Guild Wars 2

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

well, here’s the thing.

before WM, before RE/DE and the Neo alliance

We Kaineng was able to hold with DR.

as I have stated before, which ever tier DR can go, we can go as well, and I strongly believed that.

Kaineng is powerful enough without WM or RE/DE or the Neo alliance.

Sure, with them on board makes us even stronger, but without them, I’m sure we can still get out of T7 on our own.

So if you guys seriously think that Kaineng can get out of T7 just because of them? Then I’d suggest you think again.

A matchup of GoM vs Kaineng before they got their transfers would have been a great battle!! Too bad we’ll never see it.

Chaster Sharpshooter.3640:

You should join Kaineng then

SoS is probably one of the biggest PvE guild you’d ever seen xD

A lot of GoM are thinking about transferring to Kaineng for the week then transferring back once you’ve left our tier.

Ninya.3942:

Hey GoM, how many Trebs and other siege do you need to build in your spawn zones to take back stuff? Exploiting is the name of the game I suppose.

Nobody on GoM condones hacks or exploits. Screenshot it and report it to ArenaNet.

dunnberry.2964:

From an outside perspective kaineng doesn’t belong in tier 7 at all as they got a huge NA guild on RE and part of SE and an even bigger and longstanding guild in WM…with both of them
They are probably at very least a tier 4 server now…good luck to GOM and HOD, not looking forward to fighting kaineng next week or week after

Yes. By the end of the night most of GoM was in agreement that Kaineng does not belong in tier 7. Now that we know about the War Machine [WM] transfer and the Rethesis [RE] / NEO Alliance transfer we have a better understanding of what’s going on.

The WM guild leader on why they transferred to Kaineng.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/78151-from-war-machine/

Not sure if that was the original posting of that letter.

Lightsbane.9012:

lets have fun, i guess. although i’m wondering why kaineng isn’t in a higher tier if they have this kind of force.

Yeah, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself over the past hour. From what I have read so far it sounds like a couple tier 1 guilds transferred to Kaineng in order to “train”.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/21-12-Kaineng-Ferguson-Eredon-Terrace/page/2#post1091846

Not sure what the full story is yet.

Jan Merunka.1724:

Dear Enginners. I have read many information about your dissapoitment with granades nerf and i have watched some videos in which granades were used. Please tell, what wrong on -30% dmg if you can hit for 10K dmg and my elementalist can do maximum dmg about 5K. I think im average skilled player, but i cannot match dmg you can reach with them . I dont care about dps meter just want to know why are you so angry with that. We want to play this great game and enjoy fun. It doesn matter who can deal higher dps but first compare with other profession and they can speak. Now its ball in your camp, please tell me what so wrong about this nerf please.

10k from what? all 8 grenades of barrage criting at once?

Hi, also GoM here. To the SF thief from the guild “Players Versus Panzies”. I would love to know how you followed me into Klovan while green still controlled it.

It would be very sad if SF has to hack to win.

Raven.9603:

that doesnt make the damage any less comparable to fireball. we also have a 87% chance for at least one grenade to crit. in other words, avg dmg is still the same.

arguments should focus on the unreliability of grenades to hit, not the damage they do.

Well if you think that grenades should auto-hit their target that’s fine. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion and I’ll agree to disagree. Different playstyles are going to foster different perspectives on how the classes should work.

With that being said there is no doubt that there is an overwhelming consensus that the nerf to grenade damage was uncalled for. The explanation given makes no sense since a 30% reduction in damage cannot be made up by a sigil. Many Engineers believed that the tradeoff of having a time-delayed manually targeted AOE was in exchange for having slightly higher base damage. The idea being that you were going to miss a lot unless you were standing right on top of the target.

Now if that’s not what an Engineer is supposed to be then the devs should explain that better. If grenade damage was nerfed because it was overpowered then the devs should explain that too.

Bottom line, a lot of people are shelving their engineers in favor of other classes because the damage just isn’t there anymore.

Raven.9603:

are we comparing apples to oranges or what exactly? you are only seeing 1900 crits? 1 grenade can crit for 800-900 damage, = 2400-2700 crits when all 3 hit. thats with only +50% crit damage, so we could easily push that much higher.

Without a damage meter or some sort of log that can be parsed there isn’t much point in arguing about numbers. My observations are from WvW, but anyone can see for themselves with level 1 characters in the Mists.

