110 replies to this topic

[Sereglach]

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 11 July 2013 - 09:00 PM, said:

given the upcoming boating penalties this is a bad time to mess with the flamer.

Why would it be such a bad time to mess with the Flamers? The two aspects don't really correlate, unless, after they get the flamer rebalanced, they then add it's own heat scale for boating control. That, if they do rebalance the flamer along the lines of my proposal, is not something I would be against if they started scaling after 4-5 Flamers.

The core use of the Flamers wouldn't change under my proposal, they still wouldn't be able to force a mech into shutdown, and thusly wouldn't be able to force heat damage. They also wouldn't mitigate heat sink effectiveness while being burned any more than they do now, so you wouldn't take any more extra heat damage for overheating yourself if being hit with flamers.

What this proposal WOULD do is rebalance the flamer so that . . .

1: We wouldn't have this terribly inadequate and ineffective exponential heat scaling mechanic over time.
2: Any pilot would be able to mount even just one Flamer (which some trials are stuck with just one), and use it to at least some reasonable effect.
3: The Flamer would not become overpowered, it would merely become a balanced and effective crowd control weapon, capable of raising enemy heat and removing some of their DPS capacity from the battlefield.

How would that be such a bad thing to implement while they're introducing heat scaling?

Bhael Fire, on 11 July 2013 - 05:49 PM, said:

The poll has majority vote in favor. I know 20-30 votes doesn't mean all that much, but it gives a fairly good read on where the most most frequent forumers stand.

That said, think pretty much everyone can agree that flamers need some love to make them a little more practical for crowd control (regardless if they like or even care about your proposed method for doing so).

As I mentioned, I know I'd love it if they gave flamers some attention...since I really like the general concept.

Thank you kindly for the continued support.

[Corvus Antaka]

stunlocking was once in MWO - in closed beta.

during that time i stunlocked numerous mechs, and then rapidly headshot killed them. this became a significant issue to game balance.

stunlocking is not a viable option.

given the incomming boating penalties, and the internal damage mechs take, plus the damage the flamers now do to mechs, a rebalance at this time is too soon.

in principal i agree that the flamer needs love, and hopefully in august some tweaks will make it more useful without making it OP.

[Sereglach]

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 12 July 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

stunlocking was once in MWO - in closed beta.

during that time i stunlocked numerous mechs, and then rapidly headshot killed them. this became a significant issue to game balance.

stunlocking is not a viable option.

given the incomming boating penalties, and the internal damage mechs take, plus the damage the flamers now do to mechs, a rebalance at this time is too soon.

in principal i agree that the flamer needs love, and hopefully in august some tweaks will make it more useful without making it OP.

Then you apparently did not read my OP. There is no stun locking in my suggestions anywhere. Although I state it's something that I'm not against, I also state that in the fairness of balance it is not an included feature of flamer rebalancing. There is no stun locking anywhere in this suggested flamer rebalancing, so your argument is null and void.

So I again ask, what true reason is there for not rebalancing the flamers now, or in the way I suggest?

[Redwood Elf]

Blue Footed Booby, on 08 July 2013 - 10:38 AM, said:

They rebalanced flamers so they're actually semi useful, but then they totally broke them so they didn't do any damage or heat to your target--not too little, literally none. Have they fixed that? I haven't even tried flamers since the change.

Well I fried some mechs with em in the training grounds...so they do, in fact, do damage.

[Corvus Antaka]

Sereglach, on 12 July 2013 - 02:01 PM, said:

So I again ask, what true reason is there for not rebalancing the flamers now, or in the way I suggest?

I'll say it again - boating penalties.

[Sereglach]

Redwood Elf, on 12 July 2013 - 02:03 PM, said:

Well I fried some mechs with em in the training grounds...so they do, in fact, do damage.

They do light damage, which I address in my suggestion that it should stay as such. Flamers should do some, but not a lot of damage, because they are primarily crowd control weapons. Although, I do give the suggestion of allowing the clan flamer to have significantly higher DPS over the inner sphere flamer to allow two different styles of gameplay. This is certainly open for debate, as I'm sure there are other methods and ideas of balancing clan flamers.

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 12 July 2013 - 02:05 PM, said:

I'll say it again - boating penalties.

Now you're just looping back on yourself. I stated against this the first time that the flamer rebalance doesn't change the heat damage caps, and it doesn't change the way flamers mitigate heat sink dissipation. Therefore, there is no effect from the flamers against the heat scaling mechanic.

