I started looking into making the flamer work for me in tandem with Zealot’s perks, and I’m struggling to have the “AHA” moment with it.
When I see a horde, it’s dead by the time I even ready that damn thing. If I see a group of elite enemies—Maulers, Ragers, Crushers, Bulwarks—all of them seem to ignore the damage or take too little, so they reach and hit me.
I could use M1 to just stagger them all the time, but that feels awful since it costs ammo and does little to no damage. I far too often find myself using M1, realizing that thing isn’t dead, so I switch to my melee to finish the job—wasting ammo in the process.
In the rare moments I use my brain and the stars align, and I have the flamer out by accident when a horde comes through a small passage, it’s okay-ish—but far too many stragglers still reach me and hit me. The streaming animation stops when I get hit, which feels bad, and overall the weapon feels so niche, clunky, and weak against 90% of situations and enemies that I struggle to see how to make this work.
On the positive side:
It kills hordes really fast
It does massive boss damage with the right blessings and perks
Its stagger power is really neat
BUT:
The best crowd control is to kill the enemy
The Bolter is far better at dealing with bosses, is more mobile, and has less deployment time
By the time my flamer is ready to kill a horde, I would have already killed half of it with my melee anyway
This is my experience playing public difficulty 4, which I find manageable in quickplay and enjoyable.
So what did I miss about the flamer, besides it being somewhat mandatory on Havoc 40, which I don’t really care about at the moment?
Difficulty 4, too weak to fully use the flamethrower
On Havoc 35+, the horde has over 120 enemies and is a mixed horde with specialists, armor and so on.
Destroying this entire horde with a flamethrower is more effective than killing in close combat while dodging crushers, snipers and nets
My opinion is that at difficulty level 4 you can use any weapon you enjoy. If it’s not a flamethrower just take what you like.
Havok forces players to use metas, which is not a good thing, but that’s how it is for now.
Try playing Auric Curse (Diff 5) with Blaze Away and Eternal Flame in a critical build. Improved damage +25% without armor and +25% unyielding.
You will deal very high damage and have an infinite clip ammo when there are large crowds of enemies and bosses.
There are no hidden mechanics, it just burns everything except carapace armor.
Honestly I think hoards are just too small at lower levels. Auric maelstrom still spawns at most around 1.5k lesser enemies over ~22minutes, doing the math that ends up to only 17 per player per minute. Yes they do spawn in groups of course, but they just never seem to spawn fast enough to overwhelm a competent team.
That’s probably the main reason why a solid 90% of people run the duelling sword and knife when playing anything under havoc. Its not that the relic blade is bade or that the power sword is completely useless (though relic blade is obviously better), you just can easily kill the hoards with light attacks from duelling sword and knife.
They just need to buff hoards so there is a actual reason to bring these big hoard killers into anything other than havoc 40.
The thing is, any weapon is a horde killer, and hordes are a fun magnet. You just want to waltz in and cause as much AoE chaos as possible, no matter the weapon. Maybe not the Revolver or Bolt Pistol, but still, it’s too much fun to let a bunched-up horde of squishy targets go unpunished.
So having a dedicated weapon to deal with the most fun enemies in the game seems like a failure. First, you take away the fun from others by deleting hordes too quickly. Second, you often don’t even get to do that since everyone else is already attacking, leaving nothing left to burn.
Increasing horde size is never a bad idea—it’s the most fun part of the game. But that doesn’t fix the flamer’s niche problem.
From my experience, the flamer feels clunky and too limited outside of melting hordes. I’d like to see it become more wieldy, less heavy, and the burning aspect should be stronger. If I click M1 on a Grunt Gunner, it should burn to death no matter what. The ammo count could be adjusted to balance this.
Reloading also feels awkward—maybe it should be removed in favor of an overheat mechanic, like the Plasma Gun. The stream itself should stagger more enemies (except Unyielding ones) and act as area denial rather than just a direct damage dealer.
If I spray an area with burning Promethium, it should stay uninhabitable for at least 10 seconds.
