Currently the Shrapnel perk on the big guy’s Mk VI Rumbler applies 4 stacks of bleed to enemies “in close proximity”, which appears to be about a 2m diameter sphere. On malice, the only enemies that do not die at this distance from one grenade on a maxed out weapon are ogryns and maulers, and they proceed to take 11, 7, 7, and 3 damage from bleed. The 4 stacks of bleed and the talent that provides damage resistance from having bleeding enemies only lasts 2 seconds which is not enough time to even reload, let alone get off another shot that only detonates after a timer, after hitting something.
So Ogryns are the only enemies that ever even feel that bleed damage because everything else dies at that distance, it lasts 2 seconds, does no damage, and barely ever activates a bleed build’s talents. It’s also EXTREMELY hard to get a shot that close enough to an ogryn without it bouncing too far away without using the stick to ogryns blessing. On top of that, the grenade usually lands at the feet and so the sphere of bleed stacks is likely half through the floor. I bounced shots off the ground standing directly in front of a reaper and it bounced too high over his head and did not apply any bleed.
I propose the grenades apply 16 bleed stacks at the very center of the blast and decrease to 1 at the edge of the blast radius. When you test how close a grenade has to be to an enemy right now, the only time any enemy will get 16 bleed stacks is when sticking grenades to ogryn enemies. The Shrapnel perk is currently useless and its very apparent when testing in the meat grinder and seeing when bleed stacks apply from it. It could tie in so nicely with the current Ogryn bleed builds. It also makes literal sense that a shrapnel grenade would blast cutting shrapnel beyond about 3 feet. Thanks!
Yes, the epicenter aka the close range part in the blessing (worded wrong) is rather small in practice and from the bounce and floor detonation turning it into a half-sphere.
It’s a blessing that sounds a lot better than it is and a radius based drop-off would make it usable, it’s rather meh right now.
16 stacks is probably too much, even 4 with full drop-off would be a huge improvement.
P.S. You can see the radius on the weapon info card
BUT Radius “Big Boom” Talent still appears bugged it doesn’t increase this in display, but it does in-game afaik.
I could come to a middle ground of 8 bleed at center. The purpose being I’d like to be able to get a reload off and detonate another shot before ALL of the bleed stacks from the previous round are gone, so to be able to build up enough stacks on enemies to actually do worthwhile damage. Usually that’s like 7+ stacks things like that get decently high on that exponential curve. I just know soulblaze, haven’t looked at bleed damage tables.
so, before i read this wrong:
you play usually higher than malice and use this as an example or play up to malice with maxed out weapons?
this makes it hard to answer proper, cause testing bleed builds in auric maelstrom/havoc the bully 3 light massacre and kiting mixed hordes peppering them with the rumbler and bullrushing backb and forth, i see no problem keeping enemies bleeding.
first tour guardsman posted a nice build couple days ago for havoc.
Yes, I usually play auric, havoc, damnation. The rumbler is still great for bleed builds at that difficulty but just because of the blast damage taking care of the already low health enemies that are bleeding from melee hits and generally any weapon that can do damage through other enemies is great. The shrapnel perk however is not applying any bleed to the vast majority of enemies hit by the blast. Most things die from the blast at the radius bleed is applied and unless you’ve already been applying stacks to a ogryn enemy, then hit it with a sticky or a lucky shot that doesn’t bounce away, only then can you get enough bleed stacks to do damage worthy of using up a weapon blessing slot. Say instead of a horde, you’re facing a boss and every shot nails it, you’ll still only ever do about 20 damage worth of bleed each shot because the stacks decay twice as fast as you can get another shot to explode.
I tried using the perk to push into rooms with gunners - to stagger, apply some bleed and get some damage resistance before pushing in for melee and bullrush but again, I couldn’t get bleed stacks to apply to anything other than ogryns/reapers and 4 bleed stacks lasts 2 seconds. Not enough time to do anything.
The perks is not worth having in any scenario. Even the perk that increase blast radius by only 6% per continuous shot is surely better for bleed builds than the shrapnel perk because that actually increases the radius high and medium blast damage is done, thus actually doing more damage to more enemies.
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