With a recent patch, we saw an increase in damage towards hordes to our dear, iconic flamethrower
Same with the next one: the blessing of rending is good to cover one of its big weaknesses, the damage towards armor (or at least I hope it will be)
The problem though is:
Why should I use the flamethrower to clear up hordes (and thus weaken a lot myself vs ranged and special enemies, since the flamy lacks under this aspect) when Zealot is perfectly capable of doing it melee… while also gaining interesting bonuses, damaging even armored enemies and without worrying about ammo?
Aaanyway, the horde-cleaning niche, could still be interesting, for example if coupled with weapons like Crusher or Thunderhammers
Too bad that the flamethrower, even when it comes to its own niche, has major flaws:
slow draw time
slow reload
small magazines
little ammunition pool
low stagger
So we need to figure out which path we want to take:
If we want to make it an anti-horde, versatile and supportive tool, at least a couple of the aforementioned flaws should be corrected… the current damage profiles are good, but it must become more versatile, with a longe use-time
If, on the other hand, we want to make it a panic button weapon, able to inflict severe damage vs everything on screen, but for a brief time, the written flaws are ok, but increasing the armor damage becomes then really necessary… and this must be inherent in the weapon, otherwise we make a blessing mandatory (and we should talk about big numbers, since the current damage vs armor is near zero)
Increase stagger.
Add suppression.
Transfer more of the regular damage to the damage-over-time stacks.
And have the fire stick to the ground like flamer enemies.
I’ve thought of, and mentally discarded, lots of flamer changes. It was my favourite weapon of old, but yeah, OP of old. Immense fun though. Current game makes it pointless still, I think. It’s a worse Purgatus Staff because there’s no wildfire.
The idea I keep going back to is this: why can other classes not make use of a burning target debuff? I think there should be a node or two in other class trees that really make use of it so that it’s not just a fairly pointless horde clear tool.
Whether that’s through a stagger tick maybe, or something like that? I think FS should work harder to make cross-over damage types that other classes can feed off. We have bleed that is very lightly touched upon (vet can trigger it with 'nades, Ogryn can cause it and receive damage reduction from it, zealot can crit with it) … but there’s no real purposeful overlap as such.