MacKoga, on 01 July 2013 - 08:22 PM, said:
But isn't that ultimately the role of flamers? To provide advantage when fighting heat-sensitive mechs?
Depending on implementation, flamers could be more effective vs. builds that alpha and shut down than just run close to shutting down. This would help make flamers more curtailed to going after PPC boats than ML hunchbacks.
My concern is with how damage will be done, and to make sure that they can be both useful for it's tonnage, yet hard to abuse.
From what I've read on Flamers, I think it is interesting how they are powered by a mech's reactor, and although
sarna has a damage listing at 2, I'm okay with how Flamers work against how I understand how
mech armor is supposed to work. So since we already have a crit system, I say let's tinker with those values to boost flamers along with other effects like raising an enemy's heat level.
So, what I would consider for Flamers is probably keep the damage at .70 to armor and utilize the crit system to do increased damage to Internals and Items than what we currently have (looking forward to other items in the future).
smurfy's says Flamer Crits can do .77 damage 14% of the time, 1.54 damage 8% of the time and 2.31 damage 3% of the time.
So instead, I'd like to test how Flamers might perform if instead we could at least do 1 damage 19% of the time, 1.74 damage 11% of the time and 2.31 damage 7% of the time. Maybe tinker more here to improve performance as needed.
Next I would reduce the Heat to .75 maybe even .50, so that firing the Flamer does not over heat your own mech faster than the enemy, and can be used better with a mix of other weapons, at least other energy weapons.
Then increase the Max Range to 75, so full damage still goes out to 64, but you could still do some damage out to 75.
From here, I've read other ideas where heat could grow exponentially to a certain cap level, so the greater number of flamers the high the cap goes, to mimic the heat pumps on the enemy mech getting overloaded with no where to dump the heat. It could be something where flamers could have a combination of effects.
So, one effect could be where one flamer on target prevents the enemy mech from going below 35% heat (plus ambient levels, so it's higher on hot maps) on the heat scale. So then two flamers cap at 45%, three caps at 55%, maybe up to 5 flamers keeping a mechs heat at 75% and more flamers could not go beyond maybe 80 or 85%, (plus ambient heat) on the heat scale.
Then the second effect could be where the longer you can hold the flamer on target, the enemies heat will slowly also rise as it receives damage towards a hard cap level somewhere around 70 to 85%.
This is more or less what I've had in mind and the numbers should be played around with so that Flamers have a functional niche in the game and hopefully hard to abuse also.
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