Like I said, options. I like making tactical choices. Heavy clip Flares are great, obviously, but I also like Heatsink in some situations (Scrap comes to mind)... and I want to like Burst in some situations as well! It should be a big decision whether I take Burst Flares to try to light up a Junker's entire gunning pit, for example... or if I take Heavy to snipe that Goldfish's main gun!
And maybe Incendiary? Or Loch? You get my point. Options.
I personally am fine with most ammos being garbage on a gun, as long as the optimal ammos on different guns is sufficiently varied. The main issue with greased is that it is optimal (Mortar, Banshee, Gatling(close), Hades(close), L Flak) or at least beneficial (L Carro, Lumberjack, H Flak, Artemis, Mine Spammer) on so many guns. This is why greased is basically the default ammo for engineers, and why other ammos get drowned out. Incendiary has no gun where it is optimal and a bunch where it is beneficial (L Carro, H Carro, Lumberjack, Mines, H Flak, Gatling(barely)), of which only one of them could get away with running it full-time (L Carro) but is drowned out by other powerful ammos (Heavy Clip, Greased).
By comparison, here are the other ammos and most of the guns they are optimal on (and notable beneficial):
- Lesmok: Hades(long), Lumberjack(long), Gatling(long), H Flak(long), Mines(long), Harpoon(lol); (situational on Mortar, Artemis, Merc, Banshee, Flares)
- Heavy Clip: H Carro, L Carro(mid), Flares(mid/long), Minotaur (situational on Hwacha, Gatling(though unused), Banshee)
- Burst: Hwacha, Artemis, H Flak(DPS/DPC), Lumberjack(DPS/DPC), L Flak(DPC), (beneficial to Banshee)
- Lochnagar: H Carro(initiating), Gatling(DPS), Lumberjack(damage per shot/close), Mines(DPC/close) Minotaur(DPS)
- Heatsink: Flares(mid/close), Merc(disable), (situatonal on all for fires, beneficial on Hades, H Carro, H Flak, L Flak, Lumberjack, Mines)
- Charged: Merc, Mines(DPS), Lumberjack(damage per shot), H Carro(DPS)
Also, greased carronade is about burst damage up front with little change in overall DPS (when counting for reloads). Heavy clip is superior for surgical applications, incendiary is top tier at point blank range due to the synergy with damage type but outranged by greased/heavy.
Currently Incendiary and Charged (especially charged) are the two ammos I see complaints about most often for being terrible or unused in general, while there are complaints about the ubiquity of Burst and Greased.
One thing they could do is nerf Greased to Incendiary's range to give people a reason to use it over greased (Incendiary becomes optimal close range for L Carro, competes more with greased Gatling), though that might end up with Greased taking Incendiary's place in range reduction due to its greater versatility.
Charged definitely needs a buff to compete with the other ammos, as it is not even notably beneficial to a wide variety of guns, and good on only a few. A couple changes could be to give it a partial jitter reduction to make it more of a sidegrade in certain applications (sniping with gat, possible use over heavy for H Carro), which may compete too much with Heavy Clip, or make it the dedicated DPC ammo (remove clip size penalty, slightly larger RoF penalty) so it can push Burst out of the applications that aren't even related to burst radius and make it a potent option on guns with long reloads but high rates of fire (Hwacha, Minotaur, Mortar, Gatling(arguably)). The rate of fire reduction should be enough to lower DPS compared to standard by at least 10%, as currently its DPS is actually a hair under normal in a gatling (not counting for reloads).
Hopefully it's not rude of me to put all of this in an incendiary thread.