Thunder Hammer makes me sad

[Flawless]

@Reginald

@Fingeris

it gives absolute armor ignore

It doesn’t. It reduces the enemy’s armor value by one. Fatshark has already addressed this and said it was intended behavior. It only provides critical effects to melee attacks and otherwise reduces the enemy’s armor value by one.

@Fingeris

So I am calling it just what it is - an exploit.

No, you’re ascribing to it an incorrect moniker that defines it as an item that will and must be removed. A word that fatshark does not use and has not stated it is. To quote you on this matter.

@Fingeris
There you go:

@FatsharkCatfish

Dev note: “We wanted to adjust the broad capability of the flamer to deal with pretty much all targets, specifically when combined with the Zealots ability Chastise the Wicked that grants armor penetration after use. By increasing the value of armor for our poor burning enemies while limiting the amount of stagger, we hope to create a clearer use for the Flamer. Since the armor penetration effectively degrades Carapace armor to Flak armor, the removal of high damage vs. Flak helps bring flamer-wielding Zealots into more balanced territory. Combined with a lowered clip size, we hope to move away from a general-purpose purging tool that leaves nothing left alive into a more defined horde-clear role that benefits from some help dealing with heavily armored enemies. It should still leave most things dead, but it might require slightly more diligent purging.”

Dev acklowledges the interaction between chastise and ranged weapons (the flamer specifically) and does not call it a bug/exploit, but mentions it as one reason for balance changes.
Dev explains the armor penetration as degradation (treating carapace as flak), not full removal.
Assuming that it was not changed since then, it should still work the same way.

So as strange as the interaction seems to be, it is officially “working as intended”.
But in a FatShark game, something being a bit strange, or simply not fitting the description, is nothing new and should not be a massive surprise.
Here is a “small” list of things that have inaccurate descriptions (TLDR: around half of the things).

Inaccuracies in the phrasing of descriptions

All bonuses of the type +x% critical damage, +x% weakspot damage and +x% critical weakspot damage. These bonuses do not increase the overall damage of a critical hit or a weakspot hit by x%. They only increase the additional damage that was dealt (in comparison to a regular hit) due to the hit being a crit or a weakspot hit. The bonuses work so counterintuitively, that almost every player is misinformed about how they actually work. Based on the values of these bonuses, it seems like even t…