Idea to buff flamethrower: bypass player armor
Nintendows
Join Date: 2016-11-07 Member: 223716Members, Squad Five Blue
Join Date: 2016-11-07 Member: 223716Members, Squad Five Blue
The flamethrower is not in a great place right. It's only real use is to disable alien structures and maybe do some AOE damage. Flamethrower DPS is worse than a rifle, it has worse range than a rifle, and the "energy regen" reduction is almost non-existant. Buffing only the damage would make it strictly better than other weapons, which might be okay, but "strictly better" is not NS2's style.
What if vanilla made the flamethrower bypass player armor (building damage would remain the same)? It would effectively deal extra damage to Gorges, Oni, and partially Lerks, without significantly increasing the damage to Skulks or Fades. It would also be a decent counter to Onos boneshield, since that can only regenerate armor.
What if vanilla made the flamethrower bypass player armor (building damage would remain the same)? It would effectively deal extra damage to Gorges, Oni, and partially Lerks, without significantly increasing the damage to Skulks or Fades. It would also be a decent counter to Onos boneshield, since that can only regenerate armor.
Comments
You can support in 2 ways:
- Buff your teammates
- Debuff the enemy
Well the buff support is provided by commander and the debuff by flamethrower. However I don't get the idea how a full support weapon can be of any use if you have to get close to the aliens for it to work.
The flamethrower is atm like a gorge (without bunnyhop) that can only use bilebomb.
It is slow, has no killing power, very situational.
One way to add a nice support feature to the FT is to give it an alternative firemode which is basically like a giant AoE welder and that welds buildings twice as fast (maybe even faster building time for structures). Add that to the current abilities that the FT has atm and we have a damn strong support weapon.
Yes, at this point, it's almost non-existant. However, aliens would need a light counter for it that scales with player count.
It only has a chance to (kSprayDouseOnFireChance) which is 50%. On average that's 2 heal sprays, but you can easily need more if you have bad luck.
A flamethrower that doubles as a blowtorch, lol... interesting! XD
Yeah, I would have suggested healspray there. Also maybe stomp. Onos and gorge are the only aliens that have to move strictly along the ground; the others are airborne a lot more and shouldn't get the ability to remove fire.
It would probably be better if only healspray can do it, though. Onos are powerful enough and should always be accompanied by gorges anyway.
Maybe make it cheaper, so worse players can feel more useful, but without it having the ability to derp aliens whilst having almost no skill required to use it. The way it burns through alien energy makes it quite useful in a group though.
In Tremulous on the other hand, people rarely use the flamethrower not because it's weak (rather, it deals one of the highest DPS in the game) but because it can kill the user and the flame projectile travels quite slowly which makes it quite difficult to hit enemies with. You can't use it while in a vent because you just about burn yourself since the flame projectile is likely to hit the ceiling where you crouch (since the projectile size is quite large, 1x1x1 meter) and you can burn yourself by simply walking backwards then walking forwards because the projectile carries your velocity. The flame thrower uses 85% of your velocity and it doesn't travel very fast. Because jetpacks are disabled for half a second with self damage, it's almost impossible to use well with a jetpack. Totally not OP since it was essentially useless at chasing down larger aliens and a shotgun (which costs 2.7 times cheaper) was more reliable at annihlating smaller life forms without killing yourself so easily. However because of the large splash damage and flame projectile hitbox, it is still somewhat easier to kill small aliens with in terms of kills over time.
Some of these "features" could be brought over into NS2 such as the ability to kill yourself easily. Now I upped the DPS and enabled friendly fire to 100% (defaults to 33% when enabled) on my TremNS2 server but people complained about it being too OP. Self-burn is very insignificant. There's double damage vs structures (which I forgot to disable at the time, but that is irrelevant for PVP combat).
I honestly think the FF can get a buff, considering it only deals slightly more DPS (~6 * 7 damage *1.25 vs players * 2 vs structures) than a welder (30 DPS *1.25 vs players * 2 vs structures), but if it were to get any higher than let's say, 80 raw DPS before modifiers, I think it needs to be reworked.
That indeed would also be a nice addition. If you think logically, flamethrowers don't completely burn unless they are 'atomised' efficiently, leaving fuel all over the place.
The only change i'm keen on seeing (beside prolonged area fires) is to help new players understand the roles of the weapons in the marine arsenal. There are sooooo many rookie and irregular players who just buy GLs and FTs, even though the actual objective at the given time is fighting lifeforms, not taking down hives. It should be emphasized that those weapons are SUPPORT class, and should be bought only in special circumstances. Well, objectively anyway. I too enjoy setting aliens on fire at any time
As in, narrow the fire cone, increase the maximum range by 2x, halve the on contact damage, increase the time/stacks it takes to set a lifeform on fire but also increase the on fire damage over time.
Currently flamethrowers have to compete with aliens at the alien's best damage range, despite having incredibly low damage output. This change would allow flamethrowers to combat fast moving lifeforms at a greater distance but still allow skulks to take them out if they close the gap.