Author Topic: Making fire extinguisher viable  (Read 5434 times)

Offline Mezhu

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Making fire extinguisher viable
« on: May 31, 2014, 02:01:30 pm »
The majority of experienced players will agree that the fire extinguisher is a tool far inferior to the chemical spray, and that its' ease of use doesn't make up for its' reduced efficiency.

The main reason for this, according to my opinion, is the way fire stacks are applied and their damage calculated.

In its' current state, the first fire stack deals significantly high damage, and every other fire stack applied will linearly increase the amount of health a component loses. Fire is strong enough to interrupt repairs starting from a low number of stacks (even more so on balloon) and thus almost always requires urgent attention. At about 10 stacks, half the maximum, the repairing engineer can easily be overwhelmed and fail to maintain the components intact, especially if also receiving damage from other sources (which is more often than not the case). So people are practically forced to immediately counteract fire, which translates into either preemptively using Spray and maintaining it or using Extinguisher once between each repair hit (as 10 fires will easily accumulate on a number of components during the 9 seconds of the mallet cooldown). Due to the above, here's almost no scenario in which usage of extinguisher can prove more effective than spray, as it has a bigger cooldown cost in the wrong run, while also nullifying far less fire damage. There are exceptions of course- their rarity, however, turns Extinguisher from the standard fire fighting tool it's supposed to be to a more situational one, and the 'luxury' Chem Spray takes its' place instead.

Ways to counteract this (if bringing the Fire Extinguisher back to life, past novice games, is a goal)
-Change the Fire Extinguisher. Remove the fire immunity, have it cause no cooldown and be usable on components that are cooling down, but have it remove less fires on application so that the least required time for a full extinguish is relevant to its' animation time
-Change fires. Change the way stacks cause do damage from FirstStackDamage + const * (FireStacks-1) to an exponential function, initially dealing less damage, reaching the same dps as the current one at about 8 fires and dealing much more at 10+ fires. This will allow an engineer to more safely ignore a burning component until it has a number of stacks high enough to be worth an extinguish.
-Change the Chemical Spray. (maybe the most logical one) Redesign its' functionality, making it more punishing if a fight lasts more time than originally expected. Increase its' duration from 20 seconds to 27, and increase its' cooldown from 5 to 9. Spray will now require far smarter timing and include an inherent risk- using it prematurely or entering a prolonged fight will cause it to end at some point midfight. Reapplying it will cost as much as a mallet hit potentially resulting in a dead component due to the other types of damage. Not reapplying it will leave the ship extremely vulnerable to fire. This creates a difficult dilemma for both the engineers and the pilots (both the attacking and the defending ones- should I try and flee or should I continue fighting?) and increases the communication skill ceiling (each engineer might actually have to pick a different tool and alternate roles with each other depending on the situation). Not to mention the fact that a delayed application on a component that's already on fire will be far less rewarding, as using the spray as an extinguishing tool would yield bad results (might actually have to slightly increase the number of stacks removed to 4 or something to make up for this).
« Last Edit: May 31, 2014, 02:21:55 pm by Mezhu »

Offline SuperPrincessPeach

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Re: Making fire extinguisher viable
« Reply #1 on: May 31, 2014, 02:06:51 pm »
Hmmmm I like the idea of remving fire even its components are on fire....

Offline omegaskorpion

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Re: Making fire extinguisher viable
« Reply #2 on: May 31, 2014, 02:35:58 pm »
at the moment i think that fire extinguisher is very usefull, thanks to flamer buff, components will get 10 stacks of fire in no time, and with cemical spray its impossible to extinguish that much fire in time and with extinguisher its no problem.

Offline SirNotlag

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Re: Making fire extinguisher viable
« Reply #3 on: May 31, 2014, 04:16:25 pm »
at the moment i think that fire extinguisher is very usefull, thanks to flamer buff, components will get 10 stacks of fire in no time, and with cemical spray its impossible to extinguish that much fire in time and with extinguisher its no problem.

the problem is that the chem spray immunity stops that from happening in the first place, and even if your late you still spray it let the component burn out and rebuild it so it has no fire and still has the immunity. The fire extinguisher currently is just not as useful because you cant prevent the fires and cant repair the damage done to the component from the fires fast enough because the 3 second cool down forces you to sit with only one component rather than run to help other ones.

I like the idea of having no cool down, but that is quite a change and having it also able to extinguish components that are on cool down might be a bit much, I don't really know since the engineer would have to sit and nurse one component if getting hit by flames, it would have to be tested but it doesn't sound too bad.

as for changing the fire to be weaker at the beginning i don't agree with that, a quick application of chem spray would keep the numbers low and stop them from climbing and having it exponential might cause components to burn out fast than an engineer can get to it with the extinguisher, both these issues end up favoring the chem spray. I'm sure it could be tweaked but that sounds like more effort than its worth.

as for adjusting the chem spray I personally like it where it is, it provides protection but doesn't last long enough in a fight and the 5 seconds is punishment enough if your taking multiple types of damage, not just fire. Nerfing the spay might just cause flamers to flare up (pun intended) again as an excessively powerful weapon that is too frustrating to counter.

There are plenty of ways to adjust it as well you could simply change the timers so the cool down for the extinguisher is 2 seconds and it offers 4 seconds of invulnerability, that also offers the tool more power without changing the way it works . I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to fix the issue that I haven't thought of, because I actually don't really have any ideas.