Need to seriously consider nerfing flamer

It’s the H&K slap of 40k. Nothing wrong with it.

There’s nothing fun about holding down LMB or spamming LMB on flamer. Even the most braindead of melee weapon, crutchsword, has activation and more than one way to use it - against different enemies(most noob vets don’t understand that).

There’s no flamethrower groundfire to abuse unlike killingfloor2.

It has a relatively high skill floor because all you had to do is hold down or spamclick lmb(so the less skilled players think it’s op or something), and very low skill ceiling for the same reason.

All other points apart, I don’t share your experience. Flamer is 50/50 on high intensity (1/3 in non-high int? ), but bolter is maybe 1/10 recently. I haven’t gone lower than 5, but maybe that’s different there? I see usually K12, K4, braced, and sometimes headhunter or plasma, and more rarely laspistol. Haven’t seen recon in ages.

Btw, I usually get teamed up with zealots and psykers so don’t see that many.

You mostly need ads mode for squishy solo targets like specials and gunners. If you utilize ads and burst modes well than bolter is pretty ammo efficient. Burst fire is also pretty accurate.

Not with vet feats.

On t5 ~ 2 crushers easly, 3 if good conditions, with bulwarks can be tricky, but again there is enough damage for 3 bulwarks/crushers. With good headshots and lucky crits probably 4. (t3 blessings)


2 Likes

I agree and have observed similar (though still see a lot of bolter vets and pretty frequently flamer Zealots). My interpretation is that a lot of people on Damn have gotten comfortable enough to decreasingly care about meta picks and are just generally experimenting and having fun with whatever now.

1 Like

I had a really fun game with 2 bolter zealots, a bolter vet and an ogryn the other night. Lots of dakka.

Key word here, vet feats and building around it. Even then i still don’t see how this is a problem since you are building your entire tree around making the bolter work. To do this you also give up the ability to more easily and quickly engage the hordes of shooters that are extremely common in T5.

This also assumes the right T3 blessings which overall is still somewhat of a crap shoot in the current system. I really don’t recognize something as overpowered when you build your entire build around it, that’s just working as intended.

In specific circumstances yes, in most general circumstances no.

Really debatable on that one. For first shot maybe but for follow ups good luck on that one.

As much of a drawback as it is a boon. Yes again it’s great for dumping some targets down and you can burst it but a lot of the examples are “Look at how much fire control i have when these enemies stay perfectly split apart from eachother and can’t attack me in the psykanum!” and not “I’m being charged down by a doom stack of 5 of these and need to kill them now”. You can waste a ton of ammo especailly if the bulwark shield goes “he he, block”.

15 is a laughable small amount in an actual situation where you don’t have everything lined up for you and as stated i highly doubt people are sitting there counting shots when getting charged. Piercing bullets barely come into play and is mostly used for punching thin cover. Having 95 bolter rounds isn’t exactly an easily sustainable amount if you don’t have 2 psykers in a match or if if another vet or someone comes along with something like the recon las.

You mean to tell me the 2 guns that people complain underperform all the time can’t compete with the bolter? I am absolutely shocked.

I really gotta ask, compared to what? The only thing slower in the game is the Heavy Stubber and the Plasma Gun! The quick draw that you mentioned has a full 3 seconds on it and every other gun above that basically reloads in half the time.

Yes, this is called a build. It’s probably one of the few guns it was expressly intended for which also means giving up the other 2 level 30 choices. This is called build variety.

OK? Why is this even a point. Again, it’s working as intended, it’s literally there as as solid option for killing large targets when you run weapons that don’t easily deal with larger targets or with extremely rare setups the ability to suppress and move in.

I’ve mostly seen people running several weapons lately

-MG-12
-auto pistol
-Headhunters
-The odd braced auto guns
-flamethrowers

I feel like i quantum leaped into an alternative dimension because people are acting like the bolter is THE dominant choice and not just a viable one. As for the other weapons i doubt adding and extra 2-8 seconds (because i have no idea what you mean by longer reload) to the bolter is going to magically make people use the underperforming weapons because they will still underperform and then you will just add more weapons to that category.

