Obviously the flamer is without a doubt the least used weapon in the game. It is by no means viable in a pub let alone a scrim.
Currently the only “viable” way to use the flamethrower is as described in a short scenario.
The flamer should be at the very front of a human push in hall, he remains crouched most times because crouch walking forward does not induce self-damage. He swivels his flame side to side making sure to cover the area in front of him for him and mates. This effectively creates a flame shield for his battalion. Any goon silly enough to pounce into him will get fried by both his flames and human bullets around him.
Though the above scenario sounds good, it is entirely too specific and requires both the flame wielder and teammates to be competent enough not to bleed each other from the bullet spam from the flame’s flank and the flame spam when the torch wielder starts flicking everywhere because a dretch is on him.
To make the flamer viable I think we need to do four things.
Here is my proposition:
Increase the range of the flamer by roughly 20%, this will enable the flames to comfortably hug the ceilings of an ATCS hallway when the human is crouched and looking fully upright. Currently they barely graze the ceiling allowing wall friendly dretches to run past the flames.
Lower the damage of the flamer significantly, I do not know the current DPS but I do know that if a dragoon sits in the middle of a flame line for longer than 2 seconds he is TOAST. The flamer does a bit too much damage to justify the aforementioned range buff.
Significantly reduce the friendly damage from the flames. This is the weapon’s biggest drawback that makes it virtually impossible to use in any team composition. I do not know the exact percentage by which the torch’s self/friendly damage be nerfed but I do know that it needs a lot of tweaking.
Drop the flamer’s current cost from C450 to C400. This small buff gives more value to the life of a hlarmour flamer.
I would appreciate any comments or criticisms down below. Thanks.
P.S. These are my opinions and suggestions on how to fix the Tremulous 1.1 flamethrower for future use. Do not crucify me if you do not share the same opinion, all CONSTRUCTIVE criticisms are welcomed.
You might take this as a joke but… I’ve had excellent results using jetpack flamer in ATCS default on 1.1 as base defense. The main issue with the flamer I’d say is how slowly the projectiles move.
If it moved faster, you wouldn’t run into the flames so often and it actually has high enough DPS to fuck shit up ezpz.
That reminds me of another change I would like to see; No damage to human structures, perhaps increased damage to alien structures.
The shitty ass projectile is why I want to scrap it and see it as an advanced pain saw instead.
think a Combination of these two - featuring increased range than the standard painsaw.
Maybe the longer you have been firing the flamer the more damage it gets as it ramps up, this encourages it’s use as a protective shield/front line defence.
We should try doubling the frequency it shoots at, doubling the projectile speed if not more, dividing the damages by 2 and increasing the ammo to 300 and see how it goes. Pretty sure that’d be already a huge improvement.
Make it shoot napalm and have a flame last for a sec where you last shot. That could be an alternative firing mode, ideally: 5/10 ammo = fire ball with twice the range that stays on the structure/brush it hit. Obviously, it should either not have the same amount of damage on direct hit as if you shot the same amount of ammo in regular fire mode