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Fire Stack Timeout

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sparklerfish:
With fire as it stands now, unless a ship has engineers that chem spray perfectly, you can ignore all the other guns on your ship and kill your opponents with a single flamethrower.  I'm not a fan of the current engineering meta being running around in circles chem spraying constantly.  It's not fun and the flamethrower is not a weapon that requires any skill to use -- you just point at the enemy and hold down the mouse button.  I don't see why a slight nerf would be a bad thing.  Fire would still have a lot of disable potential, but would be less devastating to people who happen to, say, bring a gunner.  I'm of the opinion that fire is currently overpowered -- not only does it set firestacks that make a gunner utterly useless, it has a very high damage multiplier against everything.  Either make it do less direct damage, or have a slow firestack timeout, or SOMETHING.

Mean Machine:
Not a fan of flamer myself. But flamer/carro combo.... ahh shit i hate that build.. Two easiest guns to use combined, no skill required, yet so deadly. When I see enemy taking that I know what's the time... Most pugs will fail miserably to maintain your ship, when you're facing flamer/carro pyra.  ::)

Wundsalz:
I can't really put a finger on what exactly wrong with flamers/fire, but I dislike how it works atm.
Perhaps it's the helpless against flame locks. With chem spray you can't do anything else but to let the component slowly burn down once your chem spray cycle is broken. Using extinguishers is rather futile, as you usually get damaged by non-flamer weapons during the cooldown and once it passes. As a gunner flames aren't fun either... "I've been kicked out of my gun, does someone have an extinguisher? No? Ah well, I guess I'll stand next to it until it burns down then." hmpf.
Flamers tend to put the crew into a situations where they can't really do anything to make a difference.
At the same time flames can be ignored entirely in other situations. I don't even mind unsprayed hulls/balloons in some occasions.

While I'd like to see some change to the flame mechanics, I don't think Richard is on the right path here, as fire-stacks fading out would just reduce the duration of the "state of helplessness" rather than removing it by allowing the players to do something useful during flame locks. In the worst case scenario the flame-fade mechanic could even be used to prolong the "state of helplessness" by timed flaming to keep guns locked down.

Anyway I certainly wouldn't mind if muse decides to toy around with the mechanic. This also implies possible mayor overhauls.

Wundsalz:
Another thing I'd like to throw into the debate:
I think the 8-fire-stack-gun-kick mechanic to be very unintutive. Personally I didn't realize what's going on until I read up on it on the forum. Perhaps due to the lack of ingame feedback for the event (you just get kicked out - no further animation/message to emphasize something special is happening) I stood more or less baffled next to the gun and spammed E the first times I got kicked off by flames.

I think there are better ways to make people want to get rid of fire stacks on gun without making them feel utterly useless. Here's an alternative solution which would probably be relatively easy to implement: reduce the guns turn rate linearly to 0 at 20 fire stacks (that's a somewhat plausible behaviour, because stuff expands when heated which could jam joints)
This way the usability of the gun would be severely limited, but the gunner doesn't feel entirely useless, because the enemy might eventually drift into his gun-arcs. Hoping to be able to eventually place the decisive killing blow or disable shot definitely feels better than being forced to simply watch your gun slowly burning down. This mechanic might even yield some teamwork moments - pilot steering the ship by gunner instructions.

Hoja Lateralus:

--- Quote from: Wundsalz on October 19, 2014, 10:40:05 am ---Another thing I'd like to throw into the debate:
I think the 8-fire-stack-gun-kick mechanic to be very unintutive. Personally I didn't realize what's going on until I read up on it on the forum. Perhaps due to the lack of ingame feedback for the event (you just get kicked out - no further animation/message to emphasize something special is happening) I stood more or less baffled next to the gun and spammed E the first times I got kicked off by flames.

--- End quote ---

I will continue to repeat it many, many, many times:
Better (mandatory) tutorials.

About the rest - I've had some ideas
1. Make flamer more disably and less killing - in a meaning that it will decrease the guns damage and turning speed by up to 50% but the gun will never be too hot to use (but it will get regular damage from stacks like now). Still good enough to use but less annoying for defender.
2. Make a default "second use" for wrench / spanner (or make a slightly worse version with that mechanic) which will allow to decrease fire a bit, say 1 stack per 3-5 second cooldown. It's not much enough to drastically change the game but it's something.
3. Leave everything as it is except decrease flamer range by around 30%.
4. Make a new version of chemspray with longer cooldown but also longer protection (so the secondary engie can chem things from time to time).

As sparklefish said - the flamerthrower is a very deadly weapon which requires very little skill to use. For me it's ideal noob-bashing tool because most players below 5-ish lvl don't ever use chem, so one accurate flamer clip can disable the whole ship.

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