I can understand the flame thrower, i get it, thing needs some major tweaking since as it stands it even massively outdoes purge builds with no feat or blessing investment but I feel like people are absolutely misconstruing having a working build for overpowered which is frustrating since this usually leads to making every ranged weapon feel exactly the same because “balance”.

2 Likes

Tip: try to aim… you will use the shot by shot mode…
If you do that, the bolter is really precise.

Piercing bullets are fabulous to clean an horde.
95 bullets it is more than the revolver (52) and more than a shotgun… and in the lore, both weapons have smaller ammo than the bolter.
15 is really enough to snipe and kill everything you need in shot by shot.

On this I agree. The two weapons need a buff. However, the buff have to:

  • not make them better than other ranged weapons
  • not change what they are… a pistol and a shotgun

Compared to… the damages that can deal a bolter.
If you want to nerf a weapon and not change that (a bolter has to remain a weapon with strong destructive power), then you have to see what you can do without modifying damages.

MG12 yes. Autopistols, they are more and more used… true. but since the patch before this one. We have to wait more to see if it is just to test or something that will last.

That’s not what I call for. I really want that all weapons are viables and not seeing few that are OP. Bolter and flamer are the 2 ranged weapons OP.
Does this mean that they need to be nerfed? yes
Are they god weapon and should be nerfed to the ground? far from this.
There’s a need to find the balance that make all weapons interesting.
And you can do that without making all weapons the same…

Enough said here on the bolter… the thread is about flamer.

I personaly don’t play with bolter because it’s trivializing run. Bolter can hold any threat, so enemies can’t stress you out. Ogryn blob - dead in a few seconds, maulers, ragers - same. Gunners - suppressed or knocked with aoe, waiting to be killed. Well monstrosity can survive just a bit. Unlike with mg12 for example, it is not so good against maulers and scab ragers and useless against melee ogryns (situational for bulwarks), so some enemies can force you to go melee/change position/use nades etc, they can push you to make decisions.

Thats why i think reloading isn’t a thing to nerf. It will ruin bolter for zealot, but if you nerf vet feats it will affect plasma gun. As i already said, bolter it too mobile, same mobility caps as mg12. Maybe ads speed should be lower too.

Bolter
изображение

MG12
изображение

WRONG.

Proof entirely that the problem with flamer is precisely this. It can kill armored elites too easily. scab ragers, maulers and crushers need to be largely immune to this damage. Once they are the game will be much more fun even with flamer spam destroying hordes.

As described by nish

Specifically this quote

Let me give you another example, you are running an ogryn with Paul because you want to bonk ogryns. If I’m running plasma the most you will bonk is opening up the shield for me with it, and plasma is pretty bad. A similar thing can happen when running a lot of other specialized weapons.

Simply by making a class of enemies resistant to the flamer, aside from shooters which can out range it, we open up the playingfield for other players to have enemies to engage.

Are you being intentionally obtuse? They’re obviously using ADS. If you fire as fast as the gun lets you in ADS it is genuinely pretty damn inaccurate past the first shot, I will back @Rocker_Fox up on that 100%. If you want accurate shots you need to awkwardly wait a bit of extra time between shots for the spread to reset.

There’s probably some tech to reset the spread much faster but without such tech it is indeed very noticeable how bad the accuracy gets when firing shots quickly in ADS.

My mate and I were doing random Damn missions last night and they gave bolter a try on their Vet for the first time in ages and by the end of the run they wanted to throw it in the bin they were so sick of the sights bouncing around hugely while moving, and general unresponsiveness and the many annoyances of using it under high pressure (weren’t getting many people joining so we ended up duoing most of the map).

I’m sure you can compensate all of this with experience, skill, and potentially tech, but I certainly wouldn’t downplay the drawbacks they’ve given it. My mate often runs revolver on Vet and after our last game I’m pretty confident they’d take it over Bolter most days.

3 Likes

I like flamers cooking people in armour, you’re baking them instead of roasting them. You need something very specific things in your armour to not die to a flamethrower, specifically extremely fire retardant and insulating outer material, insulating and cooling internal material and structure, and it would be ideal if it was a completely properly sealed suit. Most of the time, the thing that will fulfil all that is power armour, but 40k flamers and heavy flamers and flame cannons have been shown repeatedly to be overwhelming even those.

