The nerfs to the flamer made it borderline useless in my opinion:
-Damage was nerfed
-Ammo was nerfed
-Stagger was nerfed
What happens now, is that you hose down a full horde.
-Whatever has flak armour ignores you and keep charging or shooting.
-Whatever is dangerous doesn’t really die
-Your allies can’t see because you’ve created a mini nova in the middle of the screen
-You run out of ammo the moment you begin staggering stuff
-You run out of total ammo extremely fast (total ammo count was overnerfed, beyond what was written in in the patch notes
-You still don’t have range to catch stuff
-Your mobility is still terrible
-It still takes about a year and a half to setup the alt fire
-Pox walkers don’t even seem to reliably stagger anymore
-It is STILL a delayed kill weapon type
So. Yeah. Well done fatshark. Guess one clip can take care of one wave of trash mobs the same way it did before though I guess.
I realise the more I play with it that I just carry it around more than make actual use of it.
SHould pretty much take the fire Shotty or the bolt instead.
Dev note:“We wanted to adjust the broad capability of the flamer to deal with pretty much all targets, specifically when combined with the Zealots ability Chastise the Wicked that grants armor penetration after use.
It’s just a demonstration that the flamer is functionally unchanged.
Reducing the damage of a weapon that does 14-16 damage maximum per tick functionally does very little to begin with. I think the absolute maximum damage I did was 60 damage crits with Blaze Away at max stacks (+50% Power) pre-nerf. Even then, that was guaranteed to be less than 10-20% of my overall damage.
Burn damage being reduced by 50% of its effective potency against flak-armored enemies also didn’t really change too much. Flak enemies are inherently low HP in general, with the armor to pad them out. They still die relatively fast as long as your Burn stacks build on them.
Quantifiably a non-issue in the current state of the game. Running out of ammo, even with wasteful use of the weapon, is almost never an issue. You would have to be holding down left click while braced in every single engagement for it to be a problem.
Potentially one of its “worst” nerfs requires you to be a bit more strategic in its use. The flamer’s primary attack (aka unbraced left click) has a very high amount of stagger, and Fan the Flames grants you an extra -30% to -60% stagger resistance to them. You can swap between bracing to stagger enemies with your left click and go back to bracing again. It just requires slightly more input on your part.
Visibility situations like this occur because you’re laying hard on spamming the flamer. The goal is to build a handful of Burn stacks and then swap to cut everything down while it’s ticking away. You can also just spam ping elites in the situation where you feel like you need to hold down flames extensively.
It was never designed to have range to “catch stuff” to begin with. The fact that the flamer weapons have the range that they do have is impressive already.
Why are you expecting mobility on an intrinsically heavy weapon that requires you to be braced?
I don’t think you ever could stagger poxbursters with the flamer pre-nerf. I certainly couldn’t in heresy/damnation. I probably never noticed, but I also don’t try to reset stagger on poxbursters so they don’t ignore shoves.
Not really sure what else is worth discussing. These flamer complaint threads are exhausting!!!
I agree with the OP, I attempted to use and test the Flamer as well in practical application,
It no longer can accomplish it’s purpose, ammo is far too low.
There’s just not enough to make it a functional weapon any more in Damnation especially in anything High Intensity.
I’ve gone out and used it and its just not a usable weapon anymore. The switch is far too time consuming, ammo reload far too long, and combined with ammo capacity it simply is not a usable weapon anymore. There’s a reason you just don’t see anyone using them anymore. I’ve seen people try to play them in games and its just sad really. I see why they never use it again.
It was overnerfed to the point where it’s just not functional and can no longer serve the purpose it was intended for.
Just to shed some light on the trick. Took me 2 days to finally get the Blaze away III blessing for the flamer to demonstrate this.
The Flamer is not THAT strong like the super cool 100 Crusher video makes you think.
That works only if you apply the Burn stacks and the 5 Blaze away stacks first. AND THEN use the ULT. If you use the Ult before the Burn and Blaze stacks are on the target or try it without the ULT, then you will not even be able to kill a Crusher
What kills the 100 Crushers so fast is the Ult that suddenly boosts the already applied Burn Stacks together with the Blaze away stacks, so that they all tick for 400 dmg.
It does not demonstrate how strong the flamer still is. It demonstrates how broken it is, that the ULT boosts a range weapon, where it was normally only meant to boost the next melee attack.
I’ve now seen it with my own two eyes, so has everyone else. This weapon can no longer achieve it’s purpose and is a very substandard weapon at this point.
It was definitely overnerfed and likely will never be used seriously again. I have no idea who the F decided this or even called it an “unskilled” weapon. Because I can definitely tell you this thing required the same skill as any other weapon.
