Weapons Discussion: Frag / Blind Grenades

[Mirage Knight]

Ridiculously easy to spam. Ideally I would like to see a "pull pin and throw" animation, but I seriously doubt that's going to happen.

At the very least I feel there ought to be a longer cool down before being able to throw another grenade. Currently a player with Favor of the Armoury can rain explosive death on opponents.

[Brenil]

Grenades. Give them a 10-15 second cooldown timer, like I said in another thread. This will fix a big portion of the game.

[Mirage Knight]

Not quite sure about the cool down time you suggested, but that's definitely a step in the right direction. And yes, the grenade spam is really a mood killer.

[Vuther]

On this point, has anyone managed to use blind grenades fairly effectively? I've been finding their tendency to blind yourself outside of managing to place them behind environment while putting yourself away from them to make using them without actually harming yourself to be difficult (not to mention it blinds you despite looking in the opposite direction to it).

[Brenil]

It's quite easy to use them effectively if you bounce them off corners or into a room prior to entry. Or as an Assault Marine throw before you take off and land right after it goes off. They're very effective and stupidly broken when spammed with Mastercrafted Wargear.

[Servius]

Blind grenades are not very useful because they can blind you too. Since they do no damage, they only provide opportunity, but you need to do the damage. Thus, they don't work well vs. enemies in cover if you are a Tac or Dev, since you need to throw them from far away so as not to blind yourself, and you only have the window of blind time to close the distance and get line of sight to shoot them. Plus, whenever I get blinded, I run and roll and scramble like a chicken with its head cut off. I'd argue that blind grenades actually make the target harder to kill for shooters.

So, blind grenades are mostly useful to Assault Marines, since they can throw them while in the air (which gives them the necessary distance to avoid being blinded themselves) AND keep line of sight for the duration of the blinding (which means they can immediately start shooting) AND are able to quickly close the distance and melee, where all my crazy antics probably won't help me as much.

Frag grenades are fine the way they are I think. 1 Frag (unbuffed by perks), seems to knock maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the armor off. Since most folks can only carry 2, you can't kill anyone with them, unless the target is already wounded. Plus, Tacs and Assaults can dive/jump away pretty effectively if they're attentive, and Devs with any combo of durability perks can usually absorb what they can't escape.

My only problem with Frags is when some Tac has the 2 frag perks. Because there is no cooldown really, you actually can '1-shot' not just one but multiple people by throwing all 4 in quick sucession. This matches my problem with Plasma Cannons, which is that it violates the core principle that damage should decrease as AoE increases. You should never be able to 1-shot with an AoE attack.

[konfeta]

Blind grenades work fine for Tacs - you can toss them behind the opponent so they blind him but not you. He can't dodge these unlike Frags.

[Fat_Bloke]

From a balance perspective I think the grenades causing you to stagger needs to go, if you get hit by the first you will get hit by the second/third/fourth.

[Mirage Knight]

I feel the effect of momentarily leaving your target a bit disorriented and injured is fine as is (kind of how grenades are supposed to work really) but the real issue is how quickly a player can follow up that first grenade toss with another. Toss a grenade that wil automatically release the safety and arm itself the moment it leaves your hand...and a couple of seconds later, you can do it again. That's where the problem is.

From a fluff viewpoint, I can see how sophisticated the grenades used by the Imperium might be compared to those used by soldiers in real life and from that perspective they ought to be sophisticated (auto safety release and arming on throw and all). On the other though, for the sake of gameplay and balance, they shouldn't be spammable either.