1.3.6 Hotfix Flamethrower

[Spud Nick]

It was burning sense the world was turning.

[-Mad Maverick-]

the one thing i learned from all this was that Sammy is the reigning expert on this game

[Schwerbelastung]

Having played some games on and against the flamethrower in the recent days after the hotfix, I feel comfortable stating the following opinions:

-I feel the flamer is in a pretty good place right now. People are still using it - perhaps even in part because of the psychological issues Dementio mentioned - and it is definitely a viable weapon. However, it is easily countered and does not demolish ships at the ridiculous speed it used to before the hotfix.

-It has been argued by a very experienced player that the flamer already had its place in the competitive scene and was as such more or less fine before the buff. I do agree with him to the extent Dementio does, but both his opinion and mine are still only our personal opinions. Do not get me wrong, I also respect Sammy's knowledge of the game, both game mechanics and competitive gaming wise. However, it does not change the fact that while his opinions of the flamer are educated opinions, they are still his personal opinions, and hardly enough to reach a consensus.

-If the flamer did receive further nerfs, as it already has on the dev app, I do fear that people would end up using it less. Buffs and nerfs in any game, be it Guns, a MMORPG/Action RPG, or even an FPS, often have the tendency to get people using the modified (usually the buffed) guns more. This directly leads to people losing against said weapon more often than they used to, and this feeds the cycle of "pls nerf". It does not mean that the gun itself is overpowered - although it certainly does not remove that possiblity - but in my eyes rather signals that more time is needed to form a balanced overall opinion among players before further modifications are warranted.

Unless, of course, stuff like the initial flamer fix happens. Then a quick reaction and modification are most definitely warranted.

Just my 2 cents.

[Alistair MacBain]

Imo the demoralizing issue of the flamer is that you only have the ability to prevent the stacks by having it chemed before the flamer fires ...
The kinda useless state the ext is in now (personal opinion) limits the ability to fight against the high stacks the flamer causes.

[Dementio]

Then we should discuss what to do with the anti-fire tools, if not Fire Extinguisher only, and leave the Flamethrower as it is, for the time being.

[-Mad Maverick-]

I dunno I kinda feel like that's how it should feel;  e.g. once the flamer ship jumps on you without being chem sprayed you should feel screwed.  I think you have a similar feeling if a gat mort pyra jumps you from a blind spot...

[XtremeNameX]

After playing a good amount with my crew last night, I'm willing to call the flamer "ok" for public/low level servers. As long as we used 3 engis all with chemspray (which seems like an acceptable, but definitely the high end, of how much equipment we should need for dealing with 1 weapon) we were able to nullify the flamethrower for the most part and have a very successful evening.

Two (maybe 3) lasting concerns:

1) We were only going up against fairly rook teams. I'm still a bit apprehensive of facing a ship that knows what they're doing and uses a flamer

2) Do we know that it's not now OP in the competitive/high level scene? Obviously Sammy's opinion is not the end-all-be-all of this discussion, nor should it carry (significantly..) more weight than anyone else's. I'm sorry if I implied otherwise :-) BUT he does seem to be raising concerns about the new flamer in high level play, and I STILL haven't seen concrete responses. Since I'm nowhere near the competitive level, I'll bow out of this side of the discussion after this post and leave it up to Sammy and others to continue to argue if they see the need. However I would still like to see a response to either of these two issues he raised:

A. The mathematics of engi efficiency, as discussed here: https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,3932.msg68360.html#msg68360
B. The necessity of chemspraying severly handicaps ships with more difficult layouts. In Sammy's words: "Galleons, Mobulas, and Spires are now non competitve. They're simply too difficult to effectively chem ahead of time due to awkward crew placement or spread out components." Again, I'm personally not at a level to accept or refute this claim, but I haven't seen many people offer concrete suggestions for why it's not a concern.

I'm glad that with the new flamer we get to see more squids (they're so squishy!) but if it's at the cost of fewer Galleons, Mobs, and Spires, I think something will still need to be changed.

FINALLY
I agree that the fire extinguisher could use a buff. Once my crew figured out the basic mechanics of the game, it became pretty clear that chemspray + awareness > extinguisher all day every day.

[awkm]

Yeah, I'm working on some ways to bring extinguisher back into the fold.  More tests coming to dev app in the coming days.

