Even Grenade Barrage(the toolbelt skill) hits so fast after cast that the red circle doesn’t mean much.
However, the big flaw with the grenades and apparently why they do so much damage, is that they are hard to hit on moving targets AND hard to hit while you are moving yourself. It is an absolute pain to throw grenades while trying to move in anything but a straight line, forwards or backwards. It is doable, but extremely hard and not reliable.
I really wish there was a simpler system for grenade tossing that could be toggled on or off to make high movement encounters(PvP or PvE) work better for Grenadier Engineers. Something like a toggle to make grenades automatically toss at your currently selected target when pressed. Toggle it back off for the current grenade throw mode. Sure, it wouldn’t be perfect, but it would help alleviate a lot of bad situations where you need to be moving around a lot, but your target is mostly stationary(or very close).
That, or they need to implement a much higher DPS output method for engineers to compete with Grenadier output. At the moment, none of our other weapon kits have even close to the same output, including bombs. It doesn’t matter if you are a condition damage build or a power build even, because they grenades do both better than everything else :/
From what I could tell, it did not increase the duration of Elixir X either. The only thing I have seen that increases the duration of the 2 effects beyond the tooltip length is the boon duration increase traits(the 30% from putting 30 points in).
If you have toughness on a weapon that is equipped when you swap to the Flamethrower, you will lose the toughness from the weapon(s) while the Flamethrower is out. This can also make it look like you are not gaining as much.