Design space of grenades

[Psieye]

There is an ongoing burning debate on what grenades are meant to do. Right now the hot topic is incendiaries but I think there's a broader issue here. To quote:

I truly do not wish to side track this discussion, but the main purpose of grenades in general is crowd control and to debilitate the enemy. Making a grenade deal such high damage was counter-productive. I will gladly trade 50% of the current damage for its intended crowd-control effect.

Now, the discussion on "a static 75% burn chance doesn't feel good" has been written out rather exhaustively. For those that missed it, here's one way to sum it up: http://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB ... phy#p46415

The perception that "if I do work to engineer ideal circumstances, I can mitigate (though maybe not eliminate) the RNG" is important to players - maybe not all players, but certainly to many. In other words, trying to hit a moving target number that you have some control over FEELS better than a static one. Objectively it's just a bunch of dice rolls at the end of the day. But some players put great importance on having control over that target number.

This is not the thread for continuing that discussion. No, this thread is to ask the question: what design space is there for grenades? Given reasonably attainable gear and the right build, should grenades that kill big things ever be allowed to exist? Similarly, I don't want this thread clogged up with "but an incendiary should be in This space not That space" - keep it general.

[LordYanaek]

I would be interested to know the developer's point of view but here's mine for what it's worth.

First some perspective : some of you might be familiar with the (now defunct) 4th edition of a famous PnP RPG. While arguably not the best Role playing game, it was an interesting tabletop small squad tactical game when it came to the (unfortunately long) battles. That edition introduced 4 "roles" adventurers should fill to have a balanced squad (huh, i mean band )

• Everyone's favorite role, the Striker takes care of most of the killing.
• The so called "Leader" helps others by providing various bonuses to keep them in their best fighting condition and making killing enemies easier : i'll rename it Support for the purpose of this discussion.
• The Controller had a dual job : controlling enemies so they don't pose a real threat to the team and killing masses of trash mobs. The second part only partially applies to LW2 since we don't have masses of 4HP enemies at the end of the game.
• The masochit's job : the Defender helped their squad by making sure the most vulnerable members (often the important striker and controller) wouldn't take to much wounds, often by taking the attacks instead of them.

I think those roles can be easily ported to XCOM2 and especially LW2 with it's bigger squads. It's a general consideration for me when i choose my soldiers and relevant to more than grenades.

Grenades in this situation could fit in all of those roles. The unique ability to swap the different grenades could allow every soldiers to either reinforce his main role or fill some bits of another role, possibly one with no soldier assigned (especially in small squads that need several strikers). As a result i consider it would be a good design to have grenades for all of those 4 roles. It would also make the Grenadier an extremely versatile and unique class capable of filling every role, and the same grenadier could fill different roles in different missions thanks to different grenades loadout. They shouldn't try to fill several roles at once thought, as they would be OP if they are good at both, or underpowered if they are not (unless maybe they are very specific in their use).

Now, since grenades are consumables that you can only use once and have an opportunity cost in forfeiting protection, regular damage or another utility item, i think they should be slightly better than re-usable abilities. They can be stronger by being able to affect multiple targets or by being plain stronger (more dmg, stronger CC ...).

They shouldn't trivialize missions if you mass them thought, which is hard to balance with the point above unless you somehow limit their availability to avoid spamming rather than try to keep them balanced.

TLDR So my view of the design space of grenades would be some (very) strong but limited items filling one of the 4 possible roles (with different grenades filling different roles). They could turn the tide of a battle if used correctly but you shouldn't be able to use them mindlessly due to their limited nature. How exactly could they be designed to fit this role thought, i'm not sure. Being limited to 1 grenade (regardless of type) / soldier (except for grenadier of course) could be one way, making them true consumables could be another. Maybe there might be more ways to achieve this.

Now, even if you asked to keep the thread general i still wish to briefly discuss every existing grenade.
[list]
[*]Frag/Plasma fits the Support job by shredding and (with the proper perks) removing cover to help the rest of squad kill their target more easily. Where they fail for me is at the remove cover part since basically before MSgt they are not better than re-usable (Demolition) because they can only (somewhat) reliably destroy one tile of cover. It have always been my biggest gripe with Sapper. They can do a bit of trash mobs cleaning but it's hard past the early stage of the game (very early they can even take down enemies on their own and act as a Striker grenade)
[*]Gas, due to it's low damage is purely a Controller grenade. However i think it's a poor one as Poison is a poor CC effect and that's where it fails. A weak grenade doesn't really have a place in a soldier's arsenal with all the other useful items.
[*]Fire used to be a Controller grenade with a strong, single target CC effect. The unreliability introduced in 1.5 will, at least for me, remove it from the controller job (i think for a single target control to have a value over mass control it have to be reliable). It will become a Striker grenade doing a lot of guaranteed damage to a single target, at least early because as the game progresses 4-9 damage might no longer be enough to maintain it's efficiency as a Striker tool compared to re-usable direct damage.
[*]Acid is a support grenade that "marks" a target for death by shredding a lot of armor. I think it fits badly that role because there are re-usable abilities that do it just as efficiently. It's DoT doesn't really allow it to act as a Striker grenade because you usually want the damage now, not later.
[*]EMP fits a weird place as both Striker and Control against some specific enemies but it's pretty efficient against those. I still mostly ignore it thought i might see a use against some late-game MEC pods that might warrant taking 1 EMP for big fights.
[*]Flashbang is obviously a Controller grenade and one of the best control tools available so it fits perfectly the strong consumable part, but not at all the limited availability as it's available right from the start and you can mass them as much as you want.
[*]Smoke is unique in being the only Defender grenade and the only available tool to protect several soldiers at once.[/list]
To me it looks like each of the starting grenade has a good and clearly defined (even if temporary) role to fill. The research-unlocked grenades however somewhat fail maybe by trying to fit several roles at once and ending up rather bad at each one which is actually quite sad

[stefan3iii]

I don't see why various grenades can't CC, Kill, or a mixture of both. The unique thing about grenades is that they always hit, they have an AOE, have limited charges, and can be fired especially effectively from a grenade launcher. There should be grenades that do lots of damage, grenades that CC, grenades that shred, etc etc.

That said the current implementation of grenades isn't great, they're wildly unbalanced, but I think simple tweaks would improve them.
1) Acid and Poison grenades are laughably weak. Unlocking Acid will probably never happen anyway, your archon corpses are much better spent on Fusion blades, or just melting them into elerium.
2) Plasma grenades are absurdly expensive to unlock. Like, someone accidentally put in an extra 0, because they cost 100 supplies, 20 alloy, 20 elerium, and multiple cores. They are literally 10 times as expensive to unlock as any other grenade. I didn't even bother in my current campaign.
3) Bluescreen Bombs are 'ok', but are completely replaced by bluescreen protocol on the grenadier, which is just better. They should at least guarantee a disorient. Honestly I'd like to see bluescreen protocol just deleted from the grenadier. Another option would be to make bluescreen bombs disable weapons for 1 turn for all enemies (not just mecs), so they have to be reloaded. Ie the same thing the codex does to your squad.
4) Sting and Incendiary are OP.
5) Conceal grenade is cool, wish it was more accessible.

More general feedback is that there isn't enough progression in grenades. Basically once you've unlocked incendiary, you've got the best grenades in the game. Yes you get advanced grenades eventually, about 85% of the way through your campaign, but for most of the campaign you're using frags, flashbangs\sting, incendiary, and smoke.