Balance Concerns & Questions 1.1.4

[RaptorSystems]

Just something that has been noticed by a few people including myself, after a certain level of competency with engineering fire seems under powered.

Awkm
Since the gauntlet has been thrown on to the table, personally I have pretty varied software development skills (c++, c#, java, js,  sql, lua, php, bash, pretty much most paradigms except those used by erlang and lisp) and in regards to UI development I've been a professional web developer by day for the past two years. I'm also aware of how painful floaters can be, and personally I dislike them for accessibility reasons.

I'm time and money poor, but I'm willing to donate time for in-kind support.

If you would like further information, contact me at my accounts email address.

[N-Sunderland]

Fire is a tough thing to balance, it seems. It used to be necessary to have a flamer on every ship, since it disabled guns immediately. With the way it is currently, it's not that useful, I must agree.

[RaptorSystems]

Yeah I don't know if changing the actual behavior of fire would be beneficial. Just something I thought is worth mentioning.

Is fire damage linear?

[N-Sunderland]

Yeah I don't know if changing the actual behavior of fire would be beneficial. Just something I thought is worth mentioning.

Is fire damage linear?

There are two types of fire damage. There's fire damage done by the gunfire, and fire damage done by the fire stacks themselves. Basic fire damage works like any other damage type (piercing, explosive, etc), while the damage done by fire stacks works differently. It does 8 base damage per second, with an additional 2 damage per second for every extra stack (up to 20 stacks).

[Helmic]

I still find fire effective on my ships, but it's after keeping that fire on for a LONG time when you just happen to catch your opponent in an awkward position.  But once you've spent that amount of time, you're disabling EVERYTHING on the ship, hull, balloon, guns, engines, everything is going to break and keep breaking, it's pretty rewarding for a slot that you otherwise wouldn't use.  My feared Pyramidion trifecta uses flames to destroy components to either distract the enemy engineers or force them to stay in one place and take continued fire.  Even if the enemy is chemspraying everything they can reach, they're going to miss SOME component and that component is going to break.

I suppose I just don't go into it expecting all the guns to be disabled like it's the light version of the Hwacha, I treat it like a very dangerous backup weapon that can become a primary weapon under the right circumstances.

Incendiaries are pretty fucking useless, though.  Either you go all in with the fire or you don't, anything halfway is just going to be immediately extinguished.

[N-Sunderland]

Agreed on incendiary. The only use it have right now is as a third ammo on heavy flak/lumberjack, but even there heavy's generally a better choice to account for right side hwachas.

[Helmic]

Hell, I just tell my gunners to bring heatsink.  At least then if the Engineer goes on strike you can sorta handle the fire damage on your gun.

[Queso]

I agree that incendiary ammo has more drawbacks than advantages with how fire behaves right now. Otherwise I think fire is good as is.

[Captain Smollett]

The problem isn't that fire is weak, it's that chem spray is super op.  A well crewed ship can make flame threat nonexistent.

[Helmic]

Yeah, there's virtually no reason to use a traditional extinguisher.  The only time an extinguisher is better is when the fire has a huge stack, ad if it's getting a huge stack the whole ship is getting flamethrowered so it's better to just rebuild it and immediately chemspray it.

[RearAdmiralZill]

Yeah, there's virtually no reason to use a traditional extinguisher.  The only time an extinguisher is better is when the fire has a huge stack, ad if it's getting a huge stack the whole ship is getting flamethrowered so it's better to just rebuild it and immediately chemspray it.

Waiting for a rebuild though can be costly in a crisis moment where you need to be completely mobile and repairing multiple components. Once the banshees got balanced, I've been using extinguisher ever since. One-and-done to get rid of any stack, and on to repair other things.

Not saying chem is worthless or anything, just personal preference.

[Lord Dick Tim]

What if fire that wasn't tended increased in intensity and spread on its own to other components?

Could be random, could go to the hull, then jump to the balloon.  The intensity of the current stack is transferred as well?  Well, maybe not the full stack.

[awkm]

Clarification on how fire operates:

There is only 1 kind of fire:

• When there is 1 charge on a component, there is 8 fire DPS applied to that component (base fire DPS)
• Each additional charge applies another 2 fire DPS per charge
• A component can have a maximum of 20 charge
• Guns will be disabled if it reaches 8 or more charges and must be extinguished until below 8 charges to be used again
• As a gun takes any kind of damage, it's turn speed is decreased

Explosive damage causes a chance of fire ignition on a component depending on the amount of damage it does.  The more dmg a single hit of explosive projectile does, the more chance the component will ignite with a charge of fire.

I'll double check with what we can do with fire but we've had ideas for them spreading at some point.  The question is a display issue and what we think makes sense enough without being silly.  Like green fire?  I don't know if we would like it as far as art direction goes.  Again, I'll double check.

I'll take a look at Chemical Spray.

[N-Sunderland]

Isn't it an additional 2 DPS per charge? I'm pretty sure that's what it said in the patch notes.

As for chem spray, and fire extinguisher for that matter, it would probably make a lot of sense if their cooldown times actually meant something. As they are now, you just need to whack the component with a spanner and extinguish immediately afterwards, and only the spanner's cooldown will apply. Fire would be more effective if you weren't able to extinguish during cooldowns.

[HamsterIV]

I may be a bit late to the debate, but I personally don't like my crew taking Chem Spray and buff hammer because it puts a glow on your components. This glow is sometimes visible through cloud cover and makes your ship more vulnerable to "blind fire". Like wise I love it when an enemy ship has glowing components because it makes shooting them through clouds easier.