31 replies to this topic

[Jesper Nyte]

Tonight saw myself and 3 friends playing in a lance and I thought I would make a joke build out of my Hunchback 4P to have 9 flamers in an effort to shut down an enemy and make it easier for my mates to finish the mech off. 4 games later and only 3 shut downs one of my lance mates says "I don't think that strategy is working. Shoot me and let's see how much it takes to overheat me."

9 Flamers raised the heat on another Hunchback to 20% and it stopped.

That means the flamer requires the closest range of all the weapons (64m) to do the least amount of damage (.2 DPS) with the highest heat (.4) per damage ratio in the game without ever causing an enemy more pain than 20% extra heat to deal with. This undoubtedly makes the flamer the worst weapon in the game. Coming from the TT to this, I expected a smooth port of the mechanics - much like the overall majority of everything in the game so far. Even the damage values have come over largely intact and those that have changed I think actually improves some of the game. But why must flamers do nothing?

Please increase the heat or the damage or the range of flamers - do something to make them worthwhile, please. I want nothing more than to shut down enemy mech from overheating. It can take a minute or two, that's fine. I am more than willing to circle around as we do the danse macabre until I die or they shutdown but don't give us terrible tools. Do you expect us to use it as anything more than an homage to killing infantry this game will never see?

Devs - I plead with you and will throw gobs of money at your lifestyle and work if you can give me flamers that actually cause fear in the enemy. It costs so much armor to get close enough and piloting to maintain the contact of the flame that only raising the heat of an enemy by a quarter and then capping the growth seems like you did a lot of work to make a weapon that will never see any use. It looks beautiful, has such glorious sounds, and it does so much to visually alter the current flow of a fight. Why waste that chance?

TL;DR: Make a flamer give constant heat and reward those of us who have the temerity to walk right up to an enemy, regardless of what they are shooting, and roast him into a coma.

Edited by Jesper Nyte, 06 November 2012 - 12:12 AM.

[Temozarela]

I concur, at this stage, the flamer is completely useless, even for overheating and light mech pester tactics.

[Excalibaard]

Either they should raise the heat by like 10-15% per flamer (on a mech with 10 HS), or make it a constant (but slow) buildup. Supporting with overheating other mechs should be fun and viable. Of course not to the point where everyone runs 6 flamer Jenner Fs with one gaussapult having a stationary target field day.

Edited by SubjectSeven, 06 November 2012 - 05:10 AM.

[Noth]

They are actually pretty accurate to the lore (not the rules). They are anti infantry weapons and thus would be highly effective against infantry if the game had them.

[I C Wiener]

Though I agree with the OP in general I'd like to add that flamers are by far not the only weapon type which need adjustments (a fact, the developers are well aware of IMO).

Balancing is always an ongoing process and I couldn't think of a MMO that was well balanced in the beginning. In fact most of them were a lot worse in Beta.

There's the general problem that a good part of the community wants to have a 1 to 1 conversion of the tabtletop rules, while another part (I would include me here) wants to see every weapon type to be somewhat usefull in an 8vs8 (12vs12?) deathmatch.

[Kerzin]

I agree with the OP that in general flamers (in their current iteration) are a total waste of space, but I’d like to point out that they were designed as anti-infantry and anti-ground vehicle weapon system and as such have never been a go to weapon for Mech.-on-Mech. combat.

Having said that they are situational useful particularly on hot maps but honestly you’d be better off taking small lasers.

[RedHairDave]

the flamer will raise the heat to 20% with one, or with 9. if you use 1 and are brawling, its effective. it slows the return fire of the mech you are brawling.(all those small laser swaybacks, throw in one flamer, it works) if you had 20% more heat on your mech, you wouldnt be fighting back as fast.

i think its like jump jets are now, one is as good as 9

Edited by RedHairDave, 06 November 2012 - 07:55 AM.

[EtherDragon]

I wish we had destructable terrain... Imagine being able to light the forest on fire - raising ambient heat in the area...

[Voridan Atreides]

Currently they are just a waste of c-bills and space..

