Build Discussion: Grenade

[Maehlice]

How do you make a "good" Grenade build that feels unique or special?

Grenade's unique quality seems to be its clusters, which do a lot of tiny bits of chip damage. However, I don't think chip damage scales or synergizes with anything. I thought maybe Corrosion, but the stacks decay insanely fast as more are applied, so there's a hard wall on how much added DPS clusters can add from Corrosion stacks.

Singular Strike makes for pretty good DPS, but then why not play a Railgun build?

Courser/Battery, Charged Mines, and/or Overpower can fill the screen with clusters, but then why not play a Salvo build?

---

I'm struggling to find a way to make Grenade not feel like a lesser version of some other build.

[Halfshell]

The thing with Grenades, is its very easy to just cover the screen in explosions and die to no visibility. Its strength should be AoE, I'd expect its single target dps to be lower if you are just directly comparing it to other weapons.

I used to stack size and Splinter on Grenade. Unless somethings been changed it should still work just as well. Grenade is one of the better LMine weapons too.

I think if you are wanting to build Singular Strike, I'd look into Skirmish. Charge Shot works well with Skirmish and probably with Anti Matter, the base damage is whatever but the muzzle blast isn't a non factor and you want the companion mods anyway. Edit Not the muzzle blast, the 10% extra size should give more Clusters.

Polar Inversion should also be interesting.

Also I've never been a fan of Corrosion, besides on Darts or maybe Thermal (or Vortex or something) I don't really like the playstyle. I tend to prefer weapon damage. And I mean Grenade base firerate is .9 and base clusters are like 5, so ~5.4 base Corrosion application.

If you want something a little more unique I would look at Outrage Module. I've been meaning to test it myself to proc a low firerate weapon with say, Hullbreaker that sinks firerate further (because why have firerate if it fires for us?). And probably Retribution. Edit When it works its great but proccing Outrage Module consistently doesn't seem to happen.

[a_triangle]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2739251944 this grenade build instakills any boss with phantom strike; every cluster explosive did 16k damage each, not even counting the splinters or the 2nd grenade from battery or the homing strike grenades

[Halfshell]

Thats really interesting, I never realized Charge Shot works with Siege but I guess it makes sense because its supposed to scale with firerate afterall.

Edit I tried a gnarly variant of Triangle's build with Railgun, yeah I'm probably the only person that actually really likes Railgun but the Charge + Saturation Fire combo worked great. Though I went for Warpstrike and Leaf on the Wind instead of Skirmish or Wild mods (Railgun doesn't really have any good ones).

Also used Firefly and Amp (up until getting Rapid Regen around 25 mods in). I mention it because I don't think many people realize Railgun scales with thrust..

[anarcher]

You're not, there's a japanese streamer called idiotica who does insane railgun shenanigans.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by a_triangle:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2739251944 this grenade build instakills any boss with phantom strike; every cluster explosive did 16k damage each, not even counting the splinters or the 2nd grenade from battery or the homing strike grenades

How do you play this build?

I got to wave 240 Mayhem, but it was a struggle. I can hardly imagine taking it to 355.

I'll admit up front that I'm terrible about using Strafe, which feels like an important part of the build.

I'm just not sure how to bring it all together.

[McGarnagle]

grenade is trash now unless you cheese with a wild metamorphasis build
if you're playing regular you just stop playing because none of the builds are fun or viable even anymore