Is there any elite abilities that can match AR’s High Explosive Grenades in terms of sheer damage?
Full Salvo should be able to do more with it’S passive by 2-3 cp…that said full salvo needs longer to cast.
You have to discount the opportunity cost to compare elites fairly. eg. Eruption hits very hard but it’s also consuming a Rage charge that you could have used to buff demolish. HEG replaces a normal Incendiary Grenade which already does very high damage per grenade.
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Ice Beam if you have a Frozen Figurine does the biggest hit as I recall.
Eldritch Scourge if you have an Eldritch Tome does a good bit of damage which also heals you and your group.
Yeah, stacking scourge with all the DoTs/DoT buffed non-DoTs and the tome is ridiculous burst damage, only downside is do it wrong and you burn all your cooldowns.
Hum i’m not sure how “stacking scourge with dots” is any relevant to getting better DPS when you’re supposed to rather separate their usages to get the most out of Flay.
Also:
I’m not quite sure we have the same definition of “burst”. 
My definition of “burst” is high dps in a short enough time to kill bosses before they can use their specials. Ex.
When fighting the filth puppy, if you have a good group, you can take him out before anyone is hounded. In those cases, I normally get off three casts of Scourge. If the group is exceptional dps, I get off two casts.
Having the highest range in the game (AR) should count in the power budget of the abilities. But I don’t think balance is a priority for funcom.
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From strictly a PvE balancing standpoint, 20 meters are practically the same with 10-15. Only pure melee gets unavoidable downtime, all other ranged weapons can do fine whether at 10 or 20 meters.
If they want to nerf AR all they need to do is adjust Incendiary Grenades and maybe the Stability passive. High Explosive Grenade is especially fine, it doesn’t need a nerf.
Basically same definition of burst for me. During that 6sec blood can just stack the DoTs for some pretty hefty damage but also burn alot of cooldowns/energy. If I just dump all my cooldowns(excl ultimate) in the right rotation I have about 3 energy left and can drop almost every non-lair/raid/dungeon mob, my IP is only like 380. By my definition that is burst, when you can blast out everything you have in a few sec and then drop to mediocre levels of DPS for a moment before jumping right back up to full facemelting.
Not quite…mostly but there are situations where 20m are clearly better than 10m. Things like the golem in HE is way easier with more range than less. Picking of enemies on the other end of a scenario too. While it’s true that in most situations you won’t feel the diffrence but that doesn’t make 20m range equal in balance than 10m or 15m. Just harder to quantify since it’s sporadic in positiv effect.
Never understood why AR is the only weapon that gets the hghest range while shotgun gets it’S crappy 3m passiv forcing you to go close combat.
Pretty much cause they kept the 1 consumer from TSW that worked that way, like how Blood only kept a channeled consumer.
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I’m talking about balance strictly in terms of unavoidable downtime. HE3 isn’t a range check, it’s an attention check. I’ve seen AR users get left behind in that fight because they don’t know how the spirits work so they position themselves far away across the tank. As long as you position yourself right, you will never be out of range of HE3 at 10m or 20. If you position yourself incorrectly, even 20m won’t save you.
Of course it does. If 99% of content is practically the same for 10 meter and 20 meter range, then they can’t nerf the AR in the name of balance because it’s subjectively easier on the remaining 1%.
In SWL it is indeed less noticeable than in TSW especially for the casual players (who can’t really abuse such subtle uptime advantage effectively).
I think that it will be more obvious if they ever release more PvP battlegrounds (it’s in PvP where this advantage blows out of proportion), Eidolon and Flappy.
See now, that’s just a jab at me in an attempt to discredit my argument. I’m melee DPS, I’m bound to abuse all uptime advantages. You’re free to start a fully new thread and post all the example situations where 20 meters help you avoid downtime that is unavoidable at 10 meters, rather than call others “casuals who can’t abuse subtle uptime advantage”. Leogrim posted an example and I told him how that example is wrong. The community can have a dedicated discussion if you’re very confident there is a range issue. We can have a look at all encounters and see if there really are a plague of unavoidable downtimes for the 10 meter range. Spoiler alert: there aren’t.
The truth is, if AR gets nerfed it will be because some of its damage values are out of line. Not because it can offer a range advantage in 1% of fights.
That would be why I explicitly said strictly PvE. I was primarily a PvP player in TSW. The vast selection of skills made all weapons situationally desirable regardless of range back then, but proper PvP would be a complete AR mess in SWL. They admittedly didn’t have PvP in mind for the SWL redesigns.
it’s not about “if you can avoid downtimes”. I use blade and I still shoot all the time with very very few exceptions and Molov here will explain to you that in those cases you should just take tank shield and have 100% uptime and that it’s as good as being ranged.
So it never was about that. It’s about how easy it is to avoid things and have good uptime for free, instead of the need of doing extra things, taking extra abilities, gadgets, loosing by preparing for perfect timing and resource management for when you will need to leave, just BECAUSE you can’t be at range etc.
