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Make chemical spray only prevent set number of fire stacks

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Unarmed Civilian:
The flamethrower has gone back and forth between overpowered and underpowered. Right now it's underpowered, so let's consider what the flamethrower is meant to do and what is preventing it from doing it.

It's purpose:
The flamethrower is meant to be a powerful disable weapon, quickly setting many, many fire stacks far faster and far wider than any other weapon in the game can, overheating weapons and causing chaos for the engineers.

What works against it:
An obvious barrier to the flamethrower is its range. However, it actually has pretty decent range with lesmok, and I think that making a flamethrower fire significantly further than that would be starting to get absurd. Also, there's already a flamethrower with obscene range in Alliance, so range is already being tested.

The other, even more obvious, barrier to the flamethrower is firefighting tools, so let's consider the two.

The Fire Extinguisher
The premium fire removal tool of the game. It extinguishes up to 20 stacks of fire per spray, which is the maximum fire count, so it effectively instantly extinguishes a fire of any size. It has a cooldown of 2 seconds and grants fire immunity for 3.

The fire extinguisher's biggest weakness is having to use it on a damaged component. 2 seconds feels like an eternity when using it on a blazing hull with low armor remaining, so often the better judgement call is to mallet it to buy some time and let the part break extinguish the fire for you. Because of this, while it is a potent tool agaisnt fires, being forced to apply it makes it so constant fire application can cause serious problems in keeping repairs up.

Because of the need to extinguish before repairing, the flamethrower can easily overwhelm it, especially when comboed with more consistent damage like carronades or explosives. The flamer can be fought against, but it is a chaotic and nerve-wracking experience when relying only on fire extinguishers.
The Chemical Spray
The premium fire prevention tool of the game. It only extinguishes 3 stacks of fire at a time, making it capable of extinguishing small fires but helpless against a roaring flare hit. It has a cooldown of 5 seconds and grants fire immunity for a long 25 seconds.

The chemical spray is the go-to fire tool for experienced engineers, as it effectively puts a constant fire extinguisher on a part with no cooldown for 20 seconds, counting for the cooldown. During this time, not only is that one part impossible to set on fire again, but multiple chemical sprays can be active at the same time. With its weak extinguishing power, it is very apt at dealing with small fires started by explosives or banshees, but is overwhelmed by a sudden burst of fire stacks like a flare hit or an unchecked flamethrower. However, both of those can be prevented by preventative, early spraying of the part. While in effect, engineers need not worry about small, harassing fires. Nearly all are prevented, and the few that aren't are still easy to deal with.

This is a flamethrower's worst nightmare. If engineers are active, it cannot start any fires at all, dealing a negligible amount of fire damage instead and not causing any major stress to the engineers other than making sure they do not abandon chem cycles. In fact, if chemspray was freshly applied, it gives the engineers 10 or so seconds to focus entirely on killing that annoying particle effect generator and the ship it rode in on.  On a Pyramidion, the hull and three engines can all have chemical spray applied to them in under 5 seconds, effectively making all of those parts fire immune for marginal setup cost, and overall immune for 15 seconds without upkeep. On a Squid this is taken to absurd lengths, as it is possible to have all 4 engines, the balloon, and the hull all chemsprayed at once before it can wear off, so the entire ship is fire immune. The fire immunity lasts long enough on a single part for it to be repaired for 480 hp AND for the chemical spray to be reapplied before it runs out, so flaming a chemsprayed ship is a fruitless endeavor. Even with double, or the legendary triple flamethrowers, it is fruitless to use them to attack a crew that is watching their chem cycles closely. The only other gun in the game countered even nearly as much by a tool is the Minotaur by kerosene. Even then, it can at least push the ship backwards a bit.

My proposal is that chemical spray be nerfed so that it is still very effective at dealing with small harassing fires and preventing major blazes on guns, but capable of being overwhelmed by the dedicated fire starting tool. Make it so that chemical spray only prevents a set number of fire stacks while active, and the fire immunity disappears early if that number is met. The fire immunity would still last 25 seconds, and no fires would be able to be set while its active, but reaching is threshold would "burn" off the protective spray early and allow fires to be set.

Personally, I think a number between 30 to 50 would be a reasonable amount of fire prevention before fire immunity is stripped early. This way, chemspray can still stop flares from disabling guns and laugh off banshees and incendiary carronades. However, under the raw fire-power of a flamethrower, even it would melt, forcing engineers to reapply it more often to keep up, and making double flamethrower capable of causing havoc regardless of what fire tool setup is present. Flamethrowers would be relevant against vets as well as newbies, and everything would change when the Fire Nation attacks.

TL;DR: Make the chemical spray wear off early after 30-50 blocked fires so we can BarbeQueQ people.

Solidusbucket:
+1

Atruejedi:

--- Quote from: Solidusbucket on November 04, 2016, 12:39:39 am ---+1

--- End quote ---

Yeah, I didn't even need to read the original post (but I did!) because I knew I'd agree with the premise immediately. I don't know HOW exactly to nerf it, but it does need a slight nerf because it really does completely negate the flamethrower. I agree that some sort of "threshold" should be met and then the chemical spray wears off and needs to be reapplied; otherwise, yes, let it last the typical application time.

Perhaps make it only prevent the first 12/13/14 stacks of fire per fresh application? That way, engineers have to keep their cycles up as they do now, face no problem from minor or errant fires, and a flare at least does something when it hits ;)

RearAdmiralZill:
Sure.

Unarmed Civilian:
I feel like 14 stacks of fire prevention is too low, and would potentially make chem worse than the fire extinguisher while being more of a hassle, as a double flare hit on a freshly chem'd gun would put it on 16 stacks of fire, forcing them to let it burn out. It would also be able to be overwhelmed by double/triple banshee setups or single incendiary carronades, which are actually the preferred ammo for carronades by more experienced players.

Having it as low as 14 would also make a flamethrower able to trivially overpower it (fire extinguisher users know how fast they can rack up stacks), and too heavily undermines its ability to prevent fires. 20 should be the bare minimum (to match fire extinguisher), and even that seems too low to me.

Chemical spray needs to be a potent anti-fire tool still, and should be able to hold out at least a bit against a single flamer. It's a tool that is a hassle to use already for fire fighting, it should reward players for dealing with the hassle of constantly making repair loops when there's nothing to repair, as well as decision making like chemming a low health part versus repairing it.


As for flares, they are a utility weapon first and an annoying fire starter second. You can still keep an eye out for missed chem cycles to punish them for not keeping up, but its primary purpose (a weapon against stealth) is not able to be hard-countered, so a flare gun will always be relevant for its intended use.Besides, the flare gun is designed to punish chem spray more than fire extinguishers already.  I suggested 30 as the floor with flare hits in mind. Fire extinguishers can always deal with a 15 stack blaze, but missing a chem cycle means a gun can be disabled for a long, long time.

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