As one of my favourite weapons in games of mechwarrior past, I rigged out my jenner with quad-flamers lately and have been testing it out. I have to say, despite the sheer volume of burniness being pumped into mechs (some even full stopped, point blank range, continuously) it's all-but impossible to get another mech to shut down from overheating. I can pump 95% of my XP-extended heat tolerance into another mech and they'll just happily continue, not just moving, but moving and shooting any type of weapon they please. I'm seemingly overheating myself more than I'm overheating them. Flamers are obviously not there to do damage to other mechs, but I've never once seen a kill from a flamer, leading me to guess they're not causing internal ammo reserves to go off either.
Of the dozens of people I've hit (heavily and continuously) I think I've managed to knock about 4-5 into heat-lock, and even then when they're already pushing themselves heavily in combat. As such, if this weapon is not overheating other mechs, it's not damaging other mechs, and its not risking other mechs' ammo supplies, really what point does it have? I'm not suggesting a massive increase, but at least a little better than a 1:1 heat increase so you actually have some justification to using them rather than just making both of you slightly more useless; with you coming out worse because you still heat up even if you miss while they don't.
(I will note it does certainly get bigger mechs' attention though. I am still planning to use it for its flamboyancy and to draw heavy mechs off my teammates, but really that's not much justification for running without a decent pack of lasers. As I've only seen one other person running flamers yet hundreds of people running Artemis LRMs it can probably be assumed this is nowhere near an overpowered, or even decently powered, weapon atm).
Edited by Woodat, 08 November 2012 - 12:27 PM.