Not only was it OP, it’s also annoying as f uck because it eats FPS and removes all visibility for your teammates. Good riddance if people stop using that piece of crap.
There isn’t really an option here that I agree with. I think it was certainly more than slightly overtuned but I also think they probably nerfed too many elements of it simultaneously.
I don’t like the ammo reduction. Not cause I need them… cause there will be players that will impact a lot the ammo supplies of the team to get ammos for the flamer.
Given that flamer users are already one of the more ammo hungry builds in DT, I can only imagine that making them more reliant on pick-ups is going to promote anti-social play.
If the intent is that they’re used more frugally, reducing just their magazine capacity (and not their reserve capacity) would have on its own encouraged more sparing use than the common “pull the trigger until everything is dead” approach.
(More sparing use would certainly be nice for anyone else on the team - having your line of sight blocked by a huge sheet of flame isn’t much fun.)
Using ammo as a balancing mechanic is fairly unreliable, because it usually leads to the group as a whole absorbing the loss. Ideally the individual player would reconsider their ammo expenditure, but in practice that doesn’t really happen.
That being said, based on the few damnation test games that I’ve played so far, the flamer is mostly fine. It’s still perfectly capable against hordes, both plain and mixed.
This is not only affecting flamethrowers, Psyker is equally affected, including the new shotgun.
And Psyker’s 30-2 combined with 25-1 becomes very difficult to kill range enemies.
Doing arguably justified nerfs to anything is going to be received overly-harshly by the community right now, primarily due to the state of the crafting/progression/career amounts.
I think this is highly relevant to any nerf that Fatshark moves forward with, no matter how justified it may be.
If they -
Fixed crafting/progression to be more fair,
Then fixed broken weapons (I don’t mean overpowered, I mean literally broken/malfunctioning),
THEN did heavy nerfs,
then their feedback and public relations would be much better/constructive.
Lastly, the glaring lack of careers/characters is forcing people to hyperfocus on you taking away their fun toys. They can’t be distracted by the exponential amounts of build permutations that you’d have with even 2 more careers/characters. The game’s release with only 4 careers was the single worst thing that has been the subconscious catalyst for so much of the perceived issues/negativity, in my humble opinion. Secondly, and relatedly, account character silo’ing. But I digress
I kind of agree but you also have to factor in that reaction to nerfs is pretty reliably worse the longer overpowered things are left in the game. The best thing FS could have done is rip this band-aid off sometime around the blessing crafting update.
For sure, that’s another large aspect of this situation. Delaying massive nerfs by a long time just makes the impact even more unwelcome. Because now people have started to believe the item will stay as-is, and they’ve made heavy time/crafting investments into it. It can also feel worse for people who were using it as a crutch to play in higher tiers of difficulty. Maybe they can’t handle those difficulties now, which might mean they can’t play with some of their friends at those difficulties, and you’ve transformed their investment into a negatively-perceived sunk cost (in their eyes, since they may no longer perceive the weapon as viable.)
I wish the flamer did work like an actual flamer, where you’re shooting a gout or stream of burning prometheum onto enemies, the stream being stopped by what it hit and splashing around. You get more range by aiming up and throwing the fuel further, at the cost of it not affecting enemies between you and the target. Right now it works more like how I’d imagine a melta or multimelta would, with a cone of cleaving energy that doesn’t seem to be blocked by anything.
I would love to see that implemented. It could be a different Mk or whatever, but would/should have a higher reward and skill ceiling for the player if used properly.
Flamer is yet a STRONG weapon. The nerf of ammo was the bad idea.
I ve just done a mission with two zealots with flamer, that they used all the time.
I was in a veteran and was always low on ammo (with shotgun) cause they were running (and stealing) to all ammo box.
So, I would really like that FS put back the ammo reserve to what it was before. The ammo “clip” (fuel canister) can stay the same.
About damages… well sorry. The nerf doesn’t fix the main problem of flamer. They continue to kill everything within seconds
Conclusion: we need adjustments of the nerf… and an other nerfs for the damages of the flamer
I say keep the Nerfs to damage types and the ammo but in turn make it so that the flamer alt fire is faster and drawing it out is without the slow set up.
It’s damage and stagger profile is fine.
It could use a higher dodge count or shorter weapon-switch animation, so that you can get it out more often for shorter bursts.
