Guild Wars 2

Hello Engeneers,

Like everyone here i was first disgusted by the « nerf » to the first grenade skill. -30% was a huge number. So i decided to work around and do some theory-crafting. And i find some interesting things that i want to share with the engeneer community.

Introduction to the study :

I’ve only made theorycraft on the first skill of grenade tool kit. The 4 others skill are not included in the study, it would be too much work. Including the belt skill, the other skill have been buffed by the last patch.

I have used the spvp stuff but result can be extrapolated to pve, number will only be higher.

So far, the change i’ve included in the modelisation are :

30 % damage on skill 1
Shrapnel trait proc chance going from 6% to 15%
Some basic combinaison of sigil.

Of course i’ve included crit chance, crit damage, vulnerability debuff on target (because grenade are able to stack almost a -25% to armor.), condition damage, condition duration…

Study :

I’ve included the spreasheet at the bottom of this page, so everybody can comment or correct my result if i’ve made somme mistake. Please feel free to edit the spreadsheet with other trait/sigil and bring your proposition to community. For better visibilty i made a graph with the most important information :

[IMG]http://i45.tinypic.com/2w6i5nk.jpg[/IMG]

Observations :

- A bigger part of direct damage is now bleed damage because of shrapnel trait change
- We are now less senitive to target armor because of these condition damage,
- Might Boon stacking is stronger than ever because it will boost BOTH direct damage and bleed from shrapnel trait. Look at the yellow line on the graph with a full boon duration stack build. I think you can maintain a huge stack of might buff with alchemy template, and add some extra buff (Fury!) in the meal…
- Even now, Power/Precision/Crit damage stuff bring a lot more dps with grenade skill 1 than crit/condition damage stuff, except with might stacking on high armored target. However, additional simulation should be done with the complete skill rotation but it’s a huge amount of work.

Conclusion

The « damage per grenade » of skill 1 is not nerfed by 30%. We are far far away from this… In fact, with the sigils effect giving his effect to every grenade skill (even the belt skill!) and the shrapnel trait buffing damage of all grenade (not only skill 1) the overall change is a break even and could be a buff.

Anet dev said the truth, grenade damage would have been completely out of control with sigil and no changes. Try to simulate the effect of 25 stack of precision + 6 permanent stack of might to a full berszerker grenadeer with old grenade. Crazy damage here !

Even if you make a poor choice of sigil, like 2 sigil +5% flat damage, the nerf should be about 10%-15% on skill 1 and a 10% buff to all other skills including toolbelt. So the final nerf should be about 5%-10% in the worst case.

With a might stacking build, simulation showed that it’s possible to do more damage with skill 1 now than before. Because with the new shrapnel trait, you will have bleed stack (even without considering the 5 point skill in firearm branch) and the might boon give power AND condition damage.. On top of that all your other skill are boosted by the sigil and the news proc chance of shrapnel.

We haven’t been nerfed to the ground, not at all. Sigil introduce diversity and the trade of direct damage/condition damage give a little bit more versality to our grenade kit. Except for grenade kit, all the other toolkits received a FANTASTIC BOOST with sigil change, opening the way to a true diversity in our build.

This patch is not the death of engeneer. In fact it’s more like a reborn with a lot of new possibilities…

Even for grenade, considering numbers, i’ve came to conclusion that it could be a… BUFF. I think that with somme experimentation we should be able to find a grenade build for an INCREASE of 10% dps, something like that. Probably with a high might boon stacking build.

Thank you for reading this wall of text and have fun with your engeneer

Link to the xls and openoffice file: http://dl.free.fr/iLe9KqQPS

Ps : Sorry for my english, i’m not a native speaker

Unfortunately, very few of us on these boards want evidence and facts. More people would rather complain and whine and threaten to quit.

But thank you for your effort, it’s not lost on everyone, just… almost everyone on these boards.

Even if it isn’t a nerf for a wealthy level 80, it certainly is for everyone else. Those leveling an Engineer now have to suffer a huge penalty when they want to AoE with grenades. Where once they shone brightly in groups against clustered mobs now they are lackluster at best. It also forces anyone who wants to heavily use grenades to use pistols instead of a rifle, which limits options.

That is some awesome research. Very good job OP.
I was also nixxed when the nerf came out but for me presonally it was just the balancing act part that annoyed me.

Unless I am in WvW attacking a base or running a dungeon I rarely use Grenades, in PVE I usually run EG-FT-Thumper because with the exploding turret trait I can combo field all day long and it is fun. It is also super annoying having to deal with all the FT bugs and the lacklusterness of my turret against certain opponents, like the ones that just 1-shot my turret as soon as I put it down basically forcing me to drop 20 points in Explosions so my turret will blow up when it gets stepped on so its not just wasted.

Our whole trait tree is a jumbled mess with pigeon holes, our turrets & gadgets are weak pathetic gimmicks and half our other skills are bugged with glitches.
So what is annoying to me is that every patch that has come out has been useless underwater fixes along with ANET fiddle kittening with Grenades.

Even if they did not put in the 30% nerf our #1 skill would not be as Overly Powered as everyone claims it would have been. Sure it would have been a hard hitting skill but you aren’t going to be 1-2-3-4-5 shotting anyone with it. Sure ppl might have complained that the 2 Engineers in WvW can really hit hard with their stupid nades when they stand still on the wall but so what!?

PPL have been complaining since DAY 1 that the Rendering Issue gives thieves a complete unfair advantage with their stealthing in WvW. Yet they haven’t had anything to tone them down. A thief can stealth and 2-shot you down to nothing with almost a garunteed escape but they haven’t lowered any of their skills so P/P doesn’t look as bad.