Also… lets get the math right:

A 50% critical hit chance means that there is a 12.5% chance that all three grenades will crit (0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125). Any argument that grenade damage is fine because all three grenades are going to crit is silly.

A completely needed damage reduction? Maybe in sPvP or PvE, but not in WvW.

My grenades now do around 1000 damage normal / 1900 critical. The Elementalist I started after the Dec 14th update does 2000 damage normal / 5000 critical.

The only thing overpowered about grenades is that they are so small you can’t see them coming, unlike fireball which is hard to miss.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Engineers have issues but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying playing them. I still play my engineer way more than my other professions because it’s just more fun. Engineers will become crazy FOTM once they get fixed. Look at how everyone is gravitating to eles, and engineers have way more flexibility than them (just at the loss of some viability).

Bottom line—if you’re just gonna be running around killing stuff in WvW, you may as well run around killing stuff with explosives.

That was my thought exactly. I loved doing WvW with grenades because they give you so many options. Unfortunately, now my level 35 Fireball throwing Elementalist is out dps’ing my level 80 full exotic Grenadier.

It’s not really scientific but the comparison is something like this:

a glass cannon build for an Elementalist is doing 1200-1500 normal damage /3100+ critical.

a glass cannon build for an Ranger is doing 1500 normal damage/3000+ critical damage

a glass cannon Grenadier build for an Engineer is doing normal damage of 1000-1300 / critical damage of 1400-2400

I can only speak for myself but what concerns me is that what was stated in the last update notes doesn’t make sense. Adding in a sigil doesn’t make up for 30% nerf in grenade damage. I would love for someone to prove me wrong and post a youtube video of a new grenade build that mops the floor in wvw.

I like the fact that grenades don’t have an auto attack and that they have to be manually targeted. I always assumed that this was one of the reasons why they did decent damage.

Einherjar.6709:

In the mists I could do +2900 damage per second with berserker’s grenadier setup. For targets you could lead, it was probably the highest continuous damage from any profession.

To give you an idea, I can do around 2800 damage per second on my warrior using greatsword with a maxdps setup. And I sure couldn’t match 25 stacks of vulnerability for the entire group on my warrior like I could on my nade-spamming engi.

Which setup was more intense, fun, and difficult to use in dungeons? It sure wasn’t nade-spam.

Are you using a DPS meter to measure your damage?

Einherjar.6709:

Grenades were definitely overpowered continuous damage compared to other classes.

Is there a youtube video of this somewhere? I would love to see an overpowered grenadier in action. pre or post patch.

Grenadier has 1500 range, damage radius of 120, no auto-attack, manual targeting, and a long delay for hitting the target.

Elementalist with Fireball has 1200 range, damage radius of 90, can auto-attack, tab/click/auto targeting, medium delay for hitting target.

Ranger with Longbow has 1500 range, no damage radius, can auto-attack, tab/click/auto targeting, short delay for hitting target.

Because…

a glass cannon build for an Elementalist is doing 1200-1500 normal damage /3100+ critical damage on a Target Golem

a glass cannon build for an Ranger is doing 1500 normal damage/3000+ critical damage on a Target Golem

and a glass cannon Grenade build for an Engineer is doing normal damage of 1000-1300 / critical damage of 1400-2400 on a Target Golem.

Now these are just casual observations taken from messing around in the Mists but the difference is obvious. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that a grenade is a delay-based AOE that sometimes COMPLETELY misses the target (think WvW open field combat).

Gurpsmeister.9068:

2: Does the trait scope (10% + crit if standing still) work or is that fubar?

I was curious enough about this to test it for myself in the Mists.

I threw 318 grenades with all my armor off but with the Scope trait activated. My Critical Chance according to the hero screen with no armor on was 4%. Even if it’s not displayed the addition of the Scope trait should have made my crit chance 14%.

Out of 318 grenades on a Target Golem I got a critcal hit 20 times, which comes out to about 6.3%. I’m assuming that if I had a larger sample size that that percentage might get closer to 4%. Or perhaps the Scope trait is increasing crit chance by 1% instead of 10%, who knows…

Either way I think it’s a safe bet that the Scope trait is not working.

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.

JonPeters.5630:

Step two is to get the weapon stats to apply to kits as well. We felt sigils was the more important first step because it creates build diversity. Flamethrower with sigil of air? Yes please.

Can we expect the damage to be reduced again when this is implemented?

