They only stopped it from critting the whole duration and didn’t actually do anything to stop the armour reduction effect after the first ranged attack hits something.
You can still magdump an autopistol or autogun into carapace for the entirety of the duration of the ult and have the whole thing count as hitting flak.
Desiring a weapon that can kill everything in a few seconds, regardless of the circumstances, sounds like you guys just want a weapon that allows you to not play the game. It’s no longer about the nerfs in this case.
Crushers and bulwarks are intentionally meant to be massive obstacles. The power fantasy of this game is that you can, with the right weapons, kill these obstacles very quickly. Think of guns like the bolter, plasma gun, Helbore Mk3, and to a lesser extent the Voidstrike (it has very good damage to carapace relative to its overall damage). Surge staff demonstrably kills all flak and carapace enemies.
Certain melee weapons like the Rashad combat axe can demolish crushers very quickly. Heavy Sword’s activation was buffed to be a can opener of sorts, and does viable damage to crushers as I build various blessing stacks.
All of these weapons have downsides to them that make them difficult to use in every situation. Many of them take a bit of time to reload, aim and fire, or falter in other situations you may be stuck in. The flamer should be good at demonstrably killing everything over time, but it should never be your main weapon as a zealot. It should be supplementary to your melee killing power.
I very rarely if ever use Chastise the Wicked with my flamer. It’s almost a waste because a big part of using zealot’s ability is to refresh your toughness for engagements and gap-closing into melee. If I’m in a situation where I have to use Chastise with a flamer to kill crushers, I take a melee weapon that can crack open armor. It’s almost as if you can build your loadout to deal with multiple different threats in different ways.
I highly recommend rolling a veteran if you just want to use ranged weapons exclusively. Zealot is a gap-closing melee hybrid—major emphasis on the “melee” part.
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I mean they did LITERALLY NOTHING to its horde clear effectiveness so i do not know if even an unskilled player would struggle with hordes. But you’re definitely right. I, personally, don’t see where all the complaining is coming from. If i read the patch notes right: Infested and unarmored take the same damage and stagger they did before. My personal flamer of choice before the nerf had 32 in the can and was neefed to like 28. My current flamer has 32 in the can. I have the same trigger time i had before and more powerful blessings. Flamer seems fine. It just can’t kill crushers and maulers and ragers as fast. I guess brusiers are a touch tankier too but they don’t have near the health to be a serious threat.
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I see some answers basing the weapon’s ability to deal damage on Blaze5
To reach blaze5, you have to dump a LOT of ammo.
Having to balance a ranged weapon because Zealot has X amount of uncommunicated/unintentional features is backwards.
The 100 crusher is a joke. What happens is that you’ll have 3, with a shield in the middle, then another 3 coming when you have run out of ammo.
It’s just a demonstration that the flamer is functionally unchanged.
patch notes say another story, my experience with it says another story
Reducing the damage of a weapon that does 14-16 damage maximum per tick functionally does very little to begin with.
They changed all the damage ratios, so yes the damage output was considerably nerfed.
- damage vs Flak mod near-far from 175%-75% to 100%-50%
- impact vs Flak mod near-far from 100%-25% to 75%-10%
- damage vs Carapace mod near-far from 25%-0% to 10%-0%
- impact vs Carapace mod near-far from 20%-10% to 10%-1%
- impact vs Maniac mod near-far from 150%-125% to 100%-50%
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.
Hahahahaha, high intensity wants to have a word (bc lets face it, anything not HI SG is boring 
)
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.
Yep, +50% stagger against stuff already burning. But stuff does not run at you at once, a plan rarely survives enemy contact.
I don’t think FS communicates well enough the difference between both shots in term of feedback.
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.
And you weren’t laying hard on the crushers?
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.
