25 replies to this topic

[CMGrendel]

Very simple question - no right answer - just wondering what people WANT flamers to do.

You can add your rants below, but we only care about the poll.

x

[Vahnn]

They are already a heat weapon. They do .2 "heat damage" per second.

[CMGrendel]

Vahnn, on 12 March 2013 - 07:55 PM, said:

They are already a heat weapon. They do .2 "heat damage" per second.

Ok, a MEANINGFUL heat weapon.

[Kaspirikay]

No, I don't want stunlock here. Next we'll have fear mechanics.

[Utilyan]

Check this out OP,

Imagine you can take your flamer shoot the ground and that makes a smokescreen kinda like when you spam jump jets only thicker and more exagerated.

Maybe on water it does the heat sink steam.....


Notice in river city theres patches of fire on the ground. If you step on one your heat goes up. So its possible to have like a flame landmine, this wouldn't be an actual landmind but would behave like one, its just a patch of fire that if you step on gives you a heat hit. Maybe the patch of fire gets smothered as a mech steps on it but he takes a heat hit much like the patch of fire.

This would make an interesting play style where mechs who are backing off in fights might start using flamers to light things on fire.......this makes nme mechs hesitate since the fire gives you slight disadvantages.


Read the description of a firestarter http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Firestarter

This guy would scout and light everything on fire so folks would not chase him.



Also Flamers are a form of CC already, its the taunt button. I shoot a guy with flamers all eyes are on me, folks tend to want to save the guy being flamed.

[FupDup]

How about, since stunlocks are annoying in shooter games, we just make Flames reduce the target's heatsink efficiency (make them harder to cool down) for a brief time based on how long you've flamed him and how many flamers you've used?

Also, the ability to start environmental fires (and even fires on enemy mechs) would be a nice area-denial tool for heat-intensive enemies (the flame wouldn't do much damage but if you stand in a forest fire you better not try to spam lazors or you'll risk overheating).


They also need their heat caused to the user to be reduced massively. The whole point of Flamers is to overheat your enemy, not yourself!

Edited by FupDup, 12 March 2013 - 08:36 PM.

[Spheroid]

Flamers need to raise the base heat level of any given mech to a maximum of 50-75% of its shutdown level.

This would still allow gauss and mg fire or perhaps a small number of energy weapons to be fired back. If a mech shutdown it would be the fault of the pilot not the external heat source.

Multiple flamers should not exceed the max heat level but rather reach the threshold more quickly.

Such a flamer would still be a niche weapon that may or may not be a good choice depending on the forces you face. A flamer Commando could be a great help against an Atlas but giving up a laser might be a death sentence against other lights. I have ideas how to make it work, PGI just needs to ask me.

Edited by Spheroid, 12 March 2013 - 08:47 PM.

[Zyllos]

Personally, the added heat generated per second to the user must also be given to the target.

The only thing that the user is penalized by is the environment heat increase.

So if you overheated at the same speed as your target (assuming the same number of heatsink dissipation), you should shutdown with the target mech at 100% - % increase by environment heat by flamer use.

I think that is perfectly acceptable. The current form is much too penalizing to the user for how little the benefit is.

Edited by Zyllos, 12 March 2013 - 08:52 PM.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

is there really a question as to if a FLAME THROWER should be a heat weapon?

and yes, flamers should do more heat than they generate -.-

Youd think they could be heat dissipation weapons lol the higher your heat the more heat they transfer/damage they do

Edited by Mechwarrior Buddah, 12 March 2013 - 08:55 PM.

[Vapor Trail]

Math exercise:

Lets say a target mech has 15 total double heat sinks. That's roughly a dissipation rate of 2.7.

If a flamer adds .2 heat per second to a mech, it would take a mech with fourteen flamers to begin to increase heat on our target mech on a neutral temp map... (increase of 0.1 heat per second...) and it would take roughly ten minutes to heat that mech up to shut-down levels if standing still from dead cold.

If the target mech is running, it heats up at .3 heat per second and therefore would require 3 minutes and 20 seconds to overheat from dead cold.


Lets multiply our flamer heat applied by 3, as an arbitrary number. Therefore each flamer is doing .6 heat per second to the target. Therefore five flamers (possible for lights, easily for laser boats) would start increasing the heat by .5 heat per second standing still, .7 per second running.

Running, it would take 1 minute 25 seconds to overheat a mech from dead cold.

Sooo...
At what point is the "Flaming Marshmallow" overpowered?

Without a pretty significant buff, flamers aren't going to be all that "Stun-locky".

Even the most possible flamers on a mech (9 on a HBK 4P) is only going to apply 5.4 heat a second (@ 0.6 hps per flamer, a 3x buff). And half of that is likely to get dissipated, and so will overheat a mech in twenty-two seconds from dead cold. Granted it will keep it there, but we have to look at how much heat the Marshamallow is generating all by itself.

By TT rules, the flamer applies 2 heat to a target, and three to its carrying unit.

So if we go by that, 33% more heat is applied to the carrying mech than to the target. Means our 4P Marshmallow is going to be suffering an 8.1 heat per second burden of it's own, and assuming a DHS loading (which is impossible to achieve) of 26 DHS would overheat itself in a little over twenty-one seconds.

