I've flown a couple of times with the new flamer now (yesterday evening and today, about an hour ago) and toyed around with some builds. My impression is the following:
flamer qualities:
- excellent hull striper without chemspray. Still unignoreable armor damage if chemsprayed.
- excellent disabler without or partly chemsprayed equipment. the balloon takes very noticeable damage even if chemsprayed and people can easily be knocked off their guns if the flamer gunner focuses on hitting guns. When sniping out equipment the hull still takes damage due to the unique multiple-hit characteristic of the flamer. If all essential equipment is chemsprayed the damage is still unignoreable on the balloon.
- decent perma-hull killer.
- overall impression: The flamer does (too) many jobs (too) properly.
predictable impacts on the game:
- new meta builds will revolve around the flamer. So far I find gat/carro + flamer combos to be most efficient. they allow to get rid of one of the most vital ship components (hull/ballon) very quickly which binds at least one engineer to the hull/balloon. Then it's almost impossible to keep the rest of the ship sprayed - leading to a disable-lock. The ship can then be finished with rams or the flamer itself, which does a decent job at destroying the permanent hull.
- ships which have hard repair routes (mobus and spires in particular) are almost entirely unable to handle flamer builds if they get in range.
- gunners will be less viable as they either can be easily knocked of their gun or they're not able to repair it if they're on their own.
- new players will have a very hard time to deal with flamers, as organized chem-spraying is the only efficient counter to flamers once they're in range.
suggestions:
- reduce the ignition chance a lot (by a factor of 1/8-1/3)
- reduce the damage the flame-damagetype deals to the permanent hull (poor hades
).
Reasoning: a reduced fire-stack rate is more forgiving when it comes to engineering errors. Engineers will be less frustrated if they have to deal with 4-8 fire stacks on the hull rather than full 20 if they acidently over-repaired it with an additional spanner-whack. Regarding the reduced perma-hull damage: The flamer already does a great job at stripping the hull and disabling the ship. That's enough. It shouldn't be able to substitute explosive weapons as well.