[Dementio]

Galleons, Spires and Mobulas all have the power to go long range and kill any ship with a flamethrower before it even gets close. If any of these ships decide to go close range it comes down to how good their pilots are at predicting and teamworking.
If the flamer would be such a concern in competitive matches I wonder why gat/mortar isn't. It just obliterates anything if it gets the chance and I doubt too many people will give up this power for 1 "ok" flamethrower that might even be ineffective because of chem spray...
Also even on the previous mentioned ships you only need 2 engineers to keep chem spray going enough for infinite until something gets broken by something else (most of the time a carronade).

Every ship can be used in competitive, even with loadouts like 5 harpoons on a mobula. It only comes down to wether the team flying these ships can actually fly them. If it can't it should either choose other ships or practise them a bit more.

[-Mad Maverick-]

I think you will see just as many spires and galleons as before... mobs weren't really used all that much pre patch...

[Sammy B. T.]

The praise is getting a little awkward guys.

Winning a lot doesn't automatically make my opinion about the flamer correct which is why I have been striving to argue from numbers and facts and less from record.

Now concerning the flamer pre-patch in competitive.

Actually dementio, the carro/flamer is exponentially more devastating than just a carronade, or even the dual carronade y'all brought. One carronade alone is enough to bring down a balloon quite quickly, in fact dealing with carronades is more about managing your fall and rebuilding than preventing the fall and repairing. In that light the flamer is vital for the long term paralysis of an enemy ship. When you are being blended and are taking average to severe armor damage, having to chem spray is what makes the flamer shine. The flamer itself doesn't do much damage to a trained a crew because they know how to deal with it. However, it is the dealing with it that causes the overwhelm. When you're under flamer and you are rebuilding your first repair is not the sweet breath of regeneration that comes from a mallet or pipe wrench. Instead it is the preventive chem spray because without that all repairs are useless. The flamer pre patch was still great at putting down fire stacks and any engi can tell you of the frustration that comes from getting that fire stacks the moment after you repair.

Basically the flamer keeps you on that precipe of fragile rebuild and somewhat operational. It keeps you there for an additional three seconds. It keeps your component hardly functional, ready to be dropped by the next carro hit, and it keeps your engi's on babysit. When I was being blended by CSR, I could keep my gunner on guns longer because I could deal with my own ballon as the only tool needed was repair tools. Well, when I say deal with I guess I truly mean, I could cope better than I could if there was a flamer in the mix.

There are many reasons why OVW was the hardest team for us to beat, however that flamer is one of the major reasons.



The Flamer is such a fantastically insidious weapon in this game. Its strength doesn't really come from the damage from its fire stacks, after all, after the inital 8dps each additional stack is only 2 more. It certainly doesn't come from its direct damage. It comes from making everything just a bit worse. It undermines the integrity of ships which makes sense. Even if something isn't literally on fire, heat warps the material and makes it more susceptible to damage, less able to be repaired.

Its a subtle weapon in its competitive application, meaning that was often overlooked.

So hopefully now you can understand why I have been so opposed to this buff. All of its subtle capabilities are still intact. The weakened repairs, and the more busy crew are still there. However, it is now far more do or die with an emphasis on die due to the extreme speed of the fire stack build up. Before if you messed up you were boned because you had 8 stacks of fire eating through your component and now you're forced to babysit until you got the fire gone. Now if you mess up, you're dead because you got 16 stacks and there aint much you can do about that.

Buffing the fire ext would be a bad fix in my opinion because it is only a response to the ridiculous fire stacks of the flamer, as though the flamer were the only fire causing weapon in the game.

I will advocate this until I am blue in the face, the best way to balance the gun is to lower the speed in which it makes stacks. This can be done by either lowering ignition chance or lowering ROF and Clip. I prefer the latter.

[XtremeNameX]

Dementio:

Very good points. It probably shows just how much of a rook I am that I hadn't considered their various long range capabilities I officially declare (2B) ANSWERED!

Sammy:

Hah sorry to make you uncomfortable! My point wasn't that you were automatically right because of your record, but rather that your arguments have too much credibility to be simply refuted by things like "that's not my experience"

[Dementio]

I was not oblivious of the damage the flamethrower did to you:

The carronade alone did the trick, the flamer only added disabling power while everybody was busy on the balloon, effectively rendering their entire ship useless if they managed to get the balloon back up without somebody destroying it again.

It's a bit less detail though. Also, incoming wall of text with no summery! Also another warning, there might be a lot of redundancy, for which I want to apologize in advance.