The nerf wasn’t that bad at all, but imo it was also wasn’t needed. TY ANET for FIXING the flaw you let Engineers ship with. Along with fixing the autoattack on kits and being able to drop them in the air. TY for sometime in the future making it so we don’t lose stats for equipping our kits. TY ANET for finally getting around to making Engineers the more finished profession they should have been at release.

Now how bout instead of trying to fudge stupid numbers around on paper so you can try to balance your precious tPvP baby, you try actually fixing the bugs and flaws and crap that flat out doesn’t work. Then when all of our skills and traits are actually working the way they were suppose to THEN you can decide if a 30% nerf on a single skill will help balance the profession.

No amount of theory crafting changes the fact it was a 30% nerf.

Also condition damage. lol.

Alturys.6821:

Even if you make a poor choice of sigil, like 2 sigil +5% flat damage, the nerf should be about 10%-15% on skill 1 and a 10% buff to all other skills including toolbelt. So the final nerf should be about 5%-10% in the worst case.

I thought two Sigils of Force don’t stack?

What I don’t understand is how people think the addition of being able to use stack sigils, like Sigil of Minor Accuracy, is a buff.

You do realize you could always use those before right? Just like any other class that equips a different weapon to get their 25 stacks of Bloodlust an Engi could do that by switching to their main weapon on the kill.

So you whole premise is based around now Engi’s can get 25 stacks of precision to crit more and Shrapnel was buffed. 25 stacks of precision was always an option and even then Grenades weren’t OP compared to massive damage other classes are able to do. Shrapnel was not buffed as far as I can tell because of the grenades nerf. Their patch notes state specifically that Grenades were nerfed because of the potential of sigils.

From the notes:
“Grenade” skill now does 30% less damage to balance against using sigils

So the only thing different is that Engi’s can now use sigils that proc on crit or proc on weapon switch. Sigil of Battle does not boost the dmg enough to make up for the 30% dmg nerf.
Sigil of Strength I run with about 38% crit and consistently had less might then I did with sigil of battle so unless going full berskers (which is only 4 pieces that I run invaders for to balance some staying power in wvw) makes that much more of a difference I can’t imagine it giving me more might then sigil of battle does. So still not near the old dmg numbers.
Sigil of Air has a 5 second CD so I don’t notice it making up for the dmg nerf.

So basically I fail to see where it ever had the potential of being OP. I used to think grenades did good dmg. Addition of sigils had the potential to make it great dmg or good utility and good dmg but still no where near OP and not as high dmg as some of the other classes that already had sigils. But the way they implemented it you now have the choice between good utility from sigils and mediocre dmg or less dmg then we did before with no additional options because you are using sigils based around dmg. Also it pigeon wholes the mainhand weapon choices you can have so you can’t rely on the immobilize of rifle.

Is this just Grenade Kit #1 or all skills?
Because with my own theory crafting I came to the conclusion that with [Shrapnel] and Shrapnel Grenade Condition Damage/Power increases the damage by more than Power/Precision/Crit Damage.

Are you considering that before the buff of [Shrapnel] a Berserker Grenade Kit Engineer was properly using [Incendiary Powder] or [Empowering Adrenaline] instead?

I just tried a condition based grenade build in the Mists and the damage was horrible.

I’ll have to take a second look at it later to see if I missed something but in the few minutes I was there it was obvious that without Power the base damage for grenades is very low.

Sezrar.8915:

*If you are suggesting sigil of battle I’m going to lose respect in your math and bring up opportunity cost.

Please do bring up opportunity cost. Are you implying that in a fight you do not switch kits on a regular basis, say at least once every 10 seconds (thus maintaining those 6 might stacks at no additional cost) ? I’d say that would be quite missing the point of engineer kits.

However I find OP’s claims misleading. It is of course a straight nerf compared to other kits. So shrapnel is better now, and we have to take it to approach our previous damage ? Well gee thanks. There is nothing special about grenades regarding sigils. They were just way ahead other kits, and the sigils introduction simply presented an opportunity to bring them in line while sugar-coating it a bit.

I’d like to say that we got what we wanted and are no longer pidgeon-holed into using grenades, but somehow I doubt it. For example I still feel charging with a mild annoyance-thrower is suboptimal, on-crit sigils or not.

Most rational people are not upset over the grenade changes. What they’re upset over is the new stated direction of the class, which as described is basically Robin to everyone else’s Batman; eternally in a second fiddle spot.

People get a lot of enjoyment over playing Elementalist or Thief well because it’s so very easy to play it wrong and fall apart. It’s a challenge with a reward (particularly in PvP & WvW). Engineers are being told they have to work harder, but their maximum output will be deliberately tweaked to be below what everyone else can achieve.

You’re being told your class is weaker by design, because you can be more “versatile” in mid fight. But this proposition of mid-fight diversity is dubious at best, and it’s not clear how stat allocation makes this even remotely possible.

There are issues which prevent us from seeing the full benefit of some of the changes meant to offset the nerf to the damage of Grenade 1.

Shrapnel applies more bleeds. Great, except that if your group was already stacking 25 bleeds before, then this change doesn’t bring an increase to your DPS. Also, as I understand it our bleeds tick for less damage than other classes (by intentional design) so if our bleeds are preventing the bleeds of our groupmates from being applied, our group might suffer for it.

