I think what gets me about the flamer balance is that people pretend it wasn’t with drawbacks.
Flamer was doing too much damage against carapace? Ok, somewhat fair, a Ogryn is generally not going to fold entirely due to a little bit of fire. For everything else? The weapon was about as close as it could be depicted to the 40k lore.
It’s not a precise or elegant weapon, it’s awkward to use and swap to, if anything is out of range then you are kind of up a creek without a paddle but if you are willing to dump ammo you should be allowed to just clear man sized enemies up close.
It feels like people just don’t fundamentally understand what specialist weapons are, it’s like people complaining that the plasma gun is good vs armored enemies. Like yeah, that’s the point, that’s the niche. You are sacrificing all around usability for being really good in one area.
Yeah that’s pretty much my feelings about it. I can kinda see why people balk at the notion of it melting hordes and non-Ogryn specials/Elites up close with ease but at the same time, it’s range makes it a one trick pony, it kinda should be really good at it’s trick.
The dmg is mostly fine, especially with the right blessings. What the flamer needs imo is way more ammo & bigger clip size. The DoT can’t just be flat out buffed, since Infernus means it would mess with the balance of many other weapons too. Besides, DoTs in general are already really strong against anything but crushers, especially at high stacks.
Other than that I agree. Now that FoF works like it should the flamer represents a massive sacrifice to ranged. It should be good enough to compensate for that sacrifice. Besides, since Oct 3:rd the game has way more armored elites than before. They could probably significantly buff the flamer base dmg on top of the extra ammo, and it still wouldn’t make it OP. It is a specialized support weapon after all, leaving the zelly reliant on their team to deal with ranged & armor.