Liquid.9672:

Tekyn.5376:

Is there a confirmed source from the developers that we’re getting weapon stats in the future?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Generell-questions-about-kits-sigils/first#post928692

Straight from the top brass.

Thank you for that, that’s interesting. I wonder if we’re going to get nerfed again to compensate.

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?

Dispari.3980:

Kimbald.2697:

I’m sorry but now you are the one missing the bigger picture.
There are 7 other test tables with glasses here as well, most of those glasses are more filled than ours.

So no: it does not make sense to remove some of that one fuller glass of ours… it makes perfect sense to fill up all our other glasses first, till we are on the same level as the other tables.

You forget we’re getting weapon stats in the future. What you’re saying would just lead to nerfs later instead of now.

Is there a confirmed source from the developers that we’re getting weapon stats in the future?

I just read some interesting posts over on Guru that talked about how grenade builds are now supposed to be condition damage based? Has anyone tried that since the patch?

I don’t know if I can bring myself to level another class to 80. I mean, what if they nerf that class too?

I wish they would just explain WHY a 30% nerf to grenade damage was needed. It obviously is not to balance out for sigils.

vvp.8512:

datbabykilla.4307:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLTzyn6CGHw

“We want the Warrior to be capable of good melee damage in a sturdy body. They can still do some decent damage at range.”

ANET is so far off in balancing the classes its amazing. There is no way you can justify the nerf when there are classes out there that are astronomically better.

wait, i don’t get it, what was special in that video?

edit – do you want me to track down and kill that dude? i’m pretty sure i’m fighting blackgate atm.

I watched that video and am convinced now more than ever that Engineers were nowhere close to being overpowered.

I agree with this post. What was announced Friday by Arenanet seems to be misleading regarding the nerf to grenade damage. A 30% nerf in damage to balance out the use of Sigils makes no sense and merits a more thorough explanation.

SentinelArk.5109:

Thank you all for your replies.

There is not much to say that hasn’t already been said, but I suggest many of you re-read the points made by Casia. I will rephrase them with my own points:

Grenade 1 was an extremely powerful ability in both single target and AoE. It still is powerful in single target, but it is not so powerful that it completely shadows all other Engineer builds.
- Pre-patch, Grenade 1 had a skill coefficient of 0.50. With the trait Grenadier, we can hit an opponent with 1.50 (1.65 with Explosive Powder) if all three grenades hit. That skill coefficient was extremely high compared to other Engineer 1 skills, and is extremely high even for Warrior 1 skills.
- Post-patch, Grenade 1 had a skill coefficient of 0.33 per grenade. With the trait Grenadier and all three grenades hitting, we get a skill coefficient of 0.99 – something more in line with other 1 skills though still on the high side.

I encourage everyone to look more closely…etc

So what both you and Casia are saying is that despite what Arenanet announced publically on Friday the 30% nerf in Grenade 1 damage was because the Grenadier build was overpowered? If that’s true I wish they would clearly state that.

SentinelArk.5109:

In terms of PvE, the #1 Grenade got nerfed by 34% (from a skill coefficient of 0.500 to 0.330), but is compensated by (1) ability to work with sigils, and (2) giving damage to the #3 Flash Grenades and #5 Poison Grenades.

In terms of PvP, the #1 Grenade got nerfed by 26% (from a skill coefficient of 0.450 to 0.330), but is compensated by (1) ability to work with sigils, (2) giving damage to #3/#5, and (3) buffing (or bringing back to normal, whatever floats your boat) #2 Shrapnel Grenade and #4 Freeze Grenade.

In addition, the change to the trait Shrapnel from 6% to 15% chance for explosions to cause bleeding is nice. However, since I do not know the nature of the ability*, I can’t say exactly how awesome it really is.

From what I can see, the 30% damage decrease was not only just due to sigils, but also for the damage increase on the other grenade abilities, and the Shrapnel trait.

In case anyone was curious, the toolbelt skill Grenade Barrage stayed at a skill coefficient of 0.375 before and after the December 14th patch.

*What I mean by “nature of the ability” is that I do not know if the trait has an internal cooldown, and whether or not the bleed is applied to a single target or aoe.

No disrespect intended, but you are drawing conclusions based on generalizations. Saying that a 34% nerf in damage is “compensated” by a Sigil is just too hard to believe without solid reproducible data.

Mif.3471:

I’m so sick of people claiming that Flash Grenades and Poison Grenades doing damage somehow balanced the nerf out.