On the PvP side of things, there’s plenty of condition removal to go around. More reliance on conditions means being more susceptible to condition removal, and it also means less “burst” damage is available to this kit. Burst damage is better than sustained damage in PvP, so taking away the immediate hitting power of this attack cannot be seen as a buff, except under absolutely ideal conditions (good bleed procs with the RNG, a lack of condition removal by your enemy, and no one else around you also stacking bleeds on your target. Not to mention having to consistently hit your player target with the grenade attacks, which was always a limitation of this kit.)

As for sigils, the only way to see equal damage numbers to what we had before is to stack might. So, rather than offering us the ability to use a number of different sigils with this kit, by nerfing the damage of they kit they actually offered us the ability to use 1 specific sigil, and one specific mechanic, with our kit. That’s not exactly what the community was promised when the devs promised us working sigils on kits, and that’s not exactly what we wanted, either.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have sigils working with kits than not working, but I would have liked for them to find a way to have a wider variety of sigils be useful with our kits. Right now, I can’t see any sigil being more useful to any of our offensive kits than Sigil of Battle. Perhaps that’s just inherent in the way kit swapping works, though. It would be nice, at least, if other “on weapon swap” sigils could find a way to compete, to at least keep things interesting (I’m talking dps-focused builds, here. Obviously there are other sigils that work well with other types of builds.)

-Travail.

My bleeds tick for ~55 damage.
This is pathetic, I couldn’t care les about how many stacks of that worthless condition I can get.

And no, from my observations in real game environment the damage dropped by about 15-20%.

Engi is still usefull in PvE, cause grenades can give 12-18 stacks of vulnerability consistently (exact number can vary). And this is very good for heavy-dps teams. But the thought about being worst party member damage-wise poisons our minds anyway.

aydenunited.5729:

Unfortunately, very few of us on these boards want evidence and facts. More people would rather complain and whine and threaten to quit.

But thank you for your effort, it’s not lost on everyone, just… almost everyone on these boards.

I guess the visual of the numbers representing damage on the graph moving down since launch doesn’t mean anything to you, huh? Or the notion that negating the damage, ie. making it less then before, is somehow not a nerf I thought was particularly funny. Nice try though.

If it looks like a duck….

So what? First of all shrapnel getting a 9% buff to 15% does not make up for me losing 300 dmg per grenade. Conditions have a cap; lots of players use conditions; your reasoning is horribly faulty.

Anet has a horrible track record of half-!@#ing everything they do. Took months to get sigils to work; will take months for stats to work. If I recall correctly, sigils or stats (one of them) have been working in tpvp/spvp for a while. The fact that they didn’t make it work across the entire game is pathetic.

Our damage has always been inferior. Have you seen the damage of a Fire Elementalist with splash damage? They can reach the same amount if not higher; however, they can’t miss like we do. People who whine about grenades doing too much damage are the morons who just stand there and take it. Have you tried to hit a mob/person who uses erratic movements? It’s a pain in the !@#. We’re suppose to do more damage because that’s the trade off WE SUFFER from; to nerf our damage to the dirt and still not give #1 ability, grenade, an auto-attack similar to underwater grenades is beyond stupid.

So what if they are going to make us scale with weapon damage when they finally get there !@#ess in gear and give us the fix that should have been fixed in beta? How long are we going to suffer with mediocre damage? What’s worse is the Elixir Gun.

I got removed from a group before it even started because people said my Elixir Gun isn’t strong enough in healing anymore and they opted to get an Elementalist. Good going, Anet, your whole non-trinity is working great.

Edit: Oh! Almost forgot. Anet cannot do math properly either. It’s not a 30% hit, its a 35% hit; it hurts us like hell.

To be honest , I got both grenade and bomb kits ( mine too ).
I usually use bombs and mines as they didn’t get nerfed. >> Bomb is the best kit specially when got speedy kits and explosion traits.
I just use grenades on champions as it’s too risky to come close.

This is a very interesting work you have done there. We are aware that sigils open a doorway to new possibilities, new and creative builds, however this can not be the reasoning behind nerfing damage of the most viable engineer build. We are already lacking behind the other classes and this is a fact accepted by the community. If you do not believe check the active engineers in your guild and cry when you see that you are the only one left.

We supposed to have sigils from the beginning as others had. Anet serves best to the other classes which have much more players. Ironically, they are the reason we lost so many people in the first place.

I strongly believe we will get another major nerf when kits get stats, we are lacking 450 stats afterall.

It has been said a million times..

At least in pvp – you may get kitten kittening awesome numbers on your spreadsheets but in reality your opponent in a high ranked tournament isnt standing there and taking it up the kitten .

So you not only lose 1 point in utility for grenades but even more for crowd control. Plus 30 lost points in the power triat tree – its just not worth it.

Bleeding procs dont stack high enough reliably in a short amount of time and once they are out of the CC they just remove condis and heal.

No matter how you look at it – grenades got nerfed very hard in pvp. Even with 15 stacks of might i cant even get close to the burst i had before (actually even rifle auto shot is stronger than grenade direct dmg)

Ill say it again because kitten like you will never understand unless i do – conditions are crap – you cant stack em reliably like ranger + condition damage in general is a joke + kitten your spreadsheet – play some tournaments with your “imba” grenade conditions so i can farm your poor little kitten /p>

I guess it´s always good if someone takes the time to collect some damage numbers.

But I have problems to compare 25 stacks of precision to what we had before without them – you could always get them, you have to stack them first and you loose them when you go in downed state (don´t know about others but that can happen to me doing fractals or pvp).

It´s similar with might-sigils, they don´t stack might out of nowhere and HGH could also have been used before the nerf.

