Bomb/Nade, HGH, all the engineer builds that people might consider OP, already go 30 into explosives for Grenadier.
Fringe builds can draw on Incendiary Powder being accessible to become “viable”.
And so you take it away from the second but not the first. This literally does nothing but kill build diversity. People have been telling you this, ever since the patch preview. Why didn’t Incendiary get nerfed in another way, perhaps making it work like a venom so it’s far more active? What are you doing Anet? Did you think about this at all? Hell, I even run an adept trait instead of incendiary in the masters slot. I don’t get it.
Guess I’ll just play bomb/nade 24/7 then. Thanks, great Christmas present!
Mortryde/Cold/Thugmentalist Bara
really bad engineer
I hate Grenades in Spvp, so i never go far into the explosives line. Bottom line is they are just to unreliable to use in such tight fast moving spaces. Been playing a few hours and this update completely killed the DPS on my HGH build. I have to take away either Napalm specialist, cleansing formula 409, or Speedy kits in order to get Incendiary powder.
How did this pass testing? I don’t understand how that change creates build diversity. We went from 3 viable meta builds, now at 2. Grenadier and S/D. Where S/D is still pretty weak.
Plus, how is it that a precision based, condition damage proc. Gets moved to the master line of EXPLOSIVES where that is power and condition duration. That makes the least sense out of all.
I’ll admit I’m expecting to see a lot more grenade engineers after this patch. It would have been better if they had also buffed up a few traits, maybe even merging a couple and throwing in some new ones (firearms could do with getting a gadget and a turret based trait) then it wouldn’t be so bad. I do miss the early days where I used to have to choose between taking kit refinement (another trait that was nerfed badly and pretty much made it unusable) and IP when I was running a FT/EG (0,30,0,20,20 or 10,30,0,20,10).
Just a shame that grenades are swiftly becoming the only real viable option for engineers considering the build diversity we used to have back at release.
I’m sure it did more harm than good to build diversity.