Maybe I was the only one rocking this before, but my DPS dropped significantly after the change, plus I had to give up another skill point just to make it usable with a lightning build. The problem is that it lost all the flat lightning and electrocute damage, and the transmuter is a mere 50% of physical to lighting, which doesn’t compensate for flat damage and 15% conversion on top.
And, I’m not just looking at sheet damage and complaining. My crits are now less than what I was averaging on normal hits.
Shattering Blast doesn’t do me any good adding internal trauma and pierce damage.
I can’t really see a point in the transmuter. You’re either going to use Grenado with fire and physical damage types, or pass up Grenado altogether if you’re heavy in lightning. And why would you give up physical damage if you’re spread between physical and lightning? I’m just not seeing the sense in this.
Also it weakens Ulzuin’s Chosen by making one of the usable skills with it far less desirable with lightning build options.
Grenado was mostly Physical Damage oriented since forever.
To make Skyfire Grenado work with Lightning now, you need to invest on Physical Damage as well as Lightning Damage. For my Commando, it even got a small buff with this change, and I love it now.
It’s a fairly measly amount compared to what you got before. Unless you also stack Internal Trauma I guess.
If you have bonuses to both, it doesn’t make much sense to tranmute between the two. Other transmuters like Aether to Chaos or Lightning to Vitality transform the whole skill opening up other build options. Here you’re always better off having a larger bonus to Physical and not taking the transmuter.
Those transmuters do that because they convert 100% of the skill’s damage type at next to no cost.
With Skyfire Grenado, I imagine you would have to make up for the last 50% physical that it doesn’t convert to Lightning through skills and items such as Stormcaller’s Pact, your weapons, and a component or two. Part fire/part Lightning Grenado if i’m not wrong here.
I agree with OP about the conversion bit. Trasmuter would be better off doing 100% conversion.
Imo, 100% fire to lightning would make more sense and making it a Lightning/Physical Grenado. We can then convert the remaining physical using skills and items. Currently its Fire/Lightning/Physical. Damage types all over the place.
True, but then i could’ve achieved conversion that way if i wanted my physical damage converted rather than opting the transmuter. Not that i’m saying the current stat the transmuter is a complete waste. I’m just saying they could’ve allowed us 100% conversion it’d make for some interesting builds
Considering you could already use conversion items with how it was originally, the skill is simply far from what it was for lightning heavy builds. 50% conversion =/= 15% + flat bonus. I don’t mind that the main version of Grenado is now better for physical damage builds, but I can’t see a reason for a lightning build to invest points in it when other skills give more bang for the buck. 75% would put it more in the range of what you could get out of it before.
Yes, you could have converted through items before but you’re saving yourself the need get the full 100% by getting the 50% conversion with one point. You’re most likely going to get that other 50% anyway through components and auras like evil baka said.
Tainted power can give 100% conversion because it’s not as easy to get aether to chaos conversion. Physical to lightning,not so difficult.
The thing is, in skill transmutation isn’t added. You don’t need 50% phys to lightning, you need 100% anyway if you want pure Lightning grenados. All the transmutation does is change 50% of the base physical into Lightning. In skill transmutations are applied at a different stage from any other transmutation.
Lets just go with a 1000 damage Grenado. 1000 physical damage, 0 conversion.
Skyfire makes it 500 Lightning, 500 Phys. This already is flat out a damage nerf if going 50/50 phys lightning, as the lower physical damage means a lower %age of physical damage will get through the target’s armor, unless you have the enemy pen’d to at least 0% lightning resistance to make up for the difference. Phys is pretty all or nothing a damage type because %phys resistance is rare, and even enemies rarely go over 20% phys resistance, while seeing 50%+innate elemental resistances before item stat bonuses isn’t impossible. I’ve had cases where humanoid bosses spawned almost purely immune to my main damage type because they spawned with a high res yellow of that type. Meanwhile, armor stops effecting phys damage once you break through it on the attack, and +200 will still add up to +200 damage for the most part.
Lets pretend you have 50% Phys > Lightning Conversion, and run Skyfire.
What you get is 500 from the Transmutor is lightning, and then the remaining 500 is then again split by 50% by your 50% phys > Lightning transmutor stat, so 750 lightning 250 physical.