And what I find irritating about the Shrapnel-trait: if you take this one you either loose incendiary powder or explosive powder´s +10% damage on explosions – or did I miss something and explosive powder wouldn´t work with grenades?

So in short.

If we gear a certain way, use pistol/pistol, trait for a certain way and use specific sigils then the nerf isnt so bad?
Thats great to know, all i need to do is stop playing the way i was and the way i enjoyed. Dump a bunch of gold on new runes, sigils, weapons, not ever get downed and drop my legendary rifle.

Yah, that sounds completely reasonable.

Dear fellow engineers.

A long post and some random numbers+spreadsheet doesn’t mean it is all true.

OP is correct, with the proper gear and stats you can do quite nicely and occassionally outpace the nerf, however, the cost is ridiculous and probably not everyone will want to invest the time and money. This nerf appears to have made engineer the most gear dependent class.

I switched up to a grenade/elixir r/elixir gun build at 30/20/0/0/20 and do about comparable damage (occasionally better depending on the whims of the RNG) as long as I have 30ish crit chance and 40+ crit damage. Hope you like fractals of the mists.

With any luck by the end of the month the only people playing engineer are technically minded. That would be ideal. DPS kittens can go play whatever else.

Nice work on the spreadsheet. Although some aspects like 25 stack of precision could be done before patch, this is good information and although it’s a nerf, it’s not as horrible as it looks at first glance. The shrapnel buff is actually quite good.

I am pretty sure the Devs used “spreadsheets” to “Balance” the class also and never actually played.

No way I will waste the money to respec and should not need nor be asked too. I will spend the gold to craft up another toon.

Even if the author is correct with his conclusion (that they have been buffed), his reasoning and evidence is faulty. He seems to assume that the old build didn’t use stacking Sigils at all, which are quite major. If you want to say that yes, grenades are on par or have been buffed, then you’re going to have to prove it otherwise rather than point to his post. Using his own spreadsheet shows that adding in a stack Sigil to prepatch Engi increases its overall damage by roughly 9-11%.

There’s also another way to consider it – a bit simplified, but whatever.

Direct damage done = Skill Coefficient X Power X Weapon Strength / Armor

The only things that we’re changing here is Skill Coefficient and Power.

Grenade 1 lost 35% from its SC. In order for Might stacking to make up for it directly, you will need to have your Might stacks give you the equavalent to a 35% increase in Power OVER what you were cabale of achieving before. If you had, say, 2100 Power unbuffed beforehand, you’re going to need 21 stacks of Might to make that up IN ADDITION TO whatever Might you were capable of stacking before prepatch.

This leads to another issue with the analysis. It assumes that any Engineer prepatch had 0 Might stacks.

At max, with a triple Elixir HGH build + 6 constant stacks from sigil, you’re looking at an additional 9 stacks of Might compared to what you could get prepatch. I’m sure there are other ways of increasing your Might stacks solo compared to before, but yeah. The Shrapnel buff will also help close the gap as it contributes 2.5 times more than before overall, but whether its worth ~11 stacks of Might worth in increased damage compared to what it could of contributed before is debatable. Don’t forget that bleeds have severe issues of their own what with max stacks of 25, and if you’re competing with someone who actually does specialize in bleeds/conditions yours are going to get overwritten easily.

Depending on your group and playstyle from pre-patch, this could either be really simple for you to achieve or completely meaningless if you already rolled a high Might build or had a group that naturally Might buffed you a lot anyways. On my Warrior, I always keep up 9 Might stacks that jumps up to 12/15 for my team on my own, so running with me would have by default already limited you to 16 additional stacks of Might or less to improve upon. On my Ele, I used to maintain 21 AoE stacks of Might permanently for my team, so… and I still maintain 15 AoE stacks with my Ele’s current build. This is mainly an issue with the fact that OP’s numbers seem to really highly rate a Might stacking buff.

Some people pointed to Sigil of Fire in other threads, and while its nice, it’s not worth 35% on its own. You can proc it at best once every five throws, and in those five throws you’ve lost the equivalent of about 1.66 throws compared to what you used to toss out. Sigil of Fire is a 1.0 coef while a single grenade throw was like 1.5. With Shrapnel buff, maybe.

Also, OP charts all the way up to 3800 armor BEFORE he hits (or is about to hit) the supposed break even point, even with the issues pointed out before (ex. stack Sigils unaccounted for or not?). I would like you to consider how many things actually have that level of armor. With Heavy Armor, full 30 points into Toughness tree, max Toughness gear (ascended!), runes, that’s 1211 + 300 + 1049 + 165 + 916 (base Toughness) = 3641. If you want to hit 3800 equivalence WITH Protection, you still need 2850 armor beforehand, which is still very high for many tankier builds.

As far as mobs go, testing on 80 mobs, only the highest armor rated mobs come close to that, the best (only) example of which I could find was the CoE Icebrood Goliath, which from personal experience is one of the highest armored enemies out there. In comparison, Icebrood Wolves have ~2600 armor (which is about equal to the Heavy Golem in HotM test area). Champion Icebrood Wolves have ~2800-2900 armor. Icebrood Elementals have ~2500. Outside of CoE, Risen Corrupters have ~2800, Plageubearer ~2550, Preserver ~2520Champ Abom (Plinx) ~2860, Champ Ooze King ~2860. Nothing else I was able to test really came close. Protection also isn’t very common on PvE mobs.