Mind you that the missing flamethrower wasn't necessarily THE reason why CsRy lost to you. It was failed engagements. Your team just picked 1 out of those two pyramidions killing it in an incredible short amount of time, leaving the other to die in a simple 2v1. There was this one successful engagement of CsRy that did a number to you though, you were practically helpless.
Also, the double carronade pyramidion did survive a 2v1 on fjords against you for a rather long amount of time, making your argument of having a "gunner on guns longer" kinda irrelevant since this survivability would have not been possible with only 1 carronade and a flamer against chem sprayed everything.
The flamethrower would have only gotten it's use if the engagement took longer, like the ones OVW had. But this was not the case for CsRy and with flamethrower certainly wouldn't have lasted too much longer since chem spray was still on everything and it was most of the time a 2v1 scenario where it barely matters what guns that 1 ship has.

Also I do not understand why you would think that the flamethrower should not be overwhelming to a crew as it is. Almost no gun is not overwhelming in this game:
- A carronade can keep your balloon down, indefenitely
- A gatling destroys your armor, you can only delay the armors destruction with 1-3 mallet hits, but it WILL go down.
  - Same for hades and mercury, however chem spraying against the hades DOES make it seem weaker
- Half of all explosive gun can finish an entire ship in 1 full clip before it's armor is even back up (if only 1 engineer is on it, but how often do you manage to get a second one on it?)
  - Hwacha, being better at destroying all components on a ship and carousel having it's high fire ignition side effect, should not be too strong, else it replaces every mortar/flak in the game. The artemis being more popular for long range disable, although having good explosive damage, but low fire rate too...
- Mines, well, that one is pretty self explanatory. It's greatest weakness is that it has to deploy first before the immense damage kicks in. Good thing gunners have the tools and, combined with good pilot fly, the skill to hit the enemy anyway.

It has been stated before: The flamethrower does everything, but in no category is it better than any other gun in this game. It is ultimately relying on a second gun doing the actual damage. Best choice seems to be the carronade with it's power to get an entire crew to work on 1 component when it comes down to it.
We have talked about the strong points of the flamethrower already, over time it's just too much and wins the engagement. (Why it shouldn't is beyond my understanding. Why have a gun that makes you lose the upper hand?)
Now let's make the weak points of this gun clear again:
- If anti fire tools are used correctly the flamethrower alone is entirely useless.
- If I am not wrong, this gun has the shortest range of all guns in this game.
I mean come on, how hard is it not to fly into it? Also, isn't that what almost everybody said when the triple art Junker was a thing?: "Don't fly headfirst into it!", "Don't try to brawl it!", "Get out of it's sight, cover and more basic anti-long range tactics!". This is exactly the same, only that the flamethrower can't hit at long range!

If you make a mistake and let the enemy get close to you with superior close range weapons (which also applies for gat/mortar) than it's your own damn fault! And don't get a "it depends on the map" argument going. Saying long range on dunes is superior to close range is the same thing as saying the same about gat/mortar on dawn. Although in dawn you do have more cover than on dunes...
What do you do against flamer/carro in dawn? I say what do you do against gat/mortar in dawn! It's the exact same thing! Both gun combination have their advantages in their own category, but they both have the same disadvantages. It isn't the flamethrower that is too powerful for you, I say that you are just too lazy to actually deal with it! And if this were to be true I would even go as far as saying that you think so because carro/flamer is too effective against your precious little Junker than gat/mortar, but that might be a bit more personal and go into an entire wrong direction...

Do you see what I think about the flamer now? It's easy to counter, if you just avoid it! It's even easier to counter than any other gun in the game, because you don't need pilot skillz or the right ship choice to render this gun useless, just let the crew chem everything if you can't be bothered otherwise! But don't just come complaining about it's power if you sit in the flamethrower's fires for 3 hours without it actually managing to kill you the entire time and at the same time having rendered you disabled because you thought it was a good idea to just let the fires engulf you in the first place! Why did you think it was a good idea? Because you have a chemical spray on everything all the time! Screw fires, ain't I right mate?

Seriously. That gun is not hard to beat and certainly doesn't dictate over your ship and loadout choices more than any other gun already does, without you thinking about it. (Why do I need a mallet again? Surely it must be because of fires and not because the gatling is soo good at destroying hull armors!). Every short range counters works for every short range gun. The flamethrower being one of them. Just counter it! It's not impossible and certainly isn't hard.

Maybe it's more psychological bullshit: The longer the gun disables you and does not kill you, the more you see how powerful it is. Or maybe you are just not used to this immense amount of damage, since piercing guns still take their own while to shred the junker's armor and thus you often don't get killed as fast as other ships. Other ships for example are spires which are probably the weakest ships against anything armor destroying, making even simple slow rams kill it, unlike the junker.
And everybody can rebuild even before the hwacha reloaded.

