1.3.6 Flamethrower Changes

[Squidslinger Gilder]

I love it. Please don't touch fire dmg. It is good to have it being another viable option. I don't want fire to return to what it was for months before it was finally fixed. Fire should be king of CQC with Gat/flak/mort as it's Queen.

If you must touch something, touch the ignition chance with the flamer. Clean up the runaway stacks. A range reduction wouldn't be bad either. That or if it is possible, do something so that the stacks are applied with more intensity the closer the ship is. When a ship pulls away or evades the stacks don't climb as fast. Force the flamerboat to commit themselves to heavy CQC.

[-Mad Maverick-]

I was playing with geo earlier and explaining to him how it felt a lot like the beta flamer because the fires were catching way more consistently will bring back the heat sink thus making the gunner a viable class again!!

Why would I prefer a gunner with heatsink over an engineer with dps-optimizing ammo and chem spray, especially when considering heatsink doesn't prevent fires during reloads?

sorry I was using stating this with the assumption that the dps gets nerfed back down.  with that done if I have a goldfish facing a flamer squid or pyra or whatever I'll go hwacha with a gunner that will have heavy/burst and heatsink.   this gunner will be able to fire from long range and if a close quarter engagement is imminent he can go heat sink to protect from disable while disabling the flamer in turn.  then switch to burst or charged to finish the boat off... he will use a buff or wrench depending on the opponents loadouts...  if I had a blender fish I would go engi for sure though because I would just have him go full repair load out with heavy clip since no other clip is really that helpful for the caro so versatility in ammo type isn't as important 

[Crafeksterty]

The point with the flamerthrower getting a "buff" was more a fix. This fix makes us expect how the flamethrower works without it being unreliable. We can rely now on its functions. And clearly, we see its functions.

Coming from conversation with skrim, the heavy ammount of stacks that the flamer thrower throws is the most unique aspect of the weapon. I almost want the damage gone entierly And keep on with the heavy stack throwing but do no real flamer hits of damage. It never seemed like a hard hitting weapon, and is the basis of the fire mechanic so weakening its use as a weapon that kills, and have it be the utility like weapon how the harpoon, flare, minelauncher are.


An example on stack heavy flamers would be to disable with Hwacha, keep them disabled with flamers.
Carronade a baloon, keep that baloon down.

Annoying close range? Fire away.



Does not really Damage the situation to glory, but rather swatting your hand infront of your opponent to sho him away.
So the only damage that would be given into this is the 20 stacks. And that damage is in most cases easy enough to combat with extinguishers or chems while the ship tries to flee. And harmfull enough to be left unattended. We may in some builds finaly have Fire Fighter engineers.

[-Mad Maverick-]

yup exactly what I'm saying

[Wundsalz]

I almost want the damage gone entierly And keep on with the heavy stack throwing but do no real flamer hits of damage.

By removing the direct damage entirely, the flamer could be rendered entirely useless  with chem-spray again. That's a feature which made the flamer quite unpopular in organized matches. Hence I don't like this approach to fix the current flamer.

[Mr. Ace Rimmer]

But chem spray doesn't prevent direct fire damage and now, miss one coat of chem spray and it's fatal.

1.6 damage per round seems just a tad on the high side. chance of ignition with each particle being at it's current percentage should come down to under 20% (you get 300 chances to add 1 stack of flame with 1 clip of normal ammunition, when that is @ an over 1/4 chance... you should on average be stacking 75 stacks per component (capping at 20 if not extinguished) - That's far to high. Mess up your chem spray run or, need to make a mallet hit because of the flamer dps, and you can very quickly be in big trouble.

This effect is only made worse with a second flamer.

IMHO, decrease the damage per round (particle) to 1, or even less. Decrease the ignition chance to 15% or even 10% and keep the range the same. If you lower the range, it will mean that you have to get far to close for it to be of equal use than say gat/mortar, or even gat/flak. I thought the idea was to make this a viable alternative.

[Wundsalz]

IMHO, decrease the damage per round (particle) to 1, or even less. Decrease the ignition chance to 15% or even 10% and keep the range the same. If you lower the range, it will mean that you have to get far to close for it to be of equal use than say gat/mortar, or even gat/flak. I thought the idea was to make this a viable alternative.

When considering a flat ignition chance reduction we need to keep incendiary rounds with their 20% ignition chance in mind.