At 3800 armor, things are vastly skewed in the favor of whatever has higher Condition Damage output compared to say, at 2500-2800 armor. Direct damage is roughly 33% weaker. If even at that high point that heavily favors one build, and with faulty testing (no Sigil), you’re still unable to break even, that speaks volumes about how much damage the builds are capable of against each other (according to OP’s numbers, condition builds are still behind prepatch power/crit builds at 3800 armor, though just barely). You also have to consider that anything thrown near the end of something’s life (meaning it will die before the conditions from that attack last their full duration) also contribute less damage, in a sense, in addition to already having to compete with other sources of condition damage.

One last issue with this is that you are applying % damage to condition damage. AFAIK, Condition damage is wholly unaffected by such things. Therefore, in your formulas where you attempted to use +5%/2x5% Sigils, your damage is overestimated. A fairly minor issue, but still something to correct. Just change your formula up a bit.

The fact that people are saying “great work with the spreadsheet” without noticing the errors kind of confuses me. Did you… actually look at the spreadsheet?

There is one other thing however that makes condition builds look much more convincing post patch with respect to this analysis, though. Condition damage is relatively static (depending on your, well, stats). Direct damage has a range that varies heavily. The 969 stat used here in this spreadsheet represents the ceiling for which the Grenade Kit can hit. Between my numbers and however the heck Cascia got his/her numbers, it’s something like 872-876 as min damage.

Calculating for all grenades hitting their minimum damage paints a slightly different picture (emphasis on slight, though). Doing this while assuming still no stack Sigil prepatch allows for the condition builds to hit a very, very slight lead on prepatch build at super high spectrum of armor. Power/Prec/Crit% build + might stacking post patch still superior to the other post patch alternatives, though. Overall though, pre patch still better than post patch builds given by OP. If you add the fact that you COULD use stack Sigils pre patch, then pre patch build once again wins at every point.

Last bits sort of moot if you’re a PvE player since the majority of monsters you’ll see I’m guessing will probably be in that 2600-3000 range, if not lower. Doubt many people are running around with super awesome maxed heavy hacker toughness armor, either, though Protection is probably more prevalent there (if it isn’t, it should be…). With Protection in WvW I’m guessing you’d probably be scratching at like a 3500 armor equivalent target.

honestly though im a big fan of just hitting the bomb kit and running around like a moron way more exciting

wall of text crits you, nerfs grenades by another 35%

Terrahero.9358:

So in short.

If we gear a certain way, use pistol/pistol, trait for a certain way and use specific sigils then the nerf isnt so bad?
Thats great to know, all i need to do is stop playing the way i was and the way i enjoyed. Dump a bunch of gold on new runes, sigils, weapons, not ever get downed and drop my legendary rifle.

Yah, that sounds completely reasonable.

This was the point I was trying to make, too. All the numbers in the world when you have dozens of gold to spend don’t counter this point. The nerf hits many, many Engineers hard. Sure, a minority can overcome it, but even they have lost an option to use rifles with grenades (unless they want to gimp themselves).

On my 30 Engineer alt, I was enjoying using a rifle and sometimes grenades and was planning to go up to Grenadier, but now my plans are in disarray and meanwhile my contribution to groups is cut by over 30%.

People swarmed to grenades because they were the best DPS. No surprise that when one path is good and others are lackluster most choose the good one. But this stupid patch made the good one also lackluster instead of making the others good to make multiple viable choices. That is the method that I decry, knocking everything down to the same impotent level instead of making more things good and fun.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

Also, OP charts all the way up to 3800 armor BEFORE he hits (or is about to hit) the supposed break even point, even with the issues pointed out before (ex. stack Sigils unaccounted for or not?).

Ha, I missed that because I was reading on a phone on a train. Good catch.

Absurd thesis is absurd.

Hello Guys

Thanks for your answers and critical observations.

I’ve seen some intersting remarks so i will give you my advice on that. Of course it’s just an advice, nothing more.

- For Pvp, yes our damage is nerfed since we don’t often stack might in pvp. BUT we can now burst a lot more with grenade, thanks to Air Sigil and we have a little bit more condition damage. A full barrage grenade + Air sigil + Shrapnel proc is serious damage, even if i recognize engeneer dps is not the better class for small scale pvp (Mesmer are probably the best, great damage, fantastic mobility and utility (10 sec of group quickness !) → See Osicat thread in Mesmer forum ^^, Thieves have a fantastic burst and great survivability thanks to rendering issues…). Engeneer have fantastic bunker builds (We can really make thieves crying ^^), some very good rifle or pistols builds, but i think they lack of something special in pvp…

- Yes if you want to maximize dps with grenade you are forced into double pistol or pistol/shield. But you will not often use your weapon so we don’t care. It’s a part of grenadeer build… You don’t invest 30 point in explosive to use your primary weapon…

- For the armor. I think it was a fair way to present damage data on a wild range of armor. The standard armor is 2600 for a lvl 80. On a 2600 armor whe are nerfed about 10% on skill 1. All other skill are buffed so i think i’ts a break even or a slight nerf.

- For the 969 base damage. It’s our base damage at level 80. For statistic comparaison, i don’t see why it would be better to use minimal damage. Average damage for one grenade is more representive of what will be your… average total dps ^^

- For the two +5% sigils. It was just a test with one of the worstest sigils combo. Ok i made a mistake on damage condition but anyway this sigil combo sould be a disaster and should be avoided at all cost. Same comment for +5% crit chance.

- As Zoel said, you can make even more dps than before BUT it will cost you respec, learning a new way of playing, maybe some gear changes… Alchemy builds seems to be the way to go but it would require a lot of testing. GW2 is a lot more complex than any other mmo i’ve played because of the huge amount of trait builds + weapon/utility choice + stuff + sigil +rune + food + combo interaction.