Scab ragers, maulers and crushers all look like they have some pretty ad-hoc and piecemeal armour, so thematically, for me, it makes sense the flamer can kill them.

Game balance-wise I don’t really mind one way or the other.

1 Like

I totaly agree with you from a fluff perspective but i am basically proposing we let it slide for the purposes of game balance in this case. No doubt the HEAVY FLAMER (BROTHER) will cause even more balance issues as a consequence of its lore allowing penetration of carapace. But lets stick to sensible nerfs and sensible chuckles about what is in the game first.

What bugs me the most with these complaints about {insert_weapon_here} being over-represented on level 5 missions, is that many of us never play them.

Also, I think the intent was to make those considerably hard, so that you would not attempt them lightly, and only with the proper equipment.

Now, could it be that {insert_weapon_here} was just the right tool?

And why should there be an equal representation of all weapons?

This is a Warhammer 40K game. What’s wrong with everyone wanting to enjoy the iconic weapons?

3 Likes

Quite this.
Flames ARE dangerous (especially if used as military weapon). The Flamer is fine as it is (mayhaps I just have a bad roll, but even when others use it I do not find it op) - especially because the same is true for the other side: when chaos troops use it, we loose ALL toughness instantly and get staggered and if we do not react we are dead.
The same is true with “our Flamer”, so everything as it should be.

Only one point I would want FS to check and that’s the glitch/bug(?) with the ULT - I never experienced this myself, because I only use melee with it, but if this is an issue it should be looked at (and fixed).

1 Like

Which brings us back to the idea of having weapon specific ammo types, with their rarity levels when spawned on their map: pistols/revolver/autoguns/las rifles etc. - common drops, plasma/flamer - rare drops. Weapons like flamer and plasma (when they finally make it less clunky) should be equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, not something you pull out on a blob of pox walkers. Sadly this will never happen, as implementation would require too much work. We are going to see some nerfs for sure, I for one just don’t use it. It removes way too much fun from TIde games.

It doesn’t matter what difficulty you play on. Flamer’s downsides are still there, it’s just less obvious at babymode difficulty. But then again anything can work at low difficulty.
Some weapons only work well at lower difficulties, like shotgun.

This is 40k so chainsword and boltgun are iconic weapons. Flamers are “iconic” mostly in memes.

I actually think boltgun is balanced but see the problem here is you normally don’t have to shoot everything.

You can easily melee(even as veteran) everything, the “specific circumstances” are the ones where you can’t quickly kill with melee(ogryn types, mainly). They are the only ones that you might need a gun on.
The God Emperor gave you a crutchsword but you’re wasting ammo into trashmobs? come on…

Flamerthrower is just a trash weapon for trash player in comparison; because it’s “good” at things that you would already easily deal with using melee(assuming competency at melee) while it does basically nothing(it barely outranges zealot targeted dash, if at all - depending on range stat) in most of the “special circumstances”(you’re not going to outrange a reaper and flamethrower does nothing to bulwark, crusher can only be killed in decent time with ult, even then the dps is terrible).

Condescending attitude aside, the assumption about people using the flamer because it’s good, is wrong.

Some of us don’t care about statistics, skill or any of that extradiegetic stuff. What we care about is that burning heretics is fun.

Hearing the screams of pain and the roaring of the flames is such sweet music. Praise the Emperor!

2 Likes

You’re right about the range on the flame.
I’d use the flamer if the group is getting overwhelmed by hordes with mixed flak specials. Crushers walk right through it and take little damage, and bulwarks block all of it for everything behind them. If crushers are in the mix I just flame around the sides to try and make a gap between them and the horde for my team to safely fight the crushers. If a horde is on the group and a couple shot gunners are walking through the horde evenly spread, the flamer can do some good work where melee on damnation will get you killed. It’s not as fast as a frag grenade and you can easily get shot pulling it out to shoot as it has bolter esq set ups, but it’s easy to play around.

If the flamer loses it’s stagger then it will be useless and become a liability like the thunder hammer. It could stand to lose some damage vs flak tho. Maybe take longer to build up stacks of flame on flak targets.

3 Likes