[Schwerbelastung]

IMHO, decrease the damage per round (particle) to 1, or even less. Decrease the ignition chance to 15% or even 10% and keep the range the same. If you lower the range, it will mean that you have to get far to close for it to be of equal use than say gat/mortar, or even gat/flak. I thought the idea was to make this a viable alternative.

When considering a flat ignition chance reduction we need to keep incendiary rounds with their 20% ignition chance in mind.

While that is true, I'm not sure incendiary rounds were too powerful in the past either. I think they applied less fire stacks on average than greased rounds, or at most an equal amount. I for one would like to see incendiary rounds as a viable (maybe even clearly superior) choice on the flamer, as it would not only be intuitive but cause more variety in ammo choices (not just greased all around when talking about light weapon brawling builds, with the occasional heavy clip thrown in).

As it stands I personally feel incendiary rounds are only decent on the gatling and the heavy carronade, and from an effectiveness standpoint one could argue that greased/charged (respectively) outperform them in most situations regardless.

[-Mad Maverick-]

lesmock is fairly viable for flamers and would be more so if the range was nerfed a bit

[awkm]

Testing changes have been made to Dev App.  Please go to the Dev App forum and find the appropriate thread to respond to the changes there.  Let's keep this thread about production only.

Changes will not hit production immediately.

[CallMeCoop]

For me, currently the gun is very frustrating to play against to the point where it isn't any fun to play the game anymore. I know some people are upset about this "balance" but i believe it was a bug fix to be specific followed by some nerfs to keep it from getting to out of hand. I did like its old niche uses and wouldn't mind playing with the old flamer (even if we nerfed new flamer to being like the old one)

Things I've noticed/ideas :

- I can only run chem spray and the 20s chem provides doesn't feel long enough for my routes on most ships specifically when things start breaking, but buffing chem sprays timer would just mean you take flamer for damage instead of for flames against well organized ships.

-the ignition chance + rate of fire is crazy to where if it isn't chem sprayed for more then three seconds it might just be dead. reducing ignition chance would be a nice breather but once you do that you couldn't reduce clip size or else you lose reliable fire starter. i.e. flipping a quarter 100 times is gonna be closer to 50/50 results then flipping it 10. hitting a part x times in a row to start a fire could be viable, but don't know how you would work that in or work with it

-6 aoe seems to be large to me, my entire ships seems to light on fire in seconds

-the nature of fire damage itself is jack of all trades with the capability to disable all components so a gun that is strong with it is gonna be on a lot of ships. Nerfing fire damage would also weaken hades, but not banshee which wouldn't be the worst result.

-I've seen the gun hit outside of the flame's visuals by spectating matches not sure if this is lesmok and visuals not lining up or something else

-there is no escape for certain ships once the flames are in range due to either speed or the ships build (compact size) : spire, mobula, galleon, junker.  even the natural vertical or turning motions of these ships don't seem to help much once the flamers start chipping engines and balloon.

- haven't run any gunners, we need more chem spray with out losing rebuild power and heatsink leaves a gun vulnerable for 4+ seconds. having heatsink prevent fires during the reload after firing would be nice, but could just mean flamers + heatsink + only engis

-I haven't played to much with it and I don't think I will be doing so much more till there is a fix

[-Mad Maverick-]

gotta take down (or eliminate) the dps of the flamer... I do think if possible having the heat sink effects stay continuous until a different round(standard ammo included obvi) is loaded would be great

[Puppy Fur]

Never liked the dev app flame thrower. Never updated my stance on it because it never changed from op.

[macmacnick]

Might I suggest the buffing of the chem spray duration, along with the amount of firestacks it removes (i.e 4 instead of 3)?

[Saeth]

My say on this is that, in order to keep the feel of the gun without either preventing it from being effective or being the pure Dragonfire of Death and Destruction that it is now would be to nerf direct damage to 1, or perhaps even 0.8. Another alternative would be to make the fire damage multiplier mostly innefective against armor.

I, at least, have always seen the armor as something like the metal plates on one of those Ironclad warships of the XIX century: implemented mostly for the sake of protection from fire and explosives which the wooden hull beneath was very vulnerable to. Now, armor takes 0.3 from explosives. Why in the world does it take 0.8 from fire? All the other ammo types are only good against one type of component and range from bad to useless against everything else. Why must fire be so drastically different?