Sadly the real cash nature of EU makes it very hard to balance new weapon types. MA has responded to this by making "premium" forms of combat that are flashier and more elitist but more expensive as well. Mindforce is of course the best example of this, and i'm pretty sure any pet combat will fall into that category. Mining amps are another example of the way they give players a chance to play higher stakes. So i wouldn't be surprised to see, at some point, (L) grenades and such that do some fixed amount of total damage at some decidedly low eco.
Here's how something like that might work that wouldn't upset the balance, but would give people the option of paying top dollar for some carnage: I take a stock of three Doer Die npg102 (L)s (non-personnel grenade 102), each with a full tt of 4 peds. I put the Sollomate PEL Mk1 (Personal Explosive Launcher) on my quickbar at emergency weapon position, #9. I'm out hunting with the new herd behavior AI and make the mistake of shooting a berycled old alpha, who calls the pack to him. Suddenly i find myself surrounded!
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Calmly i tap '9', and then launch an npg102. As it explodes, it spreads 1100 damage evenly to the mobs around me (400 pecs*2.75 dmg/pec...i have maxed out stats on it
)--in this case there happen to be 10 mobs within a 3 m radius, so about 110/mob--but never more than 366/mob (1/3 of the total) preventing it from being used against a single mob eg *cough*spiders*cough*. This wipes out the bery youngs competely and injures the rest. Fortunately the blast stuns the affected mobs for a couple seconds, delaying their attacks. Even so, by the time the 4 second reload time of the PEL Mk1 is over (it is, after all, just a Mk1), i need to fap before i launch another salvo to clear out some more chickens. Then i fap again and draw my pistol to finish off the remaining berys. Finally i run around looting mangled corpses, laughing maniacally.
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Unfortunately in the process i stumble into a swarm of ignis, and the impossible-to-hit bugs hover above my head, sapping my health and causing huge amounts of frustration. Although i contemplate blowing them all to smithereens in a massive overkill with a smaller grenade, the npg101, prudence overcomes passion and i instead enable my Chikara spray atomizer SA-100 and use one of the 20-pec Stinky Bug Bomb 101 (L)s i have in inventory. The ignis all fall to the ground, stunned, and i run off before they recover. (Alternative scenario: the bugs are dead, but unlootable. Heck, there are times i'd run around looking for swarms of ignis to bomb if i could kill them that way. lol)
Note that the grenades are designated non-personnel; They only work on mobs. There are many ways to balance this should it need more tweaking. Anti-personnel Grenades that can injure players (APGx0x series) could be launched greater distances and be less economical than the NPG series. They would also injure the person launching them if exploded too close, and could do more than 1/3 total damage to a single avatar (maybe up to 2/3?), making them useful for PvP. Naturally they would do at least a majority of shrapnel damage (a damage type to my knowledge not currently done), but there could also be a APG20x series for napalm grenades that do burn, perhaps. Mortars and other interesting weapons could be managed a similar way. A reworked npg109 would be a formidable piece of ordnance capable of taking out a cluster of HUGE mobs... at a price. It would also require a very high level of ordnance skill to get full damage out of, should the explosives end up being skill-based in effect. The reworked APG109 would be WWIII-in-a-can, for that extra-special Landgrab surprise.
Anyway this is just in fun to point out that there are many possibilities that would make the universe more enjoyable and offer more options.