This means old builds that already had massive %conversion stats have just flat out lost base damage from the original Skyfire node that was converting some of the Fire damage they didn’t want anyway into Lightning, on top of base lightning damage, AND not having their conversion devalued a bit on the base Grenado. The skyfire Transmutor node is going to need some buffs to make up for the changes for any lightning grenado builds, the change to Shattering Blast alone won’t really make up for it.
Problem with Skyfire Grenado is that it’s a transmuter.
The way transmuter work is not good with any conversion that’s below 100%, because conversion from transmuter get calculated before conversion from skills and items, therefore it’s not additive. This is why Discord from Cadence works poorly in the same sense of this Skyfire Grenado. So the only way to get 100% conversion is to stack 100% conversion from buffs and items which if you reach that point, why bother put a point in the transmuter?
To remind people that it’s not additive, take a look again at the order of conversion.
The order of events for Conversion is as follows: Base Skill > Skill Modifiers > Conversion on the Skill or Transmuter > Conversion on Equipment and Buffs > Equipment, Auras and Passives
So a Skyfire Grenado plus 50% conversion from buffs and items will equal 75% conversion to push it to 100% you’ll need 100% conversion from skills and items.
I’m not sure if devs are aware of the game mechanics? How did they came up with these half working transmuters is amusing. :rolleyes:
Nicely put Zars and Steelflame. Cadence is a perfect example of a dysfunctional transmuter. They really need to fix Grenado. I know some liked to use it before the patch but now in it’s current state it is a mess.
the math is correct but ignores anything else. If you are a Lightning build, you will have a lot more +% Lightning than Physical, so you gain a lot more in Lightning than you lose in Physical
Yes, but the relative gain vs the old Skyfire node is FAR less. Late game lightning casters would generally have had 50-60% phys to lightning conversion IIRC, maybe a bit less. All you gave them was +25% conversion, but in trade flat out removed the base damage of Skyfire Grenado node, as well as the fire > Lightning conversion that made the second node useful for further skyfire scaling.
Thanks for the adjustment up to 80%. Damage isn’t as high as it was originally, but it still helped. I’m still iffy on moving more points into it, but I’ll play around with it some more.
And thanks for the further explanations, Zars and Steelflame.
I played around with my old Grenadier (Fire+Lightning Elementalist). Haven’t had a chance to play in the last 2 weeks.
Damage output seems about the same with transmuter. My crit damage seems to range between 50K to 150K when all RR’s are applied. Average damage seems to be around 70K. I’ll post a vid later in the day. Seems the same as before.
I don’t really feel like Grenado got a buff at all. It did get a mana reduction cost which is very helpful. Moving the %Crit modifier to the 3rd tier means that Physical/Physical conversion builds are forced to take Shattering Blast as a great portion of Grenado’s damage output comes from that +50% Crit Damage. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it just feels like I have to invest a lot more to get the same returns. Now the 2nd modifier doesn’t seem that lucrative.
Also I tried out one of my extremely old builds that threw “Chaos” infused Grenados. The last modifier does not appear to convert the Chaos damage into a DoT and on top of that Ulzuin’s Chosen lowers the physical damage output with it’s +10% phys to fire. It’s not really that bad except I seem to do more damage from the granted skill “Obsidian Tremor” which has no CD.
Played around with Mortar Trap as well. Damage output seems the same.
Edit: Never mind. Did my testing without realising I hadn’t switched on Stormcaller’s Pact - “Derp”. It’s definitely stronger. Biggest crit I saw was around 190K so still not as powerful as some LMB builds but still pretty good.
I still feel like shattering blast is far too conservative. I think if the designers want to buff a well known “weak” skill, they should make it overpowered for one patch cycle so that it then becomes a “good” skill, then tone it back. At least from the perspective of the one build I tried it with, shattering blast is not that great. I’ve got a lightning/electrocute elementalist, and going for 15/12 shattering blast reduces electrocute ticks from 106k to 98k against the dummy (note, much higher damage would be possible if this build were designed by a better player; it’s far from optimized). Perhaps if I had the points to invest in grenado itself, things would be different, but even 200k every few seconds isn’t that great, since my base savagery DPS is higher, and even that’s only a part of my non DoT damage.