I'll say it again - what my suggestion does do is change the way flamers build heat to make a single flamer a viable option to assist in crowd control mechanics (making trials useful), and remove the rather ineffective and inadequate "exponential scaling" mechanic on flamer HDPS and HPS.

Please read the OP through thoroughly if you're going to pass judgments on it.

[Sereglach]

I know this thread hasn't received any attention for a long time, however a point occurred to me that wasn't brought up when I originally posted it. Another reason for severe need in Flamer rebalancing is that in table-top Battletech, mechs like the Firestarter, Blackjack 1X, and other heavy flamer using chassis were capable of maintaining relatively heat neutral builds, where heat could be easily managed as long as one wasn't constantly alpha-striking. In MWO, with the current Flamer setup, it is literally impossible to have anything even remotely close to a heat neutral build, even with only one Flamer on board a mech. That is something that requires dire addressing.

Also, after seeing the effects of heat scaling, and how it is functioning within the game, I believe it is safe to say that Flamers could still use a reasonable rebalancing that removes their own, independent heat scaling mechanic and that this proposed system could be used for flamer functionality. The new heat scaling system could then be applied to Flamers if more than 4 were equipped to a mech.

Thank you for your time and consideration in reading this thread and casting your votes.

Edited by Sereglach, 25 August 2013 - 11:24 AM.

[Black Templar]

ladies and gentlemen,

this is the prime example of a well written post. bravo!

[Sereglach]

Black Templar, on 17 January 2014 - 03:19 AM, said:

ladies and gentlemen,

this is the prime example of a well written post. bravo!

I greatly appreciate the positive feedback in regards to this. I hope PGI has given it a solid lookover. Although the original write-up is fairly old, the overwhelming majority of the information is still pertinent and valuable. The Flamer has received very little love, even since this was written.

I would love to know if PGI has ever taken a direct look at it, themselves. That would just make my year if they took this into serious consideration and took these numbers for testing.

Thank you, again.

[Roland]

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 12 July 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

stunlocking was once in MWO - in closed beta.

during that time i stunlocked numerous mechs, and then rapidly headshot killed them. this became a significant issue to game balance.

You did that with... what? Certainly not flamers, because flamers never produced appreciable heat in closed beta.

There was a bug where they didn't generate ANY heat on the shooter, but they also didn't generate any real heat on the target, even if you were running a 4P with 9 of them.

[SaltBeef]

I don't think they should be crit weapons, or damage weapons to mechs, Just reduce heat dissipation on the targeted mech enough to shut it down if it does not retreat or destroy the mech shooting it. Although it should be absolutely destructive to bunkers, small vehicles, infantry of any flavor that may be introduced into the game in the future.

[Sereglach]

SaltBeef, on 27 January 2014 - 08:44 AM, said:

I don't think they should be crit weapons, or damage weapons to mechs, Just reduce heat dissipation on the targeted mech enough to shut it down if it does not retreat or destroy the mech shooting it. Although it should be absolutely destructive to bunkers, small vehicles, infantry of any flavor that may be introduced into the game in the future.

All weapons are crit weapons. However, Flamers have a slight advantage over other weapons at getting critical hits once internals are exposed. On the other hand, they are nowhere near the crit-hunters that Machine Guns and LB-X Autocannons are. I believe they certainly should be better at critting than most weapons. You are, after all, firing hot plasma into the internals of an enemy mech which consists of Myomer (artificial muscle) fibers, wiring, and exposed circuitry of weaponry.

The reason that Flamers don't do damage to mechs in TT is because they're fully capable of doing significantly more in terms of CC. For example, creating a smoke screen from lighting brush and woods on fire actually eliminates the effectiveness of lasers, mitigates sensors and targeting in general, and raises enemy heat when they pass through the fire itself. NONE of that can be done in MWO . . . and frankly it is far too complex to program into the game.

In reality, because of the extreme heat expenses in other games, Flamers in other MechWarrior games either did significantly more damage (making them a close range armor melter) OR had amazing levels of crowd control to shut down and/or overload other mechs. In other MechWarrior games Flamers were something to be FEARED. In MWO they're a minor utility weapon that, in its current configuration, is inadequate to do its specified job.

