Guide Ned Reddavis' Guide to Grenade Damage (Updated to pyp-v1.0.0)

Ned_Reddavis

Honorable Pirate
As you can tell from the title, this is another damage optimization guide, this time for grenades. As per usual we will start with the skills in general and assess what does the most damage per animation time, then move onto specific weapons and if any of those have abilities that need inquiring about. By then we should have a good equation to approximate damage for every weapon in every circumstance, and then discover what weapon does the most damage per second. Also note that every damage calculation is under the assumption of being on a level 50 notoriety pirate, level 30 grenade, and with maximum skill rank for each component being used in the calculation. We will begin with the skill tree, pictured below.


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Grenade Skill Tree


At the top of the tree there are two throwing types for all grenades, Throw and Long Volley. For a throw and long volley of equal rank, long volley shows always having twice the damage of the throw skill. This is odd when compared to guns, which have a similar setup with a standard shot or an aimed shot, but different performance. For guns the aim techniques have equal damage, but aiming ramps up your damage linearly up to a peak increase, but for grenades the base damage starts higher, and, in testing charging a full grenade long volley throw does not change the damage at all. So in essence there is no incentive, as far as damage, to actually hold your long volley aim farther than just the start of the aiming technique.

It is not quite clear just from that which type of throw gives the most damage per second, as each have different animation times. Using my handy OBS and a video editor I can find the time for a full animation of doing either throw or long volley and use that time to compare to their damage potential. Interestingly, even though the damage of long volley is higher, canceling the long volley aim early gives it an equal animation time to the less powerful throw skill. Canceling long volley at under 3 bars (out of the 10 bars to build to max volley) will give it a faster animation time than the regular throw, guaranteeing that the long volley throwing skill does more damage than the throw skill.
Ammunition Damage


Now we move onto the ammunition. The discussion of damage here is similar to that of guns. Damage is actually calculated as a sum of the displayed damage of the throwing skill and ammo type that you use, then increased by multiplicative factors, such as skill rank for both ammo type and throwing skill. Since the animation times between grenade types doesn't change (although you do walk slower with siege charge), and assuming that ammo economy is not a concern, we should always pick a grenade that does more damage. Also similar to guns, the highest grenade may not be the best when accounting for the increase to skill on certain grenades. At the same ranks, siege will do the most damage, second to that is the basic grenade, followed by stink, fire, and lastly with smoke which has no damage displayed for it so it is assumed to be 0.

From Hollowed Woods, two new grenades have been introduced that have special unlimited ammunition much like the explosive ammo. These are surprisingly deadly to use and outperform their limited ammo capacity brethren!

Passives


None of the passive skills in the grenade skill tree will actively increase the damage that you do. It is advisable however to use the skill demolitions, since it increases the area of effect damage therefore indirectly increasing your damage by decreasing the likelihood of a missed grenade.

One skill that is not on the grenade skill tree, but still important here is the cannon passive skill called barrage, which increases your grenade damage by up to 25% at rank 5.

Weapon Skills


There are actually very few grenades in the game as of posting this guide, and because of that there is not much diversity in the pool of skills that increase grenade damage. In fact, the only skills on any current grenade that increase damage are those that increase the rank of an ammunition type or a throwing ability. All these grenades then do is change a multiplicative factor of the damage, so this is easy to calculate in.

Damage Equation


Now that we have gone through each element of grenades, we are ready to discuss a general equation that can closely approximate the damage potential of one grenade throw. You can safely skip this section if you never want to calculate damage yourself! Without much discussion of the mathematical reasoning (which I did in the guides for swords and guns) here it is:
D=1.5*(R1T + R1A)*S1*S2*(1+.005*A)*(1+0.5*PA)​

This is defined with the following quantities and with the charts below:​

  • R1T= Rank 1 Damage of throw used (See Table 1 Below)
  • R1A= Rank 1 Damage of ammunition type used (See Table 1 Below); this is replaced by a 1.3 for Maelstrom Charge and Hollowed Flame
  • S1=Net damage increase for throwing ability (See Table 2 Below)
  • S2=Net damage increase for ammunition ability (See Table 2 Below)
  • A=Weapon attack value
  • PA= Passive cannon ability (Barrage) rank 0-5

Table 1: Minimum damage values for formulae
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Table 2: Damage factors by skill point rank for formulae
1590974887895.png

Damage Per Second


Now that we have the damage sorted out, we should go further in depth on damage per second. Combining the damage of a grenade throw with the calculated animation times of a throw and long volley done earlier we can form the damage per second of each grenade. To be thorough, I did this for every grenade using every ammo type available (expect smoke cause that stuff stinks.. ) for a heuristically optimized long volley at 1-bar releasing, a full 10-bar long volley release, and normal toss. I will not present all of these here since most combinations are inconsequential. Therefore, I will represent the 3 (technically 4) highest combinations and discuss them later. For reference to remove confusion, by "1 bar" I mean a one-tenth filled long volley throw of that ammo type and grenade. The graphic is color coordinated by rarity and organized highest to lowest DPS from top to bottom:


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Takeaways

A full volley throw will always do more damage than just a throw, however it is even better to start a long volley charge and cancel it as quickly as possible. The best grenade to use is now a bit more of a tossup. Storm Sphere assuredly has the highest potential, but it's special deals self damage that can only be tanked twice. Moonstone and Green Ornament are best if you don't have the luxury of having Storm Sphere. Breath of HW is never best in category, so if you have Storm Sphere and Moonstone, then you can safely avoid this one. Unfortunately, none of the grenades, not even Storm Sphere are viable methods for popular enemy farming spots like the Gold Room. Also as a side note, grenades can get to pretty high DPS under the right conditions compared to guns, but these were never considered as they are unstable methods.

And that's all I have acquired thus far for finding grenade DPS, for those of you that made it this far, and those that scrolled right to the bottom, I really hope that this was helpful in some way! Questions and suggestions are always welcome!

If you are still curious about this topic and exactly how I did this, check out my google spreadsheet that I compiled for viewing pleasure!
 

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