Why are sticky grenades so incredibly powerful?

FTFY

I would disagree with your last comment. Grenades should be (and from what I can tell from SOE/DBG, they were designed to be) sidegrades. Frags and stickies used to have identical damage profiles, just that one bounces and one sticks. That is how the game was released.

SOE looked at performance numbers and gameplay quality and decided that grenades needed a nerf. They reduced the inner blast radius of frags quite a bit. What happened next?

Everyone started spamming AV grenades, because they had a large blast radius and you could farm infantry and maxes on a point quite easily with them. So to reply to Scrinrusher - why were AV nades suddenly OP? Because they were the most powerful grenade at the time after frags were nerfed.

Months later, AV grenades were entirely reworked so they would do better at AV and not be so powerful against infantry. That leaves us with the sticky grenade. The last remaining damage grenade that has its original damage profile from release. And it currently stands head and shoulders above the rest for this reason.

It's not there to give engineers a more powerful grenade. Engineer is an extemely good support class, and has one of the most versatile build options of any class in the game. And when the game was released as I said, stickies were the same as frags.

They should be nerfed to the same level as frag grenades. I almost consider this not a balancing issue but more of an oversight by DBG that needs correction.

I disagree with you either.

In the they start with idea of nades being side grades to each other but after that they change their mind and changed most of the nades.

I will tell you why i think sticky must not get nerfed.

Normal nades are available for all classes. Imagine a room filled with 20 peoples deffending a room and 20 attacking. If normal nades are very powerfull 20 attackers will throw 1 nade and kill everyone inside thats why they got nerfed.

You will say same goes for stickys but stickys are available only for engies. In a squad u have 2 engies maximum which makes 2 stickys without bandoleer and 8 if they have bandoleer.

Normal engie in squad that follow his max (knows as pocket engie) uses flak armor to protect him self from all explosives enemy shoot on MAX.

Lets say for the argument that 20 attackers are all engies and have stickys. Then is deffenders fault not rushing out to kill them cuz any normal squad will crush 20 engies.

tl;dr engies are not spamable class and with stickys restricted to engies only is totaly balanced IF sticky ignore flak armor bug get fixed.

I hadn't watched it yet because I knew stickies were OP.

But you said it was entertaining and it didn't disappoint! Nice work there.

It is odd that stickies were completely overlooked. They should be aware of these things by looking at stats but seemingly aren't until the community starts posting about it.

Depends what they are looking for .. Ie: Stickies kill less overall than normal nades, C4 and AP mines do .. So maybe they feel while they are maybe strong they are not overly so in the overall kills department ..

But ofc since we don't know what they judge things by. . Who knows but them ..

There's a few things that really should be consistent though - the blast damage/range of stickies and frags have to the same if you want consistent gameplay. You can give frags a slight increase, or stickies a slight decrease to being them into line, but they have to work the same - otherwise you are stuck flipping a coin and guessing if you can survive a given grenade or not - as there is no difference in appearance or icon.

Or, you could introduce a new grenade icon if you insisted on keeping them very different - but isn't it fairly intuitive that sticky grenades are just "grenades that stick" ?

-Stigma

Serious?

-Stigma

IMO Frags should be buffed .. But also Flak armour should be to .. So you gain more advantage from wearing flak and are at a bigger disadvantage versus nades for not wearing it ..

It's already 50% ... that's HUGE!
Imagine if nanoweave gave you 50% damage reduction against bullets...

If anything I think flak-armor is a little bit too strong since the last (very large) buff it got a while back. Flak is basically all I use these days. Nothing gives you nearly the same amount of extra survivability. If explosives were fairly rare in the game it would be justifiable to have it be very strong but... well... that's not exactly the case.
Making the difference between having flak-armor or not even bigger I think would be a mistake.

As a sidenote the only specific thing I think flak-armor is arguable a little lackluster in doing is protecting against rocketlaunchers as that's supposedly one of the perks to that suitslot. Anything short of fully upgraded flak and you still die anyway - and even with full upgrades you are left with less than a bullet worth of health remaining. More related to how effective launchers are vs infantry than how powerful flak is I guess.

-Stigma

Problem is though IMO is that if you nerf Stickies ( As some people seem to have as their weekly bee in the bonnet ) then you inadvertently buff all types of armour .
If for example they lower the blast radius then Nano Armour also see's the benefit which IMO it shouldn't ..

I predominately run Nano because grenade deaths are so few and far between that I don't feel it's merit ... And a sticky nerf would actually be even better for me even with Nano ...

How would a reduction to sticky damage affect nanoweave? Nanoweave AFAIK gives you added resistance to non-headshot bulletdamage. I'm fairly sure it does nothing against explosive damage.

Note that nanoweave got changed... it no longer gives you a flat extra +HP like it did before (if it remained like that then it would have helped, but that's not the case anymore).

-Stigma

Because less dmg = everyone takes less dmg regardless of the item used in that slot.
Or a lower blast radius would mean less chance of it affecting you, regardless of armour type.

I don't think that's a very good argument, especially in terms of does-not-block-explosive-damage Nanoweave, unless you actually mean to argue that reducing blast radius is going to give a sense of security that makes people feel Nanoweave offers a better comparative advantage over Flak. I argue that should not be considered an issue. Some people might be affected in thst way. That should last all of until they find out they're still very susceptible to grenades in CQC envirnonments, and then they are reminded of the other sources of explosive damage, and their original sense of precaution should return.

But when people question you....they are bias people who are just defending OP stuffs. This is what I've taken away from most of your posts. You simply state things as if everything you say is fact without actually discussing it.

The part where you called most people to dumb to understand anything you say. You know Steven Hawking doesn't even have that problem.

And you generally have this same attitude in most of your posts.

ON topic....I have a sticky grenade bandolier set up on my Engi in my fourth loadout slot. I use it for tight corners when massively out numbered and for fighting MAX units as an engi. But if there is one thing i've learned is that....it always seems far more powerful then it should be. I knew it ignored flak when actually stuck to someone. But I didn't know it ignored flak armor on anyone close to it. If true then this does need to get addressed.[/quote]

Erm... I guess that's true in a trivial sense yes (assuming that the bug with it going through flak is corrected, because right now it does nothing), but that's like saying that a nerf to sticky damage buffs the ammo-belt suitslot - which is not really a good argument I think.

-Stigma

Ditto... I feel guilty about using it - but in terms of wearing down an onrushing zergfit that uses pure numbers to win there is just no gear that even compares to this. Aseptically since the more overcrowded a situation gets the less you are typically able to leverage your individual skill-difference. Menawhile the stickys just get more and more powerful. In ideal layouts a good 20-30 kills insn't too uncommon before I run out of nanite juice - and I'm unlikely to ever actually see any of the enemies I'm killing. That shouldn't be too common IMO...

At least I refrain from spamming them towards biolab teleporter-rooms (or even through the shields INTO the spawn). Plenty of people do of course - but that's just blatant exploit abuse.

-Stigma

It IS a bug.
They're supposed to be side-grades.
They're being fixed.

https://twitter.com/BBurnessPS2/status/610902642328375296

As if it's any surprise, the stats showed they were more powerful.