[Exilyth]

Unlike MGs, Flamers are hard to balance. They need some sort of heat effect to be different from MGs, but said effect is hard to balance... either you can overheat people, making flamers OP, or you can't, making them UP.

Edit: Chased around a Raven with a 3 Flamer cicada for almost 6 minutes... after which my opponent suicided by overheating. I still wonder how long it would have taken to kill that raven...

Edited by Exilyth, 06 November 2012 - 11:55 AM.

[Strig]

Even if flamers just produced zero heat for the user they might be marginally useful ... sure they'd still barely cause heat in the target, and do very little damage at very close range .. but they would at least be comparable to the (equally useless) machine guns

[Temozarela]

I was wandering around in my atlas last night, and has a 9 flamer hunchback walk up and blast me in the face, and my heat Continued to reduce. all flamers at once, and my my heat was steadily dropping down through the 40's.

I was down to about 30 before the hunchback overheated Himself.

[Sulf]

I brought this up in in the Ask the Devs a while back and they said they were following the original tabletop rules but after seeing gameplay they're talking about how to change it.

[xenoglyph]

I didn't see anything wrong with them before they got nerfed (July maybe?).

They were annoying but flameboats couldn't kill you by themselves unless you were really terrible.

Edited by xenoglyph, 06 November 2012 - 10:00 PM.

[Der BruzZzler von Wiesndoof]

I absolutely agree with the OP. We've tried to engage a single enemy Awesome with 18 Flamers (2x Hunchback with 9 flamers). The Awesome runs hot by its own shots and we could keep it in shutdown status. The pilot tried to restart his mech and suicided. We did that a few couple of times, but it isn't effective, cause we even overheated much faster than the enemy mechs. The Flamer is useless and wasted tonnage. Nothing against to its damage, but it makes not enough heat to enemy mechs.

I imagine, i would pilot a FS9-H Firestarter. Six of my weapons are useless ... unfortunately

Edited by The Birdeater, 06 November 2012 - 10:36 PM.

[LanceHavenbay]

In MW4 you could force enemy mechs to shutdwon by keeping flamers constantly going. (Many of them)

I honestly believe that flamers should constantly increase an enemy mech's heat till overheating occurs. Running flamers already requires you to be in very close. I feel that this is a sufficient deterrent to having whole teams run flamers. LRM boats are already all over the game. At least running flamers requires the pilot to get close AND stay alive. Large amounts of flamers should be able to keep an enemy mech shutdown (7-9) or suppress the enemy fire rate. (1-6)

To the point:
Allow flamers to shut down an enemy mech when carrying enough.
Allow flamers to effectively suppress enemy fire rate when active; the more flamers, the more suppression.

[General Taskeen]

Flamer's, MG's, any AC but an AC/2. Weapons to avoid until they are made useful.

[Der BruzZzler von Wiesndoof]

LanceHavenbay, on 06 November 2012 - 10:45 PM, said:

To the point:
Allow flamers to shut down an enemy mech when carrying enough.
Allow flamers to effectively suppress enemy fire rate when active; the more flamers, the more suppression.

Sounds good. The first point is important and it would be nice if i could effectively overheat an enemy mech with less than 18 flamers. A pack of four flamers should be able to overheat an enemy mech. Slow but constantly.

[superbob]

+1
I want flamer swaybacks back lol

[Smoke Dancer]

Flamers are pretty poor and don't do any where near what they do in the table top game so don't be fooled by that. If the Devs were using table top mechanics then the flamer would have 90 range and not 64 for a start and would cause as much heat as they generated to fire. In the table top game flamers are primarily an anti personel weapon and are pretty useless against vehicles as they do 2 damage and vehicles are immune to heat build up. You should be able to use them to over heat a mech and shut it down if you have enough of them. I think the big problem is actually the way that heat has been implemented and tinkered with and the double heat sink er hmm... Sorry the 1.4 heat sink is symptomatic of that.

Edited by Smoke Dancer, 07 November 2012 - 07:41 AM.