And AR (as well as Ele and Blood) has a good range for being safe from everything most of times. While Pis/SG I consider practically melee range. I was 15m in TSW for long time and distance matters. It’s same in SWL. Being it regional bird where you actually can avoid things because of all free space around (while being closer means you deal with others s@#t), being it immolated on HE5 (good luck running and shooting as P/SG and not f…king playfield completely). Having range helps with all adds as you actually have time to react/kite if you draw attention and you can because you are the one who CC them while others waits because if they draw attention they die. Notice how range is making NYR10 more convenient if you don’t need to leave circle despite “bad” things happening (because it’s hard to get 10 perfect players who do everything by book so range wouldn’t matter)?
It’s not really about “if it can be avoided on perfect run” but how much it affects a chance you succeed. And 15m range is great in this in SWL. Bacause 90% mechanic is below 10m. It’s really easy and lazy life out there 
Did I mentioned AR is the only weapon that actually has 100% shooting uptime when you shooting behind you, like while running away things (you don’t need that often being at 15m but it’s still worth something at NYR10 where everyone is at 7m). Ele can do it only for limited because of lousy cast times and blood is even worse being channeled. At least all three can shoot when hidden from waves and such, pistols/SG can’t.
And AR was a safe/noob weapon on HR6 in TSW for a reason. All others need to go into yellows to be in range. Again, it’s easy for any weapon to be there, having their uptime while boss is doing nothing, but you raising the risk things go wrong. On your side, or the servers.
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Based on all the irrelevant information you just dumped, I don’t think you understand the origin of the argument. Mnord suggested that having extra range should factor into the “power budget” i.e. be an excuse for lowering the damage of AR. I’m repeating the same thing over and over again. I’m not saying having extra range doesn’t make it easier, I’m saying it’s not a valid excuse to nerf overall damage output. There are very very few situations where the extra range actually matters and nerfing the damage globally for those edge cases would be extremely poor judgement in terms of balancing.
Don’t hit me with another non sequitur. If you think that AR damage should globally be nerfed because it has extra range, just say that. If you want to go that way, you may as well completely suggest readjusting the damage of all skills according to their maximum range capabilities.
I really have to expand on this because clearly the point is missed. Even if we abandoned the downtime perspective like you did and look at if purely from an “easiness” standpoint, 80% of boss encounters are not any different for higher range. When you suggest AR damage to be nerfed simply because it has extra range (by how much? 33% more range warrants how big of a damage nerf?), you’re moving the weapon into the dumpster tier for 80% of encounters just because it has it easier on the other 20%. That’s absurd.
By how much? Start with making it worse than shorter range weapons (eg. 2% less than fists)
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When I say that casual (and even reguar) players don’t abuse range is because there is no need to do so in regular gameplay.
In New york raid, you can keep dpsing at max range and just sidestep to hide ffrom the wave losing almost 0 uptime. You also have the ability to quickly dps adds and golems coming (before any other weapons)
In flappy you could keep dpsing while standing on the ledge if you were the spider dpser (+ it was way easier to play long range overall for this fight).
In Eldorado you could dps typical relic spots from other ledges without being in the range of other weapons (though it is a massive advantage that is also noticeable in all the other battlegrounds, even shamballa).
But like others said, longer ranges also bring decent conveniency that sometimes translate to more effective dps (even if you can theorically still dps as melee or mid range) in fights where more space is beneficial (MT or MF6 come to my mind).
That’s why I said that it is more noticeable for players who :
know TSW because it used to be even more relevant (and even abused in pvp).
and/or are “end-game” players who have experience in “progress” fights where such benefits are relevant (hence “not casual/regular players” who play E8 at 1k IP and chill)
And I said it was a jab at me to discredit my argument because:
I was a TSW player, primarily a PvP one at that, but I fully understand that this isn’t TSW. This is SWL. Bringing TSW encounters into the argument is irrelevant until that content makes its way into SWL. We already established PvP isn’t within the scope of this argument either. The very first thing I said on my first reply was “strictly PvE” and even when you ignored that, I conceded again that PvP would be a mess. Come on, am I asking for too much?
And I cleared E10 dungeons at 1k IP (except HR of course) as melee DPS with a team of other ~1k’s. Don’t use a straw man; counter the points of the person you’re replying to. Being an end-game player shouldn’t blind you to the reality of content.
My point is extremely simple and it baffles me I have to keep repeating it as it’s consistently ignored. The number of fights where range doesn’t matter massively outnumber the fights where it does. If you nerf the damage output of the AR (and possibly other ranged weapons) just because they have a range advantage, you’re unjustly nerfing them for over 80% of the content where range doesn’t matter. If the majority of SWL’s encounters were any different (let alone easier) for range, I would gladly agree with you. But as it stands, it’s unfair. Do we really need to individually go through every single dungeon, lair, regional encounter for you to understand this? Or would you like to keep acting like the entire game is MT and NYR E10?
I’ll simply stop here because you’re not willing to discuss the ramifications of your suggestion.
But that’s not a range issue. I specifically asked how much a range advantage should call for a penalty in damage. Don’t be disingenuous. It’s not the range advantage that makes AR deal more damage than Fists. Hammer and Blade outperform Fists as well. I would really prefer we consider weapon balance to be a more sophisticated issue rather than “higher range, lower damage”.