I’ve heard nothing but negativity surrounding the new Scab and Tox Flamer changes from players in Auric missions. I kinda get what Fatshark were going for making them explode because it does add a new level of chaos to the game, which is awesome, but the fact that it along with all barrel types ignores your toughness is incredibly annoying. Barrels doing direct health damage isn’t a new thing I know, but it really sucks.
At this stage they’re practically a mobile barrel, silent poxburster combo with a flamethrower rounding corners where I try to shoot them in the face and lose a third of my health instantly. I don’t understand why any of these explosions completely ignore your toughness. What’s even the point of having toughness at all when it can just be bypassed? Most of the time when players run high toughness builds they do it to be safe from ranged attacks. Poxburster explosions take your toughness into account, so why don’t barrels or flamer tanks? Just make all explosions hit your toughness first. The inconsistency is very bizarre and plain annoying.
This update was so incredible all across the board, but this one change has been very frustrating to play against. There’s now just a new thing that ignores your toughness for some reason, and a lot of Auric players aren’t fans.
(I’ve had to revise a whole bunch of this post because for some reason a lot of the repliers just didn’t read entire sections. It started just being about flamer explosions by themselves, but I’d rather talk about all explosive damage as a whole.)
I think it’s a welcome change to add a new dynamic that we need to be aware of. I haven’t seen the damage of it yet myself, but I would agree it should be adjusted if it’s too damaging
I mean… usually people that get screwed over aren’t happy…
That being said: I haven’t really had issues since I’m not twitch shooting something that can explode within 5m of myself, I opt for melee in melee range.
Been enjoying watching heretics burn in their own vile flames from afar when popping their tanks, and occasionally mapping a Rager or two has been a nice change.
It’s weird that it took this long to have the tanks as a volatile weakspot.
I freaking LOVE this new mechanic. Behind the ease of building weapons and the chunky hordes in the event, this is my favorite change of the patch. It is SO cool to see these massive explosions, and it feels SO good to be able to use flamers to strategically stun groups of enemies.
It makes me think, which I feel is the real sign that it’s great.
I really like them. This is not something you can do intentionally (or really this will be situational) but it add something to the difficulty. I really really like this change!
An explosion that deals no damage? Yeah sure, might as well just cause Crusher overheads to remove your wounds instead of damaging you while we’re at it…pffft
I love this change, it changes the dynamic of combat a bit and you can use it to your advantage. And as mentioned I hope they add similar effects to those bombers when hitting their grenade/bomb.
Fire Barrels don’t deal any damage on the initial explosion. Although I though the flamer explosions used those as a base, since you can also Bhop through the groundfire, which you can also and do with barrel fires. As such, I assumed they didn’t do any explosion damage either, just knockback. But of course, now I’m second guessing myself.
I really like this mechanic, however it’s lacking a bit of… logic?
Like, you shoot the tank and gas starts spewing everywhere (awesome). Then the guy adopts the flamer powerstance and shoots you uninterrupted, meanwhile the tank on his back is poppin’ off. Seems like they should:
Die sooner
Shoot less/interrupted stream
Suicide run
Any/all of the above?
The visual indicator to me is that “tank is poppin’ off, time to vacate the premises cuz this guy’s going nuclear”, but the actual result is a normal flamer who will now explode on death (or after a really long time…?).
I’m personally a fan. I remember there were threads a while ago expressing disappointment that the tox flamer in VT2 you could shoot the pack to explode but here it wasn’t even a hitbox
Seeing all the animations for the different stages of the packs being messed up and exploding was something I was super excited to see. I like the change a lot
Still have yet to experience it being a bad thing, if anything it has added to the joy of mass wiping of hordes when playing
Even then most of the time I shot an enemy flamer, if the exploded, they were far from me, and otherwise (since I use Bolt Pistol) they got dispatched with no flamer tank explosion
Hitting headshot or torso shots have usually made them dead no big boom, just their head or torso became tomato sauce lol