- With duration boon rune and food, you can go to very high level of might stacking, and long fury duration. Dont forget that the 25 point trait in alchemy give you 1% flat damage increase for each boon on yourself. So might stacking have a double effect…
I don’t say it’s the only way to go but it’s a very viable option and sigil wil help you to keep your stacks.

- For engeneer class, Anet communication is a disaster. I understand why people are complaining, i’m just trying to say: “ok, we have ways to perform even better now, but it will require adaptation…” Considering class design, hybrid/polyvalent class are always hard to balance. Like a lot of people here i don’t like the “mid-range combat” or the “this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons”.

I will nerver say that this change is an easy one. It was a nescessary one, not a good one. Sigil proc on kit should have been there since the release. This is the same for weapon scaling.

And when Anet will introduce weapon scaling on kit, they will maybe have to nerf again grenade damage…

Alturys.6821:

- For the armor. I think it was a fair way to present damage data on a wild range of armor. The standard armor is 2600 for a lvl 80. On a 2600 armor whe are nerfed about 10% on skill 1. All other skill are buffed so i think i’ts a break even or a slight nerf.

- For the 969 base damage. It’s our base damage at level 80. For statistic comparaison, i don’t see why it would be better to use minimal damage. Average damage for one grenade is more representive of what will be your… average total dps ^^

The problem with the graph was that it was a little misleading. It makes it seem like the new grenades are overtaking the old grenades for grenade 1 skill when really that only has a chance of happening at the very highest armor values that you would rarely see, if even.

The 969 base damage is the “highest” weapon strength value that grenades (and all other kits) will use in order to calculate their damage. For example, when you equip a PvP Rifle, you will see under the “Attack” stat that your weapon damage is 1205. The actual range that is used is 986-1205. Similarly, equipping a PvP Pistol in the mainhand gives you 1029 under Attack stat for your weapon damage, when the full range is 876-1029. When you equip a Grenade Kit, the figure under the attack stat is 969 – meaning that using that figure means you’re always calculating as if you’re throwing the ideal, 100% damage grenade, every time. 872-876 is our assumed minimum damage for grenades that was pulled out from testing. Since you gave one side of the spectrum (max damage grenades), I decided to try a look from the other side (minimum damage grenades). If you want to try to figure out average numbers, well, there you go lol. You can figure it out from the numbers above.

You still need to fix the fact that you could use stacking Sigils beforehand, either by increasing the pre patch stats by 250 power or 250 precision.

+ % damage per boon does not take into account individual stacks of boons, only unique boons. 1 stack of Might will increase your damage by the same amount as 25 stacks of Might in regards to the trait. And as I said before, in group play where you may already have team members who Might stacked for you, this may be a non-issue. I believe a great addition to your analysis would be to include the rough individual effect of adding one stack of Might for a single grenade throw. Between stuff like Guardians hitting things with Empowering Might/Empower, Warriors using For Great Justice, Elementalists swapping to Fire and comboing with their own fire fields, etc., Might stacks were pretty easy to come by with no effort of your own with good teammates.

As I said previously, if you were somehow in a dungeon group with both my Warrior and Elementalist at the same time, there’d pretty much be only one Might stack that you’d need to fill in for yourself in order to maintain 100% uptime on 25 Might stacks. That renders the entirety of HGH useless, and in fact you would be better off with 30 into Tools as all you would lose that is somewhat significant is the extra % damage per unique boon (which would easily be made up for if you were a crit spec due to the +30 crit damage).

On a solo note, Engineer might be more capable than before thanks to the HGH buff, but in a group setting you’ve got teammates that can do that stuff for you without sacrificing so much. My old Ele build pre EA used to poop out 21 permanent stacks of Might for my entire team (38 second duration stacks on a 30 second cooldown) – pretty much anyone could fill that in with some random utilities and without sacrificing traits for it. Hence I believe you should think about making a separate bit to say what each bit would gain per stack of Might, so that people can judge depending on what they were already used to Might wise.

Also, I like your work and what you’re doing, just trying to proof it up and provide stuff for people to talk about. Even if people don’t come to the same conclusion as you, it’s nice to have accurate numbers around as a benchmark anyways.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

One last issue with this is that you are applying % damage to condition damage. AFAIK, Condition damage is wholly unaffected by such things. Therefore, in your formulas where you attempted to use +5%/2x5% Sigils, your damage is overestimated. A fairly minor issue, but still something to correct. Just change your formula up a bit.

There is one other thing however that makes condition builds look much more convincing post patch with respect to this analysis, though. Condition damage is relatively static (depending on your, well, stats). Direct damage has a range that varies heavily. The 969 stat used here in this spreadsheet represents the ceiling for which the Grenade Kit can hit. Between my numbers and however the heck Cascia got his/her numbers, it’s something like 872-876 as min damage.

spammed attacks for like 200 attacks on golem. took max damage, and min damage.
Assumed 969 was max weapon damage, which gave the max hit.
Now had weapon damage, damage done, power and armor. So could figure out coeff.

Noted earlier that all coeffs are fairly simple numbers.
.5, .65, .33, .8, .125. etc. There is no, .3426 coeff.

The min I came up with, was like 871.5 iirc. So I am not 100% sure on that. I think its 872. giving an average of 920 for kits, which works out for tooltips. which are based on average vs 2600. (although sometimes wrong)

And yes, % modifiers do not work on conditions, but GREATLY buff direct damage.
30-46% is possible. +vul on top of that. which again, is only direct damage.

HgH buff is really quite small.
B and H are the only 2 you really spam. So +2 stacks of might.