But that’s not final in any capacity its just what i came up with.
Currently it’s main draw is Havoc 35-40 and other such higher difficulty content, as it’s infinite cleave actually means something, the DoT helps to counteract high health/puss armor, and nuking a wave with a clip is actually super helpful given just how many things spawn and how much of it can’t be dealt with quickly by the rest of the the team. Part of the reason people enjoy the Mobian 21’st is the fact they got those flak chests so they live longer, and the Flamer has a purpose when seeing them in Havoc (and now during this event) since a standard clear weapon will run into them more, but the flamer finds no issue!
That all being said, it is pretty much entirely a ‘high ad clear weapon’, thus in lower difficulties like Heresy, you’ll rarely find it better than anything single target since you’ll only see like 2 enemies to yourself anyway so why bother. In that particular case it’s probably best us is monstrosity damage, but even then they are ALSo even more of a push over in lower difficulties so you’ll probably be half way through pulling it out and it’s already dead to the veteran blasting it with the aforementioned boltgun or plasmagun.
That ALL being said…I still like the weapon. Probably due to me using it in Havoc to great effect and forcing wins from losses with it, but it’s fun in the right niches and works well in the area’s it’s designed for. So to that end, I’ll offer these tips that help me enjoy using the weapon:
Knives can be used to cancel the long pull out animation while also dropping the enemies directly in front of you that might bother you while shooting, I only tend to use this tech outside of havoc (as having immolation grenade is just too good there), but if another zealot already has said grenades or you aren’t in havoc, then it’s an insanely useful tech (this can be used on the boltgun too).
Dodge sliding is practically a must while using the weapon, hitting dodge then hitting crouch directly after will put you into a slide. You get two of those before needing to ‘breath’ so to speak, but using them effectively can keep you from getting ‘bonked out of your stream’ and losing all your damage.
This is another ‘not havoc’ tip, but FotF still effects fire rate of weapons, because reasons. This can help the flammer especially since burn stacks are where all it’s damage comes from, so charging into or out of range of the enemy then letting lose the flame can result in quite a fast melt. Inexorable Judgment can help with this too.
To that end, I’ll slap two builds in here, and just say ‘mix and match however one wants’. The first one I built simply to ‘maximize the flamer’ because I thought it was fun, the second is a more ‘invis spam’ evic build with a flammer on it also for fun. One can take the second build and do FotF and grab anoint in blood + purge the unclean instead for a full crit set up for ‘infinite fire’, but yeah, can do what one wants with these.
Since you almost can’t move and are essentially blind while firing, it’s a bad idea to use it in the open unless your team is covering you.
You should instead camp choke points like doors, stairs and corridors. There you brace and keep firing until your reticle no longer shows any kill for a few seconds.
Everlasting Flame IV is a must, as it will let you fire as long as there are enemies to burn.
Beware that it’s an ammo hog. Adjust your ammo usage to your team composition.
Since I haven’t seen anyone else mention it yet take Thy Wrath be Swift to circumvent this issue (it’s also just very strong generally). Could sacrifice damage and add inspiring barrage if you want too for healing while firing so chip hits while firing both can’t interrupt you and get quickly healed off.
I think you probably wanna run it with a crit build and the refill magazine on crit blessing. As has been mentioned throwing knives also skip the draw animation so that’s another strong synergy.
This is extremely relevant general advice that more players should adhere to. If you’re a Lasgun Veteran on a team of Staff Psykers, this means that you have (theoretically) INFINITE Ammo. Go nuts. If you’re a Bolter Zealot on a team of Ogryns with (for example) Heavy Stubber, Twin-Linked and Rumbler? You should definitely be reserving your own Ammo for emergencies because they’re 100% going to hog most of the pickups.
Look at the context and your team comp, then adjust how trigger-happy you get accordingly. If you’re a Staff Psyker, don’t just leave in the event that you blow up. It happens, it’s a game mechanic. Take accountability for it, but it’s not like you’re shaming your bloodline because you blew yourself up.