That’s one of the massive drawbacks of the weapon, and a stat in and of itself. That’s never mentionned anywhere
-Pox walkers don’t even seem to reliably stagger anymore
Pox WALKERS, not BURSTERS hahaha
This is probably the thing that irks me the most. THey used to cower, but clearly don’t know.
Suppression loss might be a bug, as terrifying barrage on a shotgun does not seem to work either.
Let me boil this down for you:
- Zealot flamer easily kills everything except crushers (just as before)
- When using it in combination with the ult, it can kill crushers with no problem (just as before)
Nothing changed. It is the same as it was before.
Zealot can use the flamer without ult just fine.
You only need the ult if you want to kill crushers with it.
Crushers have full body carapace armor. Most ranged weapons barely tickle them.
No other class has an interaction that is comparable to the zealot ult making your ranged weapons ignore armor from enemies (effectively removing a major weakness that is part of almost all ranged weapons).
All other sources of burn, are basically worthless against crushers, but the zealot flamer can still delete crushers when combined with the ult.
That is not “only useful when combined with ult”, but “ult removes basically all weakness from the weapon, and makes it a complete brainless tool of mass deletion”.
The zealot flamer is not a weak weapon that requires the ult to work normally.
It is a strong weapon that is additionally affected by the zealot ult, more than any other weapon, which makes it completely broken and lets you kill absolutely everything with it.
The usual interaction with crushers is, to swap to a different weapon in order to deal with them, or to change your attack pattern and focus them down.
Zealot flamer still deletes the entire horde and the crushers inside. All you need to do, is press 1 additional button.
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I am pretty sure that you do not need the entire 5 stacks to make the weapon useable, or that anyone claimed that you do.
Balancing a zealot exclusive weapon around the way that it works when used by the only class that can use it, sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Just a bit weird, that this interaction is not mentioned in the description of the ult.
Unless someone opens the bulwarks for you, you can not always mow down the entire horde AND all the crushers and bulwarks with your flamer, without aiming or reloading.
That does not seem like a huge issue to me, considering that bulwarks block all attacks from pretty much all weapons.
Going by the zealots who claim that the zealot flamer can no longer fullfill its purpose and is bad now, because it has a smaller mag and slightly lower damage, the psyker’s flamer has to be the worst weapon in the game.
After all, it has shorter range, needs to charge up and quell every few seconds (far lower uptime) and has no way of dealing with crushers.
Yet somehow, even the psyker flamer performs pretty well.
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I know we rarely agree on anything.
But even though fatshark lowkey acknowledged Chastise being an AP source for ranged weapon, it’s still not a great way to balance stuff.
Here the weapon would be balanced if Crushers just brushed it off. Chastise fills that gap.
Hence any weapon you want to balance around lack of Carapace pen (not AP 
RIP VT), is potentially circumvented by this “mechanic”
(I personally miss the time it would give perma crit for 2s, made a lot of weapons more interesting to use with ult)
Psyflame is dreadful, I’ll give you that. BUT. It has a great synergy with one of their feats IIRC, so the damage potential remains really high (and visibility gone as everything is turned white). Psyflame has infinite ammo though. And also not stuck in a reload animation. Better mobility. Similar weapons but notable variations. Way superior chaff damage though.
Ah, and no you don’t need blaze 5, but one can complain about overtuned blessings that push weapons into overdrive, making them balance nightmares.
I do not think that the psyker’s flamer staff is dreadful at all.
But it always has been, and still is weaker than the zealot flamer.
This makes the claims about how bad the zealot flamer is now, pretty funny to me.
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They are DIFFERENT WEAPONS.
Supported by different blessings, different feats attached to the characters.
It’s wrong to take a weapon and test it in a vacuum like the meat grinder (Agrapina shotty? “great” there, but need an aim bot in a real situation)
Ok, not dreadful. Just gimmickey (warp aids spreading).
I played a bunch of High Intensity Special Gauntlets yesterday, and in all honesty, ammo scarcity was real. The inability to deal with specials with it (when almost any other ranged weapon can), is real.