So, unless they're REALLY REALLY buffed, one-man stunlock isn't possible.

[CMGrendel]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 12 March 2013 - 08:54 PM, said:

is there really a question as to if a FLAME THROWER should be a heat weapon?

and yes, flamers should do more heat than they generate -.-

Youd think they could be heat dissipation weapons lol the higher your heat the more heat they transfer/damage they do

I have my own opinions, but they are not salient to this poll. The idea of this poll is to give the developers some ideas as to both what the players broadly want and how they would like it implemented. The designers already know what they want to do, I'm not going to waste my time asking them to implement my ideas instead. I'm just trying to give them some data to make their own decisions.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

really really buffed past the point of TT but that shouldnt be an issue for this game lol

CMGrendel, on 12 March 2013 - 09:05 PM, said:

I have my own opinions, but they are not salient to this poll. The idea of this poll is to give the developers some ideas as to both what the players broadly want and how they would like it implemented. The designers already know what they want to do, I'm not going to waste my time asking them to implement my ideas instead. I'm just trying to give them some data to make their own decisions.

they get their own data in the game. The polls here dont mean ****. Want proof of that? Look at the numerous 95% no to 3rd person polls but pgi thinks theres a large enough percentage of ppl that want it to look into putting it in the game. http://mwomercs.com/...rd-person-view/ "a huge number of requests"
I guess that means all things like this do is to show them what they should put in by seeing what the smallest portion of ppl vote for.

Edited by Mechwarrior Buddah, 12 March 2013 - 09:09 PM.

[Sephlock]

I should be able to take a flamer boat and trololol in situations where its 1v1.

[xengk]

I wouldn't mind if Flamer does 0 damage but inflict 0.5 Heat per second on the victim and reduce heat dissipation by 20% for 3 seconds.

If someone boat 6 Flamer, the victim will get 3 Heat per second.
Negating the effect of 3 SHS or 2.1 DHS.

[Deathlike]

Flamers should not be a running joke, like MGs. A simple tweak is to make flamers give as much heat as they generate (.4 from user, .4 to target is simple enough). It has to be closer to 1 to 1 ratio (target to user).

[Vapor Trail]

xengk, on 12 March 2013 - 09:17 PM, said:

I wouldn't mind if Flamer does 0 damage but inflict 0.5 Heat per second on the victim and reduce heat dissipation by 20% for 3 seconds.

If someone boat 6 Flamer, the victim will get 3 Heat per second.
Negating the effect of 3 SHS or 2.1 DHS.

Check your math. 3 heat per second is thirty Singles, or 10 engine Doubles and ~7 extra Doubles.

Edited by Vapor Trail, 12 March 2013 - 09:19 PM.

[ragingmunkyz]

Your poll is...odd. The topic doesn't match the poll, flamers are already a heat weapon, so it's not clear what you're even asking for. Since flamers are already a heat weapon, I'm going to answer to the topic, which is if they should be CC weapons. There is only one correct response to this:

You want them to be a stunlock weapon? Seriously? ECM, LRMS, Streaks all get complained about very regularly on this forum, but stunlock is perhaps the most complained about feature in the history of MMOs. I have no clue why you would want to have something that I have never seen make a community happy, and is almost never implemented correctly. It is very difficult to balance stuns in any game, and this is a shooter, not an MMORPG, so it would be even more of a nightmare. I don't even want to imagine the forums on the day they announced something like that. It would be like The Great Consumable War 2.0...I shudder to think of it.

Edit: Apparently you meant to say "should flamers be buffed?" Which is a different question entirely, perhaps that should've been made clear in the poll and the OP.

Edited by ragingmunkyz, 12 March 2013 - 09:23 PM.

[WassonG]

One thing they could do to make the flamer worth while is give it a degree of lingering heat generation, and possibly some lingering damage over-time. The weapon's flame can coalesce onto it's target's armor diminishing the cooling efficiency a great deal for a time proportional to the exposure to the flamer's flame, after direct exposure has ended.

possibly even...it's this game's "sunder armor" effect? with the armor under stress from the flamer's heat, other weapons do a small amount of extra damage...? Any time a weapon or part of the game is completely useless and never used, you need to think of reasons to make it a viable weapon, something to elevate it past the status of "joke" weapon.

[Sephlock]

If nothing else, a flamer should cause an ECM unit to overload and explode for 50 points of internal damage.

[hammerreborn]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 12 March 2013 - 08:54 PM, said:

is there really a question as to if a FLAME THROWER should be a heat weapon?

and yes, flamers should do more heat than they generate -.-

Youd think they could be heat dissipation weapons lol the higher your heat the more heat they transfer/damage they do

No, because I agree with the not stunlocking desire. However, it really needs to add more heat the longer on the target.

Basically, currently, using 6 flamers, my heat automatically jumps to 42%, and quickly increases over time.

Meanwhile, the target sits at 12% (give or take environment), and doesn't move. His heat should tick along side mine. It would still be impossble to basically keep a mech shut down, but it would really make the target have to worry about using any high heat weapons.

Last night I ran an 8 flamer team that all targetted a single 4 PPC stalker. He was able to fire just fine, only shutting down twice, with over 30 flamers hitting him, and that's bs.

Edited by hammerreborn, 12 March 2013 - 09:55 PM.