per throw anymore.

Instead, make the engineer throw a grenade per grenade skill, and everything in the AOE reticle will reliably be hit by that grenade (up to the AOE cap). One shrapnel grenade now inflicts 3 stacks of bleeding, poison grenade 3 stacks of poison. Flash grenade 15s of blind, freeze grenade 6s of chill.

And then the 15% proc of the ‘Shrapnel’ trait can finally stop being balanced around 3 grenades and finally give bomb kit and mortar kit a chance.

Couldn’t agree more. This has been an obviously needed change since beta when they first upped it to two grenades to differentiate it from the mine kit, which was eventually removed anyway. Triple procing basically means that the engineer can have no crit procs that are not balanced around this kit, either requiring that everything else have a similar amount of hits per second or not be of any use.

But at the same time, ANet really needs to stop making everything the engineer has a hybrid weapon in the first place. And the bomb kit should logically be a power weapon, the flamethrower a condition weapon (we have a BURNING condition and it’s a freaking FLAMEthrower for cripes sakes), and grenade kit should be the hybrid kit. But instead, bomb kit is hybrid, grenade kit is hybrid, and flamethrower is hybrid, and the remainder are basically just 2 for 1 utility skills, because who cares about build diversity right?

I mean, look at the bomb kit. It has the highest scaling autoattack in the game totally regardless of number of targets. The only other auto attack skills which scale better than it are found in three part chain attacks, meaning they hit significantly less often. And yet this kit goes almost completely unused, that is how screwed up this class is that we can just ignore what is one of the highest DPS output skills simply because the kit it is on isn’t as good at hybrid builds.

i agree to this.
altho pve engi will lose its vuln stacking ability. that much less reason to take one, which is bad. how to balance this?

The entire basis of the “3” is that it’s somewhat of a roulette. If you are skilled and hit with all 3 you get 3 stacks of vulnerability, 3 opportunities to proc Shrapnel, 3 critical strikes for any sigils and/or Sharpshooter to proc off of individually, and 3 attacks in one strike which totals significantly higher than other baseline autoattacks.

I understand your point but do not agree to it. Your change would greatly weaken the weapon.

IMO anything that weakens the nades gives better chances to the other weapons/kits, so this could be good.

Condition Engineer is already sub-par in performance per effort/skill imo. Nerfs to Grenade Kit would be devastating to it’s case in PvE.

Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit should instead get their own GM traits. Shrapnel clearly is not meant for them (reliability or focus targeting wise).

Please don’t.
Not only it would look lame, but also this:

If you are skilled and hit with all 3 you get 3 stacks of vulnerability, 3 opportunities to proc Shrapnel, 3 critical strikes for any sigils and/or Sharpshooter to proc off of individually, and 3 attacks in one strike which totals significantly higher than other baseline autoattacks.

A lot of what makes nades so good is that they are 3 hits in one attack.

Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit should instead get their own GM traits. Shrapnel clearly is not meant for them (reliability or focus targeting wise).

Doesnt bombs trigger hits (for traits and sigils, etc) on each pulse?

Tbh bomb kit got hurt more by the burn changes than anything else, as now you have to get someone to stand in the fire bomb for the full duration to get good burns instead of just tagging them. From a pvp perspective, it’s the difficulty of landing the bombs on aj opponent with a brain that makes them a sub par choice to grenades.

There was a similar thread on the thief forums not long ago, with people asking for a nerf to D/P so the other weapon sets can get some love. While I can see where you’re coming from, nerfing the most effective option wasn’t a good plan then, nor is it here.

just make nade skill 1 auto target …. im done with my broken fingers and keyboard !

LilBiM.3581:

Condition Engineer is already sub-par in performance per effort/skill imo. Nerfs to Grenade Kit would be devastating to it’s case in PvE.

Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit should instead get their own GM traits. Shrapnel clearly is not meant for them (reliability or focus targeting wise).

Nothing, is meant for the bomb kit so long as the grenade kit can triple proc. And its not just the bomb kit, that’s true of pretty much every kit but the flamethrower. That’s kind of the point of the thread.

Literally everything that involves critically procing scales so well off the grenade kit, that it all has to be kept at a level that it is entirely unviable with anything else but that which is similar to the grenade kit. Meaning there are no reasonable buffs to anything except to homogenize kit abilities to be similar to the grenade kit, or make them so entirely un-alike that there is no crossover between their builds.

The problem with the first solution, is that would make the entire class boring, bland, and repetitive. Everything would feel like machinegunning or shotgunning crit procs without any variety in playstyle.

The problem with the second solution is twofold. One, there just isn’t enough space! They can’t possibly add in sufficient traits for each kit, there aren’t enough slots. And the second is harking back to the original problem, the grenade kit isn’t the only condition weapon we have, we have pistols, we have an elixir gun, we have a flamethrower, and everything else is somewhat hybrid. Having crit procs royally suck for everything but the grenade kit is basically the developers saying, “We want you to use the grenade kit for condition builds, and screw everything else.”

Conncept.7638:

LilBiM.3581:

Condition Engineer is already sub-par in performance per effort/skill imo. Nerfs to Grenade Kit would be devastating to it’s case in PvE.

Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit should instead get their own GM traits. Shrapnel clearly is not meant for them (reliability or focus targeting wise).

Nothing, is meant for the bomb kit so long as the grenade kit can triple proc. And its not just the bomb kit, that’s true of pretty much every kit but the flamethrower. That’s kind of the point of the thread.

Literally everything that involves critically procing scales so well off the grenade kit, that it all has to be kept at a level that it is entirely unviable with anything else but that which is similar to the grenade kit. Meaning there are no reasonable buffs to anything except to homogenize kit abilities to be similar to the grenade kit, or make them so entirely un-alike that there is no crossover between their builds.

The problem with the first solution, is that would make the entire class boring, bland, and repetitive. Everything would feel like machinegunning or shotgunning crit procs without any variety in playstyle.

The problem with the second solution is twofold. One, there just isn’t enough space! They can’t possibly add in sufficient traits for each kit, there aren’t enough slots. And the second is harking back to the original problem, the grenade kit isn’t the only condition weapon we have, we have pistols, we have an elixir gun, we have a flamethrower, and everything else is somewhat hybrid. Having crit procs royally suck for everything but the grenade kit is basically the developers saying, “We want you to use the grenade kit for condition builds, and screw everything else.”

Then perhaps the approach to solving this issue lies in buffing the minor trait that applies vulnerability on explosions to apply 3 stacks of vuln and reducing the number of grenades from 3 to 1 while buffing the stacks applied by 1 grenade to 3 stacks and increasing the base damage?

In PvP scenarios what does this change do to Grenade Kit’s cleaving potential on downed opponents or vs opponents with high access to Aegis? It is definitely a buff to all the other kits (Mortar / Bomb).

As a result of these findings, can we say that the problem here really is Grenade Kit? Do these proposed changes effect other game types and how so? Is the problem that Bomb Kit does not perform even at it’s best (traited and well used)? Should Sharpnel be merged into the Minor Trait for Grenades and a suitable Explosives related trait be made GM instead?

There are lots of ways to solve this ‘issue’ but consideration must be taken to the over all impact that your change would have on all game modes.