Drakegun is in a REALLY odd place right now.
It’s good at clearing hordes, but it requires space so using it any difficulty harder than Veteran is a struggle. And hordes are useful for THP anyway.
It struggles with elites and is almost useless against specials.
It can deal friendly fire (probably tiny amounts, but it can proc status effects) and it easily blinds the team with the flames.
I don’t see anyone take it on higher difficulties and it only really works well on a few maps with chokepoints (like Into The Nest or Hunger In The Dark).
It really needs a rework. I know the resources may be limited so I came up with a rather simple idea for a rework to bring it up to par with the rest of the ranged weapons:
The weapon should fire a medium-range stream of fire instead of ignited farts that we have right now. The stream should be slighly more narrow/concentrated to avoid blinding the team.
On impact the stream should do small area-of-effect damage and ignite enemies affected by it. Any surface hit should be lit up with flames that linger for some time, potentially igniting enemies who step on it (could use the same fire effect that you get from the incendiary bombs), much like in Spacehulk Deathwing.
The impact of the stream of fire should probably somehow stagger the enemies hit. I assume one would find it particularly unpleasant to charge straight at a stream of blazing pyrogel.
One very experimental suggestion I have is to change how the weapon’s overcharge functions. You could leave it like it is - or you could make it build up the charge VERY quickly and then have it also cool down significantly fast. For example allow the player to have 3 seconds of continous fire and then have the heat drop down to 0 in similar amount of time. Of course the mechanic of overheating and blowing up would need to be removed. This would result in the player being able to fire the weapon in very short bursts (very much like flamethrowers in real life), but often.
The changes above would allow the weapon to perform an unique role in Bardin’s arsenal, giving him a ranged AoE DoT option that could also provide area denial in a pinch (with the flames lingering on surfaces). I think it’d also be much more fun to use than underpowered short range blindng fiery troll farts.
If we keep to the current fire spray implementation.
At the very least, make it possible to stagger lock all enemies, including CW without crits.
This stagger lock is probably the only useful thing in cata. And it no longer available in a consistent way, because of removed engineers crit passive.
And this
I really don’t know how to get around this.
I want to burn the horde, but every time i look at my teams THP i have to hold back myself,
because someone always needs that horde to build more THP.
this stream fire idea might help a bit, but i am not sure.
How are you supposed to make a flamethrower that’s not good against horde, but something else?
Exactly how I described it and exactly how flamethrowers work in real life. Make the fire into a powerful and precise stream with longer range and lingering effect, but make gravity affect it and perhaps make it only a brief burst.
This is the third post asking for a weapon rework I’ve read this week from you. And I can already tell that you don’t really know how weapons work in V2. Drakegun is one of the best weapons for hard diffs and it is also fun weapon as hell. You just need to learn to use it right.
Please wait for further suggestions until you have at least 1000 hours played in the game. I also recommend you look on youtube for players like chocoB and others who have really mastered the game and learn from them.
Only thing I agree with you is that Under Pressure talent could be reworked.
I know exactly how to use the weapons. I’ve talked with a lot of people about them, I tested a dozen mods that rebalance the game, I looked into spreadsheets that have information and calculations of each weapon in the game and their combos. Your typical player doesn’t do that.
It’s not a fun weapon - you need space to use it, you stop shooting when you get hit (and immediately build heat), the flames are great at blocking vision for your teammates, it doesn’t do much damage apart from killing the weakest enemies (which are probably better left as THP fodder), it’s awful at hunting specials, it can easily trigger friendly fire.
Is it possible to use it on higher difficulties? Yes, but it sucks and is often detrimental, not to mention you don’t get to use a normal ranged weapon and your teammates have to do more work because of you.
Maybe I am weird but I don’t think a weapon in the game should start being viable after 1000 hours.
Drakegun is hopeless and in dire need of a rework.
The fact that a person who spent hundreds if not thousands hours in the game can finish a mission using Drakegun is completely irrelevant and is missing the whole point.
There shouldn’t be a single weapon in the game that requires hundreds/thousands of hours of experience with the game to use effectively.
I agree that drakegun is not hopeless or useless. My problem is that its niche is too narrow and rarely presents itself in cata pugs, outside of specific map events.
This thing is able to damage and stagger unlimited amount of targets in fairly large area.
Which make its value vary, depending on the enemies amounts present at the same time.
Thus, as you mentioned, the harder the content, the better the gun.
So of course it’s gonna shine in true solo. But not in cata pugs with decent team.
I’d personally like primary fire to be altered in a way that widened current niche of the gun,
in some way.
So it will be useful more often in mid difficulties.
That guy true solo’d with a goddamn REPEATER PISTOL of all things.
Choco being able to bring it to a level means squat. You can give him beginner level equipment and he’ll probably solo Trail of Treachery like it’s nothing. It just means he has robot-like reflex to make literally anything work.
IB with Greathammer and Flamethrower is probably one of the better Cata builds in the game. It even competes with Dakefire Pistols (Hunter) Greataxe.
OE with Flamethrower was and still is one of the best builds for him and is completely viable on Cata+, where you can solo bunker (Shield + Piston Power) and rotate Crank Gun and Flamethrower.
It’s good with every Sienna Career.
To avoid FF, you can just aim above your friends, and the cone still hits enemies below.
To avoid eating everyones THP, just look at portraits, and see where you need to calm it down.
For Specials, there’s 3 other people in the group. Reminder that completely melee builds are viable in this game, despite not having Special killing capabilities.
I don’t want to see Flamethrower become the new Greatsword or OE, where they randomly overkill buffs on it because some people think it’s bad.
If we’re really doing the ‘less people play it, therefore it should be buffed’, that’s a dumb metric to base buffs on. Again, look what’s happened to OE, parts of him was completely viable, but playstyle and lack of flexibility is the main reason people wanted changes. They buffed the already good things.
An experienced player who has probably spent thousands of hours in the game gets most ranged kills by erasing THP fodder on a map that’s made entirely out of choke points and with the mutator that splits enemies into more enemies that spawn direcly in his fire. (Notice how he isn’t even top 2 elite kills-wise) Wow, impressive. Definitely first time I see that video and I have never been shown it before.
Sarcasm aside, this video also shows very well how Drakegun absolutely does not help with visibility, steals THP fodder and how often it triggers friendly fire.
Visibility is the only good point you’ve made about it. Coruscation and general BW AoE is causing this more in that video than flamethrower.
“steals THP fodder” - player can just not spam during low HP- the same applies to literally every Ranged Weapon in the game
“triggers ff” - so? It does 1 damage, can be avoided by shooting above, and if you have the mod for FF to show up as green hit taken, it doesn’t even make you react. Also free Barkskin
Also on the “it’s only useful on choke maps”, that’s just not true. You can force positioning on most maps, and like most weapons it has it’s strengths and weaknesses. In some cases entire Careers can be made to feel useless on certain maps. E.g. Against The Grain as Grail Knight with 2 Ranged Careers in the group.