See @Keln comment above. As far as we can tell currently from FS’s comment the Ult ranged interaction is intentional. They basically said they nerfed flak damage partially because that is what carapace armour is counted as during Ult.
I don’t see how any of this proves the flamer isn’t still very strong when you use it correctly (with blaze away) and ulting for crushers. The game currently gives you the tools to make it very effective, hence it is effective, just requires a bit more player input than it used to.
So you actually need a good flamer now and more player inputs to make it do work. That seems like a reasonable way to nerf it to me.
It is possible to have a different experience and opinion without lying. I don’t think that line of argumentation, where you seem to assume people who disagree with you are trying to gaslight you is very helpful or effective.
To “use the flamer correctly” you can no longer use it as any normal ranged weapon… you have to “use it with the ult only”… and only use it during those times to make it effective…
Got it…
Something tells me that’s a pretty backwards and F’d up way to look at a ranged weapon for a class. My god can you imagine telling a mage he can only use his staff during his Ult? Or maybe tell the Vet he can only be effective with his guns if he uses them during his Ult?
No, only if you intend to also kill crushers mixed in, otherwise Ult isn’t particularly necessary. So I was certainly not saying you have to Ult every time you use it.
The thing was overnerfed badly. And now the reason no one is using it anymore is because they no longer get any return for it and its not a weapon that achieves it purpose anymore.
Well it still killes hordes and other things fast. What it no longer does is killing Carapace armored things when your Ult is on cooldown. Could be a bit annoying when you use a melee that is not good at picking Carapace targets out of a bulk of burning trash mobs around them. But it still burns stuff.
Effectively that just turns the flamer into a weapon that has some kind of cooldown to its most powerful attack.
At the very least clearly communicate the ranged interaction of Chastise the Wicked in game. It’s just incredible that it was actually nerfed twice and is still a better ult for ranged than it ever was for melee.
It just sounds like to me that they couldn’t remove all ranged interaction and just gave up and is treating it as ‘feature’ that fails in communicating any of it to a player.
That’s exactly what they did. They made it work for the next attack. And restricting it to only work on melee seemed to be so much of a total rework, that they simply took the easy way and told us that it shall stay that way on purpose.
It boosts the burn stacks that are already applied. When you use it and then use the flamer, it only boost the first burn stack tick.
If you use a normal gun it boosts the first projectile.
If you apply bleed it boost the first bleed proc.
If you apply bleed stacks and then use it, it boost all stacks.
TBF it’s pretty multi faceted in its use cases. I categorise it more as general utility than melee or ranged focused per se.
It’s good for toughness recovery, repositioning, has surprisingly high stagger which means you can use it to guarantee safe T Hammer hits into rough situations (similar application for revved chain weapon attacks), and the guaranteed melee crit can help you get bloodletter stacks started which both helps crit rate and Ult cooldown for crit builds. I think boiling it down to just “better for ranged than melee” is kinda under selling the breadth of its utility.
The flamer can still drop a horde of chaff out to 23m with about 6 ammo, if you’re shooting more than that you’re wasting ammo. Used judiciously there is still more than enough ammo to get through high intensity damnation. Used poorly you’re gonna to run out of ammo. Over pressure is better for this role than blaze away because you want to be puffing alt fire.
The flamer can still drop a mixed horde out to 23m. The ult turns every flak target into unarmored for 1.5x burn ticks. You don’t need to hold down alt fire, just do alt fire in puffs and sweep to burn everything you aim at across each application window. Over pressure is better for this role than blaze away.
The flamer can delete unlimited crushers (and everything mixed in with them), if you hold down alt fire and ult when at max blaze away stacks.
The flamer can tear through all bosses, you don’t need to ult because it doesn’t help against unyielding, just hold down braced fire for max blaze away boost.
Over pressure lets you delete hordes with very little ammo consumption. Blaze away lets you delete crushers and bosses. Get both blessings, a burn stat of 76+, and you have an all round heretic deleting weapon. No other weapon can do all of that, but it now requires using it in the right way at the right time to get results. In the right hands the flamer is still an absolute monster in the hardest settings. In unskilled hands I can imagine running out of ammo while not clearing hordes or killing priority targets does indeed make it feel weak.
I compared 2 factors of the ult, and ranged interaction is definitely better than the melee, I did not say that those were the only interactions.
Yes, it has multiple uses: escape, recovery, closing, stagger/interrupt, etc., but it’s still an issue that such a large interaction that is “ranged reduction of armour type by one step while active” is completely uncommunicated, and it’s that interaction that can have the biggest impact when Chastise the Wicked is used.
