34 replies to this topic

[Badgerthej]

ok i was in a match recently with my enforcer 5d, 2 mg's, 2 large lasers and a flamer.

now i have my mg's and flamer on one grouping for multiple effects at close range and attacked an ebon jaguar who was low armour and heat damaged internals so i thought, might as well have a go at him I can win. alas this wasnt the case.
I had fired my dual larges once or twice and rolled at half heat on terra therma, I was close to the lava in centre and the ebon had dropped down into a ditch with me so i opened up with the flame/mg combo hoping to grind out those tasty crits on open internals and maybe even open up some of the heavily damaged armour while keeping some form of heat management.
The ebon during this time was constantly hitting me with meds and larges.....here's the issue...I overheated and he didnt, from one flamer...one!!!.

what the hell, do i set fire to myself or something, pgi you got the fire all wrong it should never effect the firing mech anywhere near as much as it does, its pretty much useless to begin with let alone making it a handicap for the mad pilot trying to use them.

was this self harming effect ment to be part of the weapon or did someone suggest that flamers were op somewhere, I am confused, can you explain why his 90m support weapon must do more to the mech firing it than to the mech being toasted?

[FupDup]

Here is all you need to know about Flamers:



It's so sad.

[Badgerthej]

ok thats rediculous, deffinitely needs a tweak.

[Monkey Lover]

if you take two flamers and chainfire them you dont have to worry about it

[Roadkill]

FupDup, on 24 June 2015 - 10:24 AM, said:

Here is all you need to know about Flamers:

Actually, the only thing you need to know about Flamers is that you have to carry 2 of them and use Chain Fire.

Flamers have an exponential effect on the firing Mech if you use them continuously. To get around that, carry 2 and Chain Fire them one after the other so that no single Flamer is ever on for more than 0.5 seconds. Completely avoids the exponential effect.

Still doesn't really make them useful, but that's a different issue.

And I've been ninja'd by Monkey Lover yet again! CURSES!!!

[FupDup]

Roadkill, on 24 June 2015 - 10:36 AM, said:

Actually, the only thing you need to know about Flamers is that you have to carry 2 of them and use Chain Fire.

Flamers have an exponential effect on the firing Mech if you use them continuously. To get around that, carry 2 and Chain Fire them one after the other so that no single Flamer is ever on for more than 0.5 seconds. Completely avoids the exponential effect.

Still doesn't really make them useful, but that's a different issue.

And I've been ninja'd by Monkey Lover yet again! CURSES!!!

Congratulations, you've just spent 2 tons on what amounts to a Machine Gun with even less damage and less range.

[Mcgral18]

FupDup, on 24 June 2015 - 10:39 AM, said:

Congratulations, you've just spent 2 tons on what amounts to a Machine Gun with even less damage and less range.

Also lacks the 9x crit bonus of the MG, so it's only dealing face value damage...of 0.7 per second.

[Badgerthej]

to be honest flamers are 0.5ton so its only one ton, but the fact that you'd have to have two on chain fire to mitigate rediculous heat build up is still a massive issue.

[Roadkill]

FupDup, on 24 June 2015 - 10:39 AM, said:

Congratulations, you've just spent 2 tons on what amounts to a Machine Gun with even less damage and less range.

Well, I did say that it still didn't make them useful...

And it's only 1 ton if you're Clan. Their flamers are 0.5 each.

[Badgerthej]

they need to either have a little damage boost or they need to have their scaling dropped

[Ragtag soldier]

Monkey Lover, on 24 June 2015 - 10:34 AM, said:

if you take two flamers and chainfire them you dont have to worry about it

yeah, but this ALSO means you can't pile on flamers to punish mechs boating lasers by pushing their heat scale over when teh alpha. the broken heat scaling makes them useless for punishing energy-based builds. and since they don't do much damage either, whay use 'em?

[Badgerthej]

its mostly an annoyance that there can be obsolete weapon systems, very few use small lasers unless its a last resort but at least they do damage, even if its only a little.

[FupDup]

Ragtag soldier, on 24 June 2015 - 11:45 AM, said:

yeah, but this ALSO means you can't pile on flamers to punish mechs boating lasers by pushing their heat scale over when teh alpha. the broken heat scaling makes them useless for punishing energy-based builds. and since they don't do much damage either, whay use 'em?

They also can't even heat up the enemy robot past 90% of their threshold.

[Boris The Spider]

Not sure how you managed to shut yourself down, flamers generate no heat unless you fire them for more than 4 seconds, probably linking them with the MG's? They do however prevent you cooling off, roughly half’s the cool down speed when used in my experience.

I can see is why they didn't work on your target. To achieve a shut down the target needs be hot already, you can't start from scratch on them. Flamers are terrible at transferring heat to a target and their effect maxes out at 80%, so forget that, what they are great at doing is preventing the target cooling down. So what you want to be doing his finding targets that are already engaged in combat and hot (thermal vision helps on most maps for this), those are the ones you flame. If you can keep someone at 80% heat and their weapon generates a 20% heat-spike then they will shut down when they fire. Even if they don't though, you are still distracting them and lowering their DPS, if you start flaming a mech that is engaged in an other wise 50/50 fight, he will lose. If he was winning he may start losing and if he was losing, hes going to be dead much much quicker.

Used right they can be extremely effective, but it takes tons of practice to get the experience and situational awareness to make them work. The mech needs to be built around the flamers, its no good pulling a medium laser off a working build and swapping it with a flamer, to be able to fight and flame you need massive redundant heat capacity. You need the speed and agility to be able to engineer 2vs1 situations, you need the armour to tank the inevitable agro and you need a primary weapon system that is heat efficient and effective in its own right. Also, don't bother with them in the group queue, the technique relies on the ability to isolate mechs, and group players wont let you do that.

While not for everybody, my most prolific (highest KD highest WL) solo mode 'mech is equipped with flamers, and it's the most fun and rewarding to run out the lot of them.

[Badgerthej]

boris, i was targeting a mech who had already been in combat, and he continued to fire his energy heavy build at least three full alphas more before I shut down, my original post stated we were on terra therma and we were practically in the crater (down one of the run offs) he should have toasted well before I shut down but apparently flamers cant overheat an enemy but they can overheat you.

in my oppinion this is an extremely dumb thing.

[Moldur]

There are useless weapons, and then there is the flamer. Exponential heat, the one factor that might make flamers useful if it didn't DO IT TO YOUR OWN MECH.

[Boris The Spider]

Its all about the timing and Badger. Unless your spraying them like MG's they generate zero heat, I'm looking at mine on Caustic in the testing grounds now and I can run them for 8 seconds before they generate even 1% heat. In actual combat I wouldn’t even use them for more than 2-3 seconds.
But your right, a flamer cannot overheat an enemy, you a relying on him overheating himself.

Edited by Boris The Spider, 24 June 2015 - 12:40 PM.

[Badgerthej]

its the reason i have my mg's linked in weapon groupings with flamers is the added if only slight heat management issues the flames give works well with the screen blocking and the constant MG crit grinding when they have open armour.

and when i fire my flamer i usually hold the trigger since tiny spurts of flame just dont do jack.

[Deathlike]

It was somewhere during the release of the Firestarter (I think early 2014) where this came up.

It was someone's position @ the time to "fix" them, but we're like 16 months past that position @ Russ's twitter.

[Badgerthej]

there are better things to do than flamer re-work but maybe they can combine it all into a weapons rebalance or something.