Alturys.682

Yes if you want to maximize dps with grenade you are forced into double pistol or pistol/shield. But you will not often use your weapon so we don’t care. It’s a part of grenadeer build… You don’t invest 30 point in explosive to use your primary weapon…

Hell yes, I do. For the awesome CC, not for the mediocre autoattack. That’s what we are complaining about. If all you care about is maximum DPS, then yes, this wasn’t a big nerf. But if you care about utility and support, then either that or your DPS did take a serious hit, because they require different weapon/sigil setups now.

Noid.2871:

Hell yes, I do. For the awesome CC, not for the mediocre autoattack. That’s what we are complaining about. If all you care about is maximum DPS, then yes, this wasn’t a big nerf. But if you care about utility and support, then either that or your DPS did take a serious hit, because they require different weapon/sigil setups now.

Well, that and the same handful of “technically minded” people are all congratulating themselves on seeing this ‘nade nerf coming while ignoring why they were so prevalent: turrets are only nominally viable, gadgets are only occasionally slotted, toolkit trait is still bugged, elixir gun is only a role player, flamethrower is still bugged. This forum is full of some of the dumbest smart people I’ve seen in a while.

It’s a bit hard to theorycraft atm since the sigil change left some interactions that obviously won’t last through the next hotfix, but playing with the OP tPvP bunker build is the last refuge for me, until that gets fixed too.

To the OP: The graph is a nice start, I suppose; wondering about traits, build, numbers, ect.?

Silentsins.3726:

Noid.2871:

Hell yes, I do. For the awesome CC, not for the mediocre autoattack. That’s what we are complaining about. If all you care about is maximum DPS, then yes, this wasn’t a big nerf. But if you care about utility and support, then either that or your DPS did take a serious hit, because they require different weapon/sigil setups now.

Well, that and the same handful of “technically minded” people are all congratulating themselves on seeing this ‘nade nerf coming while ignoring why they were so prevalent: turrets are only nominally viable, gadgets are only occasionally slotted, toolkit trait is still bugged, elixir gun is only a role player, flamethrower is still bugged. This forum is full of some of the dumbest smart people I’ve seen in a while.

It’s a bit hard to theorycraft atm since the sigil change left some interactions that obviously won’t last through the next hotfix, but playing with the OP tPvP bunker build is the last refuge for me, until that gets fixed too.

To the OP: The graph is a nice start, I suppose; wondering about traits, build, numbers, ect.?

What interactions do you think won’t last?

Silentsins.3726

Well, that and the same handful of “technically minded” people are all congratulating themselves on seeing this ‘nade nerf coming while ignoring why they were so prevalent: turrets are only nominally viable, gadgets are only occasionally slotted, toolkit trait is still bugged, elixir gun is only a role player, flamethrower is still bugged.

Well, yes, indeed, I could see a grenade dmg number nerf coming, because I know ANet has a history of failing to fix the core problems. ;-) Which in this case is the Grenadier trait. +50% damage and 50% more crits on top of the longer range makes it by far the strongest trait in game. Unless that gets fixed, non-Grenadier grenades will be underpowered or Grenadier grenades will be overpowered.

Which is yet another instance of engineers-are-not-actually-versatile, because your trait allocation locks you into a specific build.

^ Overpowered would be if our Grenade skill with Grenadier gave us too much of an advantage over other professions.

In no way are Engineers Overpowered when compared to other professions.

Its just because of poor design we have a “MAX” build.
Just like most professions have a “MAX” build.
The difference is other profession’s alternitives are more appealing than ours and require less of a total respec.

And the OP title IS completely wrong

Yes, Grenade Kit got nerfed.
It specifically says that because of Sigils, #1 Grenade skill had to be toned down.
If something is made to hit softer than it has been nerfed.

I’d take the raw damage over conditions any day so it’s a nerf anyway I look at it

Are you implying that in a fight you do not switch kits on a regular basis, say at least once every 10 seconds (thus maintaining those 6 might stacks at no additional cost) ? I’d say that would be quite missing the point of engineer kits.

If you’re switching kits on a regular basis, I’d say YOU are the one missing the point of engineer kits. Whilst there are kit heavy builds that rely on rapid switching to utilize the most powerful abilities in each kit, kits aren’t designed to be switched constantly like Elementalist attunements. They’re meant to be swapped no more often than the alternate weapon sets on every other class (bar ele).

Now on my Ele, I switch like mad, dancing between the attunements constantly. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, when I change attunement, I buff myself and my entire party with handy boons. Secondly, the Elementalist weapon abilities tend to have long cooldowns, especially for the most powerful ones. My offhand skills all have cooldowns of 20 seconds or more, topping out at 45. It thus makes sense for me to switch to an attunement, blow it’s most powerful spells, then switch to another and repeat this process. By the time I come back to the first attunement, it’s usually recharged.

Compare that to Engineer kits. They’re all built like normal weapon sets, with low cooldowns (almost all sub-20 seconds). This encourages you to stay with that set, because you can continue to use all the abilities in a good rotation. Furthermore, there’s little benefit to be gained from the actual swapping; Kit Refinement is the closest thing, and only one of it’s effects (Super Elixir) provides any benefit to the group.

Hence I don’t believe kits are supposed to be swapped often and I further believe that most engineers don’t play that way. Most have one kit slotted and switch into it, or out of it, depending on circumstance: exactly what every other class (again, bar ele) does.

Well we are going to have to agree on disagreeing there, because I think YOU are doing it wrong. In fact, apart from the elementalist part, I disagree with pretty much everything you said.

