So in my taking screenshots for my bug report on bulwark shields I noticed something, it has probably been this way for several patches and I never noticed in-game due to no damage numbers (but since I have them in the meat grinder here we go):
The flame deals LESS damage to UNARMORED… what the actual f- are you smoking fatshark? The flamer somehow deals more damage to flak armor than unarmored…what? How the heck does that make any logical sense? But yeah, sure, then infested (which for all intents and purposes is basically unarmored with spice) it deals basically the same a flak. And again against maniac. I get wanting a weapon to be better at some things than others but come on FS. It should devastate unarmored enemies. Have you never heard the horror stories from Vietnam to do with flamethrowers and napalm? Unarmored targets.
It is terrible against carapace, and does less well against unyielding, that is its weakness. Why the heck have you given it a weakness to unarmored enemies? You realize this makes the nerfs you gave it because of fury of the faithful (then chastise the wicked) has effectively double nerfed this weapon right? If you use fury of the faithful you do more to carapace, sure, but you suddenly can’t kill most elites WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Fix this travesty. If you want it to not melt hordes (literally its main job so no clue why you would do that) and that is the reason for this ridiculous lower number for unarmored, fine, whatever, but make it so fury of the faithful will not downgrade armor to a type your weapon will deal LESS DAMAGE to. That makes literally no sense.
No clue how long it has been this way, but ignorance being bliss I cannot unknow this slight against zealots and now it infuriates me knowing how f-ed this interaction is.
Unarmoured is still really strong both in that it tends to get forgotten in most damage tweak passes and almost all unarmoured enemies (sans groaners) are given a chunk more health than their armoured equivalents, more than what flak would reduce damage by.
Other weapons that deal less damage when using fury of the faithful:
Heavy Eviscerator (if you were wondering why the evicerator sometimes blows through enemies and sometimes does F-all to them when using fury this is why, I solved the mystery).
Tactical axes.
Combat axes.
Bolter (not much but it is still there, this partially make sense but then again the lore says bolter pops unarmored targets and turns them into red mist so…)
Revolver (which is odd because the infantry, headhunter, and braced autoguns as well as the shredder which are all conventional munitions weapons deal more damage to unarmored as one would expect of solid projectiles)
Edit: Oh yes and I nearly forgot the chain axe which suffers a nearly 50% damage reduction to unarmored. (only on the light attacks though, actually the chaxe damage numbers are all over the place this weapon needs to be looked at none of its numbers make sense)
Yeah so it makes even less sense for things to somehow do less damage to unarmored targets in the first place. The vast majority of weapons do more damage to unarmored (because duh, of course they should). I can’t think of a single weapon in the game that should deal less damage to unarmored when compared to flak.
Fire should be pretty much equally effective against everything except specifically fireproofed things. It’s why it’s a pain to find a good middle point between balance and verisimilitude for fire weapons. Power sword has similar issues.
It crops up all over, I think the one that frustrates me the most are anti-tank weapons in strategy games. If it can blow a hole through a tank, it would probably splatter a person if it hit one.
Eh, I mean I get why it isn’t (at least I understand that they do not want it to be good against carapace, that is the entire reason they nefed this weapon into the grough vs carapace, since chastise the wicked, which is FoF now, lowers carapace to flak so they didn’t want it doing good vs carapace and even better vs flak). Carapace is meant to be the hardest enemy type to damage and an area denial weapon dealing with it well would certainly be OP (has been OP, it used to absolutely melt them). But unarmored? Come on, ain;t no way.
Personally, I think it should just do (on 80% damage) 25 across the board (that is a nerf to some types and a buff to others) and be strong against unarmored and infested (dealing 35 to them). Those numbers are small enough that it really should not be swinging anywhere between 4 and 37. It is fire, fire absolutely messes us up, so why are the enemies so resistant to it?
Like I get it “realistic would be OP” okay but at least don’t insult us with nonsense low damage numbers to some targets just because you want “balance” you have made a game in 40k and pitted us against mostly just regular humans, yeah turns out the weapons humanity has created to fight the monstrous xenos races would devastate a regular human. Kind of a giant misplay.
give fire weapons enhanced fear/pain effect against enemies who are not berserk/wild/zombified/intentionally supertuff like ogryns. make more exceptions for specials and elites if you want but these common dregs and scabs should be scared. if an enemy is susceptible to fear enough to cringe at gunfire they would be running in terror screaming and rolling in agony when set alight.
Jet fuels melt steel be- Okay, tbh i want flame debuff reduce the armor like rending/brittleness does. If not, why not make the flame debuff do more stagger the enemy after certain amount of flame debuff. This will help flamer more useful against amount of elites.