IF we get the other things in the future like vehicles and infantry (it is on PGI's wish list, but we know it is a while off . . . they have bigger fish to fry right now), then you still need to retain the damage on the Flamers vs Mechs because all the other weapons will be just as capable of obliterating infantry and vehicles as flamers will be. It's not like they can impose damage and accuracy penalties towards the tiny infantry targets on the end of an ERLL or AC20, like what is done in TT. Flamers have the advantage in TT because they incinerate an entire Hex Grid (old tabletop battle-maps use a hexagon grid system) and fry everything in it, including infantry and light vehicles. MWO does not give flamers that kind of area of effect ability.

It needs to be overhauled and balanced for the gameplay that we have. I give a solid basis to do that with. If you have ideas to actually accomplish that then by all means, please post them. However, as I even state in my post, you can't just make the flamers stun-lock and overload any mech you fire them at. For a purely PVP game such as MWO it ruins the fun for everyone around you and leaves the flamer as a horrifically unbalanced and broken weapon.

[Felio]

Ack so many options. I'm "at work." TLDR version, plz?

[Imperius]

Flamers should do a little DMG, but cool your mech and heat theirs. After all the flame comes from the exhaust of the engine right

[HammerSwarm]

My only disagreement (and bump for a good thread) is about the use of flamers as a smoke screen, a deterrent, and a weapons shield.

Now when I shoot the ground I see a puff of smoke with my flamer. If they increased the duration of that and added more smoke.

One implementation problem:
1.) Computer performance taking a hit when lots of smoke is on screen

I don't care about this so much. balance it for the minimum recommended stats, include the smoke effects as a setting in the options menu and start adding. Work your way up from a gray mist that looks like you took some spray paint patterns from MS paint and put them live in MWO and go all the way to realistic smoke.

Once you have the physical smoke screen down you can start in on things a flamer should do, like weakening laser beams. I have an idea for this too. Run a function checking for smoke right after you check the hit on that pulse of the laser if it returns true then reduce damage on that pulse by 10%. Shouldn't eat too much processor time.

[Krujiente]

Personally, I would be okay with the flamer being how it currently is COMPLETELY if they made it so it had a chance to cook ammo through peoples armor. I would also be okay with it being made like it is in table top though. Either/or

Edit: For some reason it doubled my post. Weird.

Edited by Krujiente, 04 February 2014 - 03:23 AM.

[Ironclaw1]

I would suggest to give the flamer the unique ability to negate artillery and air strike smoke if applied directly to a smoke marker before the strike hits. Easy enough to do, and may encourage someone to actually carry a flamer. It gives it a distinct CC flair too.

Edited by Ironclaw1, 05 February 2014 - 03:37 PM.

[Hex Pallett]

I was thinking that they could just keep the damage as it is but completely take away heat generation on your end.

That way it could at least be a silly weapon to use without the painful factor in it.

[Kaeb Odellas]

I'd like the Flamer to be given the Machine Gun treatment. Turn it into an actual damage-dealer and let the heat-generation stuff be a secondary effect.

For instance, you could leave the heat generation relatively low while the target still has armor, and increase heat transfer when firing at exposed internals. You could give them a high crit rate and higher chance to cook off ammo.

Since the flamer supposedly works by venting engine plasma, you could also have each flamer reduce your max speed by a certain percent, so spamming them will cause you to grind to a halt.

This would allow the flamer to be useful, but not abuse-able.

[General Taskeen]

Personally I wish they would just switch it to a burst of flames with a cool down, but they seem to be stuck on trying to balance a constant ON flame, same with the MG's. A rather difficult thing to do given that both weapons are the only ones that do that and suffer because of it. The game is a lot more forgiving when using weapons that do straight up damage, since you fire and move, to avoid damage - while flamers and MG's require constant upkeep.

If they actually were to test ideas, the test server is just prime for letting balance suggestions played out in real-time to really see the affects.

Something I've thought they should try is changing it to a duration 'flamethrower' akin to how lasers are programmed. It would just have the bonus of doing actual damage, while actually transferring heat more quickly, offset by a cool down and high HPS.

Essentially like this
----

90-120 Range
3 Heat Per Shot (additional 3 heat transfer)
2 Damage Over Duration
1 or 1.5 Second Cool Down

(sort of a small laser that deals low damage, burst of hot energy flames, with bonus heat transfer produces way more heat)

vs.

(current Small Laser for comparison)
90-180 range
2 Heat Per Shot
3 Damage Over Duration
2.25 Cool Down (runs much cooler, but obviously does not heat up enemy at same time)

Edited by General Taskeen, 05 February 2014 - 07:56 PM.