Gas Guzzler, on 17 February 2016 - 05:58 PM, said:
Amusing graphic means you get the quote.
Anyways.
Yes yes yes yes
yes, I understand the point. "Flamers are actually broken; you can circumvent their penalties entirely with macros! This is a stupid hackjob that lets people lock their enemies at 90% heat with no penalty!"
First of all: longtime PC players just need to accept that macros are nothing more or less than legitimized, low-order cheating. That's a discussion for a different thread, though. Second of all: does it matter?
No, really - does it matter? Yeah, I know what The Community(C) wanted Piranha to do - rebuild flamers into a weapon with a 5-10s cooldown that inflicted a single spike of heat on a target. Basically turn them into tiny tiny plasma cannons instead of flamers, because that woulda been "good design".
My point is this, and lets do it step by step so everyone follows:
A.) The flamer, as a weapon, is designed to inflict heat rather than damage on its target (in terms of 'Mech to 'Mech combat. We are ignoring infantry/terrain-firestarting in this discussion as they are irrelevant to MWO).
B.) Heat, in MWO, is a limiting mechanic which is designed to slow down weapons fire and control how much damage a player can deal in a given period of time.
C.) A weapon which inflicts heat instead of damage, such as the flamer, is intended to slow down an opponent's weapons fire and reduce the amount of damage they can do within a given period of time.
D.) A heat-based weapon which inflicts negligible heat on the target (i.e. the Flamer of the last three years) does not slow down an opponent's weapons fire and reduce the amount of damage they can do within a given period of time. This goes against the intent of heat-based weapons such as flamers.
E.) A heat-based weapon which inflicts significant heat on the target (i.e. the Flamer of this Tuesday)
does slow down an opponent's weapons fire and reduce the amount of damage they can do within a given period of time. This aligns with the intent of heat-based weapons such as flamers.
F.) While a superior napkin-stage design for Flamers is very easy for forum players to spitball, recoding the weapon entirely to turn it into something it's not, but these ground-up rebuilds may not be an option for Piranha. The current edits to the Flamer allow the weapon to have a point for the first time since the game launched; waiting for Piranha to acquiesce to the "tiny tiny plasma cannon" philosophy of flamer design means flamers get to have a point
never.
G(G).) If you want flamers to stop sucking, congratulations - they no longer suck. They may not work the way you want them to, they may not work the way anyone hopes and dreams and aspires they might, but they actually have a use now. We can accept this and hope Piranha iterates on them later, or we can get Piranha to club them back into uselessness, after which Russ will (rightly) state "we tried making flamers better before. You guys screamed at us until we reverted the changes. Why should we bother with Flamers, they're mostly a legacy subweapon from TT anyways. You guys aren't happy unless they're awful."
if that's what you want...well, keep on keepin' on, I suppose.