Get ride of ammo and replace it with heat. The flamer can’t be triggered once the heat is above 30%, but of course you can go up to the 100% heat while holding LMB since beginning.
The heat can’t be reduced manually and once being on 100%, it might take like 2 minutes to get to 0% again.
Decrease the damage to 0 against armored elites and cut it half against unarmored elites.
Rework the special to activate a 2nd gaschamber, which will increase the flamers temperature drastically, so the flamer will be able to deal with elites but on the cost of a way faster heat-increase.
It can be activated / deactivated while holding LMB and doesn’t need to be prepared. The flames will turn blue as long as it’s activated.
This would give the player a bit more of interaction and decision-making with the flamer. If players want to use it permanently, they can’t hold LMB anymore and have to keep it under the 30% mark. But they’re also able to still deal with bad situations unless they exeggerated it before.
About the ammo-packs…
a) Maybe the game should spawn ammo based on the amount of guns within the party.
b) Nerf the peril-management on Psyker a bit and add those tinctures i suggested in the past, which will always spawn randomly if a Psyker is in the party. Those tinctures will grant a buff to peril-management to outweigh the nerf for a decent amount of time.
It would bring Psyker in a better balanced spot and will finally make staff-users happy when they open chests.
c) If my idea about the flamer should become somewhat real, add rare cooling-mixtures to the game. It’ll decrease the amount of heat by 50% since you can’t do it manually.
Could be a thing for the plasmagun aswell.
I shared my thoughts about the PS here and have come to the conclusion that it’s still one of the best melee weapons veteran has. I really have no problem using it post-nerf, and I think once I get one with Power Cycler on it, it will still be abhorrently broken.
I agree that stagger is still too high. I have a blessing that ignores 60% of all stagger resistance and even baseline stagger is still very generous. Maniacs should probably have a condition that lets them ignore braced flamer/purgatus stagger so there’s an actual enemy counter to a weapon type that functionally trivializes the game.
And just in case anyone doesn’t know, since a lot of people in this thread give that impression: unbraced left clicks on the Purgatus Staff/zealot Flamer both have insanely high stagger. They are explicitly designed to stagger enemies.
Range nerf is great…
Damage reduced on flak is great… even if I think the flamer can kill them too fast. However, I think that, like is the flamer actually, is good, even if it is a strong weapon.
My problem is about ammo… I think that there’s a need to find something about ammos. Ammos reserve should return as it was prior of this patch.
I agree with Death_angel proposal… something I always pushed for. I think it would have been better “nerf” for the flamer. But I pointed several timers that flak enemies were dying too fast. And on this FS did something.
You quote what I did in a thread about ammos… I think it could solve everything, especially cause they could also tweak how much vets receive.
I would say that, against flak, it should not be 0… but 25% of the normal damages.
Anyways, FS has made a choice. I doubt that, now, they change totally what they have done… and even if I pushed for a heat system, I think that we have to be realist, they won’t now go for a new nerf method.
I can only repeat me as i did in the PS thread, i don’t see a nerf here. XD
It would just depend on how impactful the heat-management is within my idea, but that’s something FS could find out with testing and math.
It’s more that flamer will indeed offer atleast a bit of skill-ceiling and playerinteraction then, while still being useful and fitting the niche of having “a rescue-button”.
Poeple would automatically look at it with a different view if it would have some depth to play around instead of holding LMB into every room while taking all ammo lying around.
Yes but limit it to ragers.
In my view the flamer is strong but has drawbacks and isn’t a win button anymore. The correct balance is to ensure there are enemied that can challenge you while you burn them. That can be flanking ranged units, flanking specials, units that outrange you, or crushers, maulers and ragers running you down regardless of being on fire. Any further damage nerfs are going to feel horrible.
Flamer still feels very oppressively strong for me. Even after the nerfs to flak enemies, they’re already fairly low HP enemies padded out by the fact that they’re wearing armor.
It would make logical sense that flamers would ignore your own flames (considering the thematic crossroads there), ragers wouldn’t feel themselves being burned to death, that sort of thing. The only maniac I think shouldn’t ignore flamers are trappers at that point. I think this is logically intuitive and presents a challenge that doesn’t always encourage a zealot to use a flamer to address rooms full of enemies.
Think of it like how you would deal with poxbursters, right?
Fan the Flames is pretty much BiS now because -60% stagger resistance kinda puts things back into where they were pre-nerf. In controversially comparable terms, Fan the Flames is very much the flamer’s Power Cycler. Keep in mind this only applies to the unbraced left click (‘primary attack’) that is designed to stagger enemies.
So, for example, the best way to use a flamer now is to brace, build stacks, unbrace and spam left click to stagger, then brace again, ad nauseam.
Also they could just make Chastise the Wicked not work on ranged weapons anymore. That’s sort of a thorn in the side of game balance right now when it comes to zealot… but I digress.
I am not really finding that to be generally true. Maybe its just the quality of player i’ve been bumping into in my damnation games but the flamer zealots are doing less damage than me with my shotgun and caxe/hammer.
The few of them that really preformed with it still gave me room to do stuff at all ranges. Especially when maulers, ragers and crushers show up.