Bishop Steiner, on 03 November 2013 - 06:26 AM, said:
I have yet to have a flamer mech make me overheat. I have had several flamer mechs become easy targets while they tried to keep me bathed in flame and I potted their little faces. Taking advantage of people with bad builds doesn't make the weapon good.
That's because a flamer mech is absolutely incapable of making someone overheat.
Flamers will gradually increase an enemy mech's heat to 90%, but no higher. Said enemy mech can then overheat if they fire high-heat weaponry, but otherwise there's no real ill effects except the trivially low damage(even compared to an MG) from the flamer.
However, flamers will eventually cause the firing mech to overheat, which makes them particularly amusing. Since the last change, they initially inflict more heat than they create on the firing mech, but the inflicted heat his capped, the firing heat is not.
Colonel Johnny Rico, on 03 November 2013 - 07:38 AM, said:
What do bad builds have anything to do with making a "non-viable" weapon good? Some mechs might not fair as great as the ones you use do, like most of the light mechs, and maybe even some of the mediums. Does it necessarily make it bad? Just because YOU couldn't find a use for it, doesn't mean others wont. Not trying to get offensive, or trying to say I'm the all seeing eye, but I am trying to say it's not completely useless lol. It may not be the heat that is as effective in some cases as it is the blinding (for people who use cockpit view anyway). Maybe some people freak out when they see fire.... and as you said, easy targets.... become easy distractions... use the flamer mechs with heavy armor for annoying distractions while lrm support nukes them. Though there is a downside to this, their friends could show up and annihilate the flamer mechs... i guess it's a situational weapon rather than an outright 'good' one.
You could argue it's situational, but only when that situation is only "Against spectacularly bad pilots".
Not only is it not a good weapon, but it's an objectively bad one. It's effectively a weapon that does nothing, and you're relying on your targets reacting more to a weapon that does nothing than ones that can actually kill them.
There's no other use-case. In every other situation, a Medium Laser is simply better. It actually does damage, can actually kill things. Against pilots who aren't objectively terrible, it'll get more attention than the flamer does because pilot who don't suck react to taking real damage.
Yes, flamer mechs attract attention. Not because it's some magic taunt weapon, but because it screams (and actually means) "This mech is an easier kill than it otherwise would be". You can accomplish the same thing with Small Lasers fired beyond their range too - you're just telling your opponent that you're an easy kill. But at least the small laser mech can do real damage up close.
Flamers absolutely need work. They are, and since at least the start of open beta always have been, the worst weapon in the game. There was a time in closed beta where they could overheat opponents, but then you have stun-lock issues the devs don't want (for good reasons). If we had high-heat penalties, then Flamers could have a decent role, but we don't. A mech at 90% heat suffers no ill effects from it, short of being unable to fire a lot... But accomplishing that requires generating tons of heat on the firing mech too. And while the Flamer generates more heat on the target than the firing mech, if the firing mech doesn't have as much heat capacity/dissipation, it'll still overheat first. Even if that's not the case, the firing mech can't hold it's target at 90% because the heat generation on the firing mech increases exponentially - no matter how many heat sinks, firing one flamer will cause you to overheat.
They're the worst weapons in the game, by an
enormous margin.