Grenade Launcher in Orc Problem: The 60% Slow Explained

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026 · Newest game update reflected: 2026.08.18.12.05 (18 August 2026). No single mechanic is cited more often across this site than the grenade launcher's slow. It appears in the write-up of every hard level documented here, in the explanation of why level 3.2 walls people, and in the reason one player had to write an entire alternative guide to 6.1. The turret's own damage number has almost nothing to do with any of that.

The numbers

From the player-measured sheet by the Steam user Mrlazy, self-dated 31 July 2026, as printed on the all turrets page. The sheet lists no shots-per-second figure, no penetration and no range for this turret — three blanks that make a direct comparison against a damage turret impossible even if the comparison were useful.

Two numbers, two different jobs

The 60% slow and the +30% damage are usually quoted together, but they are not the same lever and it helps to separate them.

The slow buys time inside a kill zone. The orc flow mechanic page makes the sharpest version of this argument: a slow matters far more at a chokepoint than anywhere else, because a slowed orc spends longer inside the one place your damage is actually concentrated. On 5.2 the page goes further and says the slow is what allows a lip to function as a kill box at all instead of a pass-through.

The +30% damage taken is a flat multiplier on every other turret firing into the slowed cluster. This is what the turret roles page means when it says the grenade launcher placed in front of your cannons multiplies the whole line, and what the FAQ page uses to argue that a DPS column cannot rank turrets on its own — 44 on detonation looks small beside the cannon's 34.5 DPS until you notice that one of those numbers is being applied to everything else you own.

The branch that published layouts assume

The grenade launcher is unusual on this site in that its upgrade branch, not its placement, is what pages keep returning to.

• The 3.2 difficulty spike page quotes a reviewer saying the game is massively fun unless you have not picked both lasers and grenade towers before 3.2, at which point maxed-out towers of every other category fall short. The page's own explanation is the scaling one: a grenade slow multiplies, more cannons only add.
• The upgrade grind page turns that into a spending rule — buy scaling before magnitude, and put resources into the laser and grenade branches even when your cannons are further along, because you are buying a different curve rather than a bigger number.
• On 6.1, most published layouts assume the slow branch is unlocked. The player Григорий wrote a separate guide specifically because he had upgraded everything except slow-down grenades and could not use any walkthrough he found.
• The 6.2 damageless page says the same about that level's schemes, and adds the diagnostic: before blaming your placement when a published layout underperforms, check which branch its author was working from.

That last point is the most useful thing on this page. A grenade launcher you have unlocked but not upgraded will make a proven layout collapse in a way that looks like a placement error.

Where players placed it

On 5.2, both detailed setups use it and they use it identically — jeffk114 wants slow grenades at the top of each lip to hold the enemy in the kill box, and Sulphuric_Glue opens his first base of fire with slow grenades to clump the wave before anything else fires. The third reply on that thread, from Bobby, compresses the whole level into one line: you need the freeze beam or gas grenades to slow the hordes at the lips, and after that it is about controlling the flow there. The site's own 5.2 checklist lists grenades at both lips as the single element every reply agreed on.

The placement rule that falls out of all of it is a positional one rather than a targeting one: the grenade launcher goes in front of your damage, at the point the map already narrows, and everything it slows should be inside something else's firing line.

Where it is weaker than it looks

The slow lasts 3 seconds and the radius is 13 m, which is the smallest area figure this site records for anything with an area — smaller than the mortar's 28 m blast and far smaller than the nuke's 250 m. A grenade launcher covering a wide approach is covering a fraction of it. And because its contribution is a multiplier, a grenade launcher placed where nothing else is shooting contributes close to nothing, which is the opposite failure mode from a cannon left in the wrong place.

What we have not confirmed

We do not know whether the 60% slow and the +30% vulnerability scale with upgrade tiers or stay fixed, which is the question every "check your branch" warning above implicitly depends on — no source in our guides gives tier-by-tier figures. We have no fire rate, range or penetration for the turret at all. We also cannot confirm whether multiple grenade launchers' slows stack, refresh, or simply overwrite each other; no layout documented here says. Neither logged patch on the update history page mentions the grenade launcher.

Sources on this site

Stats and the support framing: all turrets and turret roles. Why a slow is worth more at a bottleneck: orc flow mechanic. Branch priority: 3.2 and upgrade grind. Layout dependence: 6.1 and 6.2. Player placements: 5.2. The DPS-ranking myth: FAQ and myths. Definitions: glossary.