The veteran talent rework was big and made a lot of grenade focused builds better/cost less points. Krak grenades were also heavily buffed. Technically smoke grenades are cheaper to invest in and spam too, but they are still smoke grenades.
The patch notes said:
Smoke Grenade
Reduced chain time of instant throw 0.9s → 0.2s
Is that it though? Like, hopefully they might be good against the new plasma gunner enemies too, but that’s not nearly enough to close the gap with the other grenades. I know the smoke AoE was smaller than the visual so they were never reliable to begin with and honestly could impair player vision against enemies that could still see and shoot the players.
I only saw one guy at Havoc, using it for melee veteran, self smoking or smoking shooter concentration. But i do feel shredder would do better vs concentration anyway.
Near as I can tell they’re still trash. I use a mod that removes the smoke effect and replaces it with a grey circle on the ground, which makes them merely Bad instead of Actively Detrimental. I’ve only seen like one or two guys using them, and one of them was low level and throwing them at hordes so I think he only brought them for the Penance.
If it were up to me, I’d make them have a toughness regeneration aura, like 2%-4% per second to allies standing in the cloud, in addition to whatever it is they do now. And of course, make the dang smoke cloud translucent to players. Also I would have put them in the middle with the Sergeant skill tree, not on the right with the Jungle Fighter tree. Sergeant is more team buff oriented and Jungle Fighter feels to me like it’s better at burst damage than the other two so krak grenades would fit in there. Not that grenade placement on the tree matters anymore or anything.
They are trash. Taking smoke grenades equates to losing approximately 30% of your total firepower which comes from spamming your damage grenades.
In Havoc I can kill most of gunners and shooters as long as my Ogryn/Zealot hold the horde. In auric and lower there’s no need for them at all, since you can survive gunners and shooters just by using abilities correctly and not staying in the open.
In auric new vigilant autoguns kill most enemies in 1 single shot, while you restore toughness in Exe Stance and have 40% damage reduction from talents and perks. Why would you use Smoke Grenades instead of just killing them is beyond me. Maybe for that one time when the game spawns 10 Scab Stalkers away from you while you need to reload and everyone on the team is low on HP and has no cooldowns.
It’s only good for melee Veteran so you can cut distance, but then again, it’s not your job to dive headfirst into enemies (unless your team has only Vets and Psykers). And melee Veteran is still kinda a meme build outside of a few weapons (power sword/falchion/ds) that is solely held together by Voice of Command’s existence.
Smoke Grenades need to buff teammates and/or debuff enemies inside of smoke cloud. At the very least they should give all enemies inside the cloud an effect similar to Exe Stance, so that your teammates could see all those Crushers you just smoked.
Making a near infinite blitz that restores toughness to the entire team is a bit too strong, but they definitely need something. Maybe 15% damage reduction inside the gas cloud would do. On it’s own it may not sound like much, but at least it can stack with other effects, such as Zealot’s aura and 60% damage reduction for a single hit every 8 secs, Arbites dog talent that gives 20% reduction to teammates upon dog pounce, etc.
About their only use is funneling shooters if people all decide to enter the cloud. This is also why some groups swear by them, under coordination you can use them to basically force any and all encounters into melee only. The smoke also can’t die, granting consistent 30s of protection unlike dome that expires right away if gunners are dumping into it (without tinkerer it’s only 15s).
In auric and other games I see people sprawl way too much for them to be useful, and the general usefulness of grenades and kraks is a lot to pass up. They also kill groups of shooters the fastest so the value is pretty low. Could use some kind of buff state in the smoke, can we take something from the shopping list of buffs scriers has?
I remember seeing someone suggest it grant brief threat reduction to teammates who pass through and thinking it was very thematically fitting and useful. Threat reduction to reposition or to strike a priority target among a horde of lessers seems useful compared with how smokes affect enemies in general.
However, almos all of CN serve teams would bring a smoke vet for havoc 40 games. And the other region players who come to CN serve bring it too. In our opinion, a smoke vet can ingore gunners’ barrage and protect ogryn and psyker deal damage to elites. It’s really efficient for havoc games. If someone really like krak or shredder, they will play two vets in same team.
Bubble has a higher cooldown, while Vet can carry up to 4 smoke grenades that work 30 seconds each with Grenade Tinkerer. Even if Psyker uses bubble with 6 warp charges to decrease the cooldown, you cannot place the second bubble right away. So having smokes restore toughness would be way stronger.
I’m not sure, with the last patch bubble cooldown is basically 20.25 seconds, since psykinetic’s aura is always active in Auric and if you take seer presence aura, witch you should do.
never had a match, havoc or otherwise, profit from smokes (playing with randoms mind you) in any feasible way.
neither do I need gunners ”blocked” visually, it rather blocks my overview over possible encounters and enemy clusters, in a fraction of the time this “tactic” would play out I slid towards and whacked em dead.
plus it destroys any momentum you generated pushing forward and actually killing stuff, randoms tend to stall and be indecisive enough as it is, without additional “hunker down” incentives.
usually by the time smoke goes out they still stand there uncoordinated, dicks in hand and get volleyed then by the same gunners they tried to avoid rather than later.
granted, most havoc matches 35+ got people knowing their but then even more so, movement was/is key.
with so much yellow toughness, bubbles not put where you are but where the engagement WILL BE, the momentum leaves no time for this counterstrike behavior and is much more efficient
Smokes were bis since their release even with the tax nodes and a must pick. Especially in cultist games, where the high ranged damage wittles down most “meta” players over time.
but then even more so, movement was/is key.