Most of the issues I describe are factors that put me off the weapon, as I ultimately used it a handful of times.
Those issues were already there before and are still there now. Except now it does the rest… worst.
Also: psykers have been buffed again and again and again, so what exactly is the point you are trying to make? Their end of round damage is extremely high using meta weapons (Stubgun, trauma, flame,…)
Correct. But both are the same weapon type for the same purpose.
And one of the two can also kill carapace.
My point is, that zealot players claim “my flamer got nerft so hard, that it is useless now and can no longer fullfill its purpose”, while psyker players use their weaker version of the flamer just fine.
Different classes. Different blessings. Different bonuses from the class itself.
But same weapon type, same purpose.
Somehow, the stronger one of the two, is the one that people claim is useless.
No one is lying to you, you have multiple videos in the thread which show you that with the right approach and build you can still melt even carapace armour targets. Nevermind its ACTUAL intended target types. Are you calling these videos fake? Doctored?
Should we just have a quick Google search for a video which shows that flamer still melts lighter than Crusher targets with relative ease?
There you go, a nice clip showing what a flamer does to a horde mixed with elites:
Can we stop with these hysterics? It has been a week by now? You JUST might take a step back from time to time if you set up wrong or pull out your melee weapon. I know, its a crazy thought for a melee centric class. Especially in a game where weapon balance has a clear prinicple of making weapon good vs some targets, and not so good / terrible versus others.
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Wow… Someone using the health bar mod correctly. That’s new.
I think some of the people complaining, would never have used their melee weapon for any of the situations in the first 5 minutes of the video.
The flamer is no longer the one solution for everything, that you would use to kill every single enemy you come across.
I guess this means that the flamer is too weak for those people.
At least this is the mental gymnastics that i think they go through in order to come to their conclusion.
I mean yes. If it doesn’t die instantly after I press and hold one button for few seconds, my weapon must be too weak.
Player interaction? Understanding the weapon strengths and weakness? Potential breakpoints? Aiming? Learning recoil / weapon control? Going for headshots? Ammo management? Learning attack patterns and combos? Timing? Judging distance? Dodging? Dodge count management? Stamina management? Never heard of it. If a weapon requires any of these things, it is clearly underpowered.
Why would you ask for balance in coop games? It is your fault for using anything else, but the “meta”. If developers change MY meta weapon, it must be the toxic forum elitists’ fault and I quit.
Poxwalkers never cowered or were suppressed. They are mindless. Groaners did and still do.
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It’s a bit like that with the power sword too tbh.
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They staggered before, I’m 100% sure of that
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I would have to fish out an old video of my gameplay to see. But i do not believe you are experiencing any new behaviors on either group of horde enemies. The behavior was not touched in this balance patch according to the patch notes and it seemed the same to me when i ran a mission.
Oh that must be why no one is using this weapon anymore…
Its such a great weapon that melts everything with the Ult that everyone loves it…
oh wait… no one does because its to bad right now no one is using it anymore. You are lying to me. I’ve seen people trying to use it, and they never do again.
They already had to lie their rear ends off on this supposed “Crusher” test. Not only does it take an Uber Flamer to do that, but also you need to use your ULT. This isn’t some god like weapon and mine could never “Melt” Crushers in the first place, it was only good on Ragers. They ALWAYS made it to me and started whacking on me long before they ever died.
Now its even worse.
They are going to have to unnerf this weapon now. When combined with the Slow Load and Weapon swap speed, (which is lower than the Bolter btw), and the low ammo and limited range AND limited targets… its no longer capable of even fulfilling it’s role let alone on a High Intensity game.
But I’ll even go further here… I got money on the table…
Not a DAMN one of you on here even uses this weapon consistently, You just talk a lot of crap but don’t actually use it, and probably for the same reasons I talked about on here. The weapon is no longer a usable weapon in anyone’s book… except the people NOT using it.