SPNKRGrenth, on 21 June 2021 - 08:58 PM, said:
Flamers just need a full entire redesign from the ground up. Throw the whole thing out and start fresh.
THIS!
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Here's the issue that neither side of the debate I'm seeing in this thread is addressing:
Currently Flamers took the exponential scaling heat generation and kept it!
Flamers do exponentially increasing heat damage and build-up. Both are affected by exponential scaling. Where is this a huge problem? When the heat damage starts at a whopping 4 Heat DPS and
it just goes up from there as long as you keep the flamers on your target (which, lets admit, is not hard to do with a hit-scan weapon). This makes a single Flamer absurd for doing heat damage. Take any comparison metric you want, TT or prior MW games or HBS Battletech, a single Flamer was never meant to be crippling to an opponent.
Then throw in the doubly absurd "free fire window" which causes a Flamer to generate ZERO heat for 4.5 seconds (not including Ghost Heat penalties), and you have a weapon that is ripe for abuse.
If you don't address these inherent flaws, then the weapon remains ripe for abuse to people who know how to abuse it and utter trash for everyone who doesn't. I personally stopped using Flamers when these changes were implemented because I refuse to abuse a broken mechanic. I was also extremely frustrated over the complete removal of any real physical damage from the weapon, which I personally thought was just a pointless move.
Why did this happen? Because Russ refused to dedicate the engineering time (all the way back in 2013, no less, and even with Flamergeddon in 2015) to actually scrap the broken Flamer code that PGI had to admit that THEY DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKED ANYMORE! Literally . . . the engineer that designed the original Flamer code moved on to a different company. Therefore, now that we have the opportunity, we need to actually fix the weapon.
How do we address this? Scrap the Flamer and restart from scratch.
Copy/paste the core code of the machine gun, another hit-scan weapon with the same basic mechanics. PGI already did this base premise for the Flamers of MW5 and it needs to happen for MWO. After that you tune the weapons for the environment we have in MWO instead of the single player coop experience of MW5.
Give them a fixed flat DPS of 1.2-1.4 so the weapon does what it's always supposed to be able to do, viable physical damage.
Set the heat damage to a fixed flat value such as 1.6-2.0 Heat DPS. Retain the 90% heat cap so that if someone does actually get someone to high heat, stun-locking cannot be abused.
At the same time, set the weapon's heat generation at a flat value of 1.0 HPS. By the time you would get an opponent to 90% heat, you don't have much extra firing time left in yourself, either. Therefore, you can't abuse the system and you're not shutting down a bunch of mechs.
Put in a standard range of 90m and a max range of something small, like 120, which creates a steep but reasonable drop-off. It then feels like every other energy and ballistic weapon in the game with damage dropoff outside of maximum range.
If you really want Ghost Heat at that point, put it in at something such as more than 6 Flamers, because at that point you'd be inflicting up to 12 Heat DPS (depending on what the value is set at), which could get even heatsink laden mechs to 90% in short order . . . as well as yourself.
1 Flamer is a nuisance. 2 is a modest deterrent that negates a fair amount of any DHS equipped mech's cooling. 3-6 becomes dangerous, but more than that becomes difficult for anyone to handle or it's an overboated gimmick that won't be able to handle its own heat generation.
Now, if you don't want to reengineer the entire weapon with copy-pasting techniques, people long ago parsed the game data and realized this could be done with basic XML adjustments to the Flamer's stats. You set the exponential scaling seed values to 0, thereby shutting off the scaling mechanics. Then you set the flat values from there and adjust the other values as necessary.
In the end, the Flamer is supposed to be a support weapon that can cause a hinderance to enemy heat dissipation while also inflicting some damage on the opponent. It's supposed to allow you to move in on the enemy, do some damage, and get out without the fear of as much returning fire from your opponent.
Edited by Sereglach, 22 June 2021 - 10:56 AM.
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