Make Grenades More Balanced

Greetings Devpeoples,

I would like to request that the Grenade Satchel items receive significant balancing, in order to bring them into line with the current arsenal of weapons. Below, I shall list the reasons I feel why this is needed, and ways to go about doing so.

As always, I would like to thank you for your time and continued development of this wonderful game.

Issues With Grenades

1. Grenades are currently obscenely powerful, breaking the progression difficulty of the game. It's being commented on regularly by newer players that from the point of acquiring their first Grenade Satchels, the difficulty of the game practically vanishes.

2. An infinite supply of mundane thrown weapons is distinctly out of place, especially considering ranged weapon ammunition is consumable (even throwing the Sickle has it come back to you, you don't magickally get more sickles).

3. There is zero real restricted ability to simply spamming massive Area of Effect damage. Durability is a joke, as extracting higher tier essence = infinite T1 essence (1x T4 = 2500x T1).

4. Weak Spots no longer matter, even using a Hunter Eminent card, you can instantly kill every creature with a single grenade (whilst almost every other weapon cannot unless actual aiming and hitting the Weak Spot).

5. Comparing Grenade Satchels to Enchantments, Grenades -vastly- out perform the capabilities of Enchantments in area of effect capability, supplanting magick as a truly comparable combat avenue.

6. Grenades have the second highest damage output, individually, of all current ranged weapons. Only the Paradox DB shotgun is higher, and the Grenades are significantly more spammable, have no costs (ammunition), can ignore weak spots entirely, don't need to worry about ranged damage fall-off, and can hit entire rooms at once.

7. Once you get 100% Fire Resistance, hitting yourself with a Grenade actually -heals- you, significantly. You become effectively immortal when using them knowing this.

8. Satchels and other off-hand weapons can benefit from the attributes of the primary hand weapon (including Critical Multiplier with Ferocity, making a Dauntless Dagger the -best- weapon to use with them), resulting in tremendous damage values.

As such, this creates a distinct problem in the balance of ranged weapons and combat as a whole. Grenades -should not- be the single best combat weapon in the game. They should have a specific purpose and be good at that purpose, they should not eclipse everything else at everything.

So, how we do address these things?

Possible Solutions

1. Grenades become a single use consumable. You craft them in batches (like ammunition), you throw them, they explode, they are gone. Increase the carry weight of each grenade to make carrying thousands unfeasible.
   Material quantity should increase to represent crafting multiple grenades.
   Material rarity should be increased for higher quality grenades.

2. Grenade Satchels cannot be repaired. You craft it, you throw them until it runs out, and then its gone. Significantly increase the carry weight of the Satchel to make carrying lots of Satchels unfeasible.
   Material quantity should increase to represent being a satchel of multiple grenades.
   Material rarity should be increased for higher quality satchels.

3. Remove the ability to apply attributes to grenades from materials used in crafting, treating them just like ammunition.

4. Change them from being considered as Ranged Damage for attribute/damage scaling. Instead, treat them as Fire Damage. Or even better yet as a new type: Explosive Damage.

5. Remove the ability to heal from your own grenades.

6. Remove the ability for main hand weapons to affect the attributes and damage of off-hand weapons, and vice versa.

Suggestions 1 & 2 focus upon making them consumable, in different ways. This means Players using them have the drive to acquire the resources to make use them. As something has a consumptive cost, it means the power level can be higher than others without a cost. With higher quality Satchels / Grenades, the materials needed to craft them should come from a steadily more rare material, inspiring treating the highest quality grenades as special purpose.

Suggestions 3 & 4 focus upon changing the attribute scaling of the grenades to separate them from general ranged weapons. #3 treats them just like ammunition, the materials you use -don't matter-, the thing itself is the purpose. #4 shifts them from normal ranged weapons into a new explosive category, allowing implementation of specific items that can be used to govern the scaling of grenades separately, allowing much greater control over them difficulty wise.

Suggestion 5 & 6 -should- be mandatory no matter what else happens. Healing yourself from these is ridiculous, and a critical knife should not make my grenade do approaching +5000% damage. Honestly, the Charm of Ferocity should also never apply to grenades, for this same reason.

My view towards this is not to make grenades un-useable, but rather to bring them into line with how the game has presented the other combat and crafting elements. Grenade Satchels since their release have sat outside the general arsenal of weapons in how they function, in a way that causes significant problems to difficulty, pacing, and combat as a whole. I would prefer grenades be balanced, to function logically from their crafting process, and to complement existing weapon options.

Kind Regards,

Kahz