The incentive to switch kits is the fact that there a negligible cooldown penalty on doing so, thus being able to always use the best tool for the job. Since the engineer was my first character, I had to wait until I rerolled another profession to realize how much utility kit switching brings, compared to normal weapon swap.

Also, rotations on a single kit ? All right, when you are PvE’ing by spamming grenades like a turret and don’t have aggro you can use a “rotation”. In other situations, when you have to do dps and survive at the same time (aka “the hard part”), you really gimp yourself by using skills as soon as they are off cooldown. Some skills should be kept for when they are needed, these include : net shot, overcharged shot, magnetic shield, static shield, flash grenade, gear shield, magnet, smoke bomb, glue bomb… Thus, when playing with kits, switching should be used early and often to maximize their usefulness.

The fact remains that the elementalist is designed around switching attunements often, both due to high cooldowns on their abilities and benefits on attunement switching. The Engineer kits not only follow neither of those design principles, but must be slotted before a fight. This more than anything else cements their purpose, as alternate weapon sets to be switched to when circumstances dictate, just like every other class.

A negligable cooldown penalty isn’t an incentive to switch. Warriors can trait for a 5 second cooldown on their weapon switches, and guess what! They switch weapons when circumstances dictate. Enemy at long range? Pull out my rifle. Enemy up close? Pull out my greatsword. The exact same principle works with Engineer. Enemy at long range? Rifle/Elixir Gun. Enemy close up? Tool kit/Bomb kit. Of course you might switch into a weapon set to pull an enemy or CC them, just as a Guardian might switch to their Greatsword to yank an enemy closer. But there’s no penalty for staying with one kit/weapon, because all the cooldowns are low enough that switching isn’t necessary. Contrast that with the elementalist, who IS penalized for staying in one attunement, because their high power spells have very long cooldowns, and they don’t have blast finishers in the same atunement as their combo fields.

Galen.9042

But there’s no penalty for staying with one kit/weapon, because all the cooldowns are low enough that switching isn’t necessary.

That depends on your definition of “penalty” and “necessary”. You’re still losing dps. Pre-nerf, I ran around with grenadier/rifle, both traited for reduced CD, and would bunderbuss on CD (when it was safe). No reason not to. Similarly, until they implement weapon stats for this, you should aways use toolbelt skills as “drop your kit – use TB skill – pickup the kit again”, to make the TB skill benefit from your weapon stats.

Perma-kit may not make you lose you as much as a single-attunement ele, but you will not be performing optimally.

Galen.9042

That depends on your definition of “penalty” and “necessary”. You’re still losing dps. Pre-nerf, I ran around with grenadier/rifle, both traited for reduced CD, and would bunderbuss on CD (when it was safe).

Entirely agreed. I would be interested to know what you replaced grenadier/rifle with. I am currently struggling to find a new build to my liking. Pistol/shield/flamethrower still does not cut it for me, even with life stealing food buffs. What do you think is our best option for sustained dps now ?

Grenades need to be aimed, have a cast time, spread, & take time to land (can throw from max distance while running forward with swiftness and almost catch your own grenades).

Before, the pay off for landing grenade#1 was high damage. This is no longer the case. The risk/reward ratio has changed (based on the situation) to where grenade#1 isn’t worth the risk anymore in many situations.

I’d call that a nerf.

Observation =/= Inference

Well in dungeons I don’t feel like changing kits. The whole point of grenades is to keep those vuln stacks up. So you’re forced to spam 1-2 with occasional elixir gulp.

But in pvp – yeah, it’s al about changing kits all the time.

Well I just changed my gear from power/prec/crit% to condition/power/prec damage, and did put in shrapnel in.

My dmg has gone insane since i did so. I can now easily stack up to 20 stacks of bleeding, keep up poison in the same time + a pretty solid burn every now and then from the incendiary proc trait + some confusion too from pistols.

It seems like the change to shrapnel made this actually possible for me. I never felt as deadly as I do now tbh. So I wont jump on the flame train.

Sometimes I really want a DPS-meter in GW2. >_>

NeryK.5301

I would be interested to know what you replaced grenadier/rifle with. I am currently struggling to find a new build to my liking. Pistol/shield/flamethrower still does not cut it for me, even with life stealing food buffs. What do you think is our best option for sustained dps now ?

I’m still trying to figure out what to replace it with myself.

Elixir-Infused Bombs was fun, particularly since it gives you an excuse to pick the freshly buffed Power Shoes as well.
I tried hard to like the Tool Kit, but (apart from Throw Wench) it feels underwhelming, probably because my fingers are still too slow to use the block effectively in an “oh kitty”-situation.
I never got along with the FT, the only skill I like there is Air Blast. Juggernaut makes that worse by discouraging you from switching out of it.
P/S for dual sigils just makes me miss the CC of my rifle.
TODO: Finding a build that DPSes in P/P (or P/S, hah) and uses utility slots for utility.

Also, I still like Grenadier/Rifle. But then I knew I wanted to play G/R as soon as the skill descriptions came out during beta, and that it turned out to be the top DPS spec was just icing on the cake.

Isslair.4908:

Sometimes I really want a DPS-meter in GW2. >_>

accurate combat logs, parsers do SO much for ferreting out bugs, and oversights.
People don’t understand this, all too often.

Isslair.4908:

Sometimes I really want a DPS-meter in GW2. >_>

I wish they would bring this in! So so much. And a damage meter and healing meter in SPvP.

Papaganoosh (SPvP Officer, The Unnamed EU)

http://www.the-unnamed.com/spvpapp – recruiting skilled players for TPvP