We lost 35% damage on a skill we use once per second, and gained damage (which is only 1/3 and 2/3 the damage of a skill 1 attack) on skills we use once every 10 and 25 seconds.

It doesn’t even come close to compensating.

Agreed.

Great point by the original poster that I think arenanet has yet to address. Most grenadiers have been assuming that the trade off for grenades doing good damage was that you never were going to hit the target 100% of the time.

Does anyone have an example (video, etc) of an over powered grenadier from before the update(s)?

PotatoOverdose.6583:

I don’t think they hate engineers. There are some absolutely ridiculous sigil + rune combos for engineers atm. I’ll just leave it at that.

I’m curious, what are the absolutely ridiculous sigil + rune combos?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune

Yeah, i’m still not convinced that arenanet knows how grenades really work, i.e. you have to throw them and then they have to actually hit the target. Any calculations they did to figure out this magic “30%” must have assumed that 100% of a Engineer’s grenades are hitting the target. This hardly ever happens, especially in WvW.

Pannonica.5378:

Its apparently more than 30%:

Wolfies.8152:

Tekyn.5376:

My tooltip damage fully buffed for “Grenade” went from 462 to 301. Very frustrating……..

That’s annoying. If that’s true, its a 35% decrease not 30%.

462-301 = 161
462*.35 = 161.7

yeah… I was already using Sigil of Bloodlust before yesterdays update so the change merely cut my damage 30% without any benefit.

Also, after the update killing something with grenades did not add a stack of power. I still have to switch back to my pistol/shield to get the effect of the sigil.

The funny thing is you could already use Bloodlust before the update. The extra 250 power never came close to giving me an extra 30% damage. I agree that a 10% nerf would have been better.

Pukknub.7368:

If not, we’ll still be able to get some nice bonuses from few sigils, like weapon swap ones.

Unless they changed this and did not announce it a kit does not count as a weapon swap.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10ilke/how_sigils_work/

If Grenadier damage was “a little” too high as arenanet said in their update post then why the 30% nerf in damage? IMO 30% is not “a little”.

And for the record some of us engineers were already using sigil of bloodlust before the patch. +250 power at max stacks never came close to giving us 30% more damage. It all seems very imbalanced to me.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil

Are there any sigils that don’t have an internal cooldown?

agreed. 30% damage reduction to our primary attack is just crazy. Even if they do have a good reason for the change the size of the nerf is just staggering. I cant see how we make up 30% damage with a sigil.

I always thought that the tradeoff for having higher damage with grenades was that they were AOE and on a delay. In WvW in particular this meant that you missed your target a significant number of times unless you were shooting at a piece of siege equipment.

Voltaire.8369:

In truth, if this does turn out to be a large nerf, then Grenade Kit use will drop. If this is truly is the only viable build, the engineer log-on count will drop; dollars-to-donuts Anet tracks these numbers and will buff the class if this happens.

Grenades are too easy to use at lower skill levels (static targets), but take a much higher skill level to use effectively in the harder dungeons (e.g., Fractals +30) where you’re moving and dodging constantly (steering and reticle-aiming at the same time while watching for tells does require higher skill level). I would happily trade the damage nerf for a lock-on aim for grenades.

A lock-on aim or a larger target area, i.e. for when you use grenades in WvW against other players who can tell you are throwing grenades.

I was already using sigil of bloodlust before the patch so all this did was reduce damage by 30%. With the bloodlust buff I was not overpowered so it’s completely nuts that they felt the need to nerf our damage by 30%.

I don’t understand wtf arenanet is doing.

I always assumed that the tradeoff for high damage with grenades was that all 5 attacks were time delayed AOE’s, i.e. you sometimes miss completely if your target moves a lot like in WvW. A 30% drop in damage makes me wonder if the developers forgot about this part of the build.

My tooltip damage fully buffed for “Grenade” went from 462 to 301. Very frustrating……..

My #1 – “Grenade” attack before the patch had a tooltip saying 462 damage fully buffed glass cannon build, now it’s down to 301.

Do the Devs not understand that grenades actually have to hit the target to do damage? I always assumed that the trade off for high damage with grenades was that all 5 attacks were time delayed AOE’s.

Now I roll a new class. sigh.

Before patch:
Attack 1 “Grenade” tooltip was 462 damage

After patch:
Attack 1 “Grenade” tooltip is now 301 damage

Very very dramatic changes…

Remove repair costs and this problem will all but go away.