Regarding nerf on that gun: Lowering rate of fire is fine with me, but lowering chance of ignition is a bit more tricky. If it's too low I might just bring a carousel or incendary rounds or even both, since the stacks are why I would want a flamer. This is what a flamer does and why it is as powerful a gun as it is. You said it yourself that the dealing with it causes overwhelm. What would cause this "overwhelm" if not the fire stacks?
Also, I am not fond of decreasing the flamethrowers clip, since I am used to it having an incredible large clip and the image of it having less clip just doesn't want to fit in my head. Also, less clip causes more reload, which can cause a gunner to easily switch between ammounition for different ranges much quicker, where as now the gunner would have to "guess" if greased is ok and the pilot can stay in range. The second he gets out of range the gunner will most likely try to change ammunition to something longer ranged (lesmok) which opens up a window of no damage and the enemy can gain more distance. If the reload happened more often or too often the gunner can estimate if the enemy ship is getting out of range for lesmok or is going to be IN range for greased and switch ammo during the natural reload to something more appropriate. This gives the gun more advantages in the hand of an attentive gunner than disadvantages in general, thus not really nerfing it in that regard. If you however made the reload longer, like almost too long, than the timewindow for counter attacks is much greater.
But I honestly doubt that that is necessary at all.

Regarding the fire extinguisher: It's either buff it or nerf chem spray. But of course you can leave it as it is too, since for certain situations fire ext is just better than chem spray. It's just that most people that learn of chemical spray almost never use fire extinguisher again believeing it is in general "weaker" than chem spray, especially since with chem spray you can fight fires while not having it interrupt with your repair cooldowns. On the contray you would have to use fire extinguisher indefnitely to fight constant fires without ever getting to actually repair anything. But then again, if it comes down to it and a component has more than 3 stacks of fire the fire ext does offer a much quicker solution to the problem...
However, I believe, the weaknesses of these two tools is what makes fire as powerful as it is and as well their strength combined (pipe/fire ext/chem engineer) offer you the power to be completely immune to fire.
As an engineer you give up either
- Best repair & rebuild power (Mallet/Spanner)
- Buff
- Fire immunity
"Pipe wrench/buff/chem spray"-engineer being the best combination of all these things, but it's just not the best at what it does. (Chance of fire overwhelming, less repair/rebuild power)
This should be discussed in another thread though.


I dunno what it is that makes you believe this gun is "too overwhelming", which is total bullshit since all guns are overwhelming in their own aspect and have a right to be so! (_#GunRights) Or that this gun adds too many fire stacks, but if it was lowered too much carousel and inc could add more fire stacks and if the number of stacks was lowered just enough people almost wouldn't notice the difference between the flamer and inc carrousel, regarding stacks alone.
The fire stacks really make you wanna sacrifice something to effectively have a firefighter on your ship does it not? What do you want to sacrifice: The best repair/-build power in the game? The ability to buff? Or do you really sacrifice the gunner class only because you are not good enough to not get close to flamethrowers? Yes, harsh assumption, I know, but you haven't stated yet that you can indeed keep yourself away from it. But if you can, what's your problem again?

I say once more that the Flamethrower is just right.
It also has the power to get rid of endless buff on really everything. There once was a discussion about how the buff tool does not have any disadvantages compared to anything else in the game, other than the fact that it is timed.
Either way. Either 1 engineer has to be a firefighter or the gunner class gets out of the picture or you just don't get close to that gun. Do you let your crew adapt to fire or do you use basic short range counter and let your crew be optimised for your ship and guns?
It's all up to the captain of the ship.



Yes, I can argument with you about the Flamethrower until Adventure Mode is released! If you want to of course.

_{By the way, I am Daniel}

[HamsterIV]

One of my problems with the flamer is that the counter to it (chem spray) can not be impediment while you are under attack. Either the ship was chemed up before the encounter or you are screwed. This is not the case with the other disabling attacks Flechette and Shatter. If your balloon gets popped you could fight your way out by drogue chute or sitting on the ground. If your weapons break you could rebuild until you are "one away" and wait for the enemy's reload cycle to finish the job and use the weapon. In both these cases you could turn the tables with a little skill and exploitation of game mechanics. Flame is a different beast entirely, once a ship is enveloped in fire I do not know of a way for the crew to recover the situation. The crew can prolong the inevitable, but until an outside event causes that flame ship to sop shooting, there is nothing the crew can do to turn the tables.

What if we lowered the health of the flamethrower? Making it easier to shoot out a flame thrower would give the defending crew a chance to recover and turn the tables.

[-Mad Maverick-]

just have heat sink loaded up prior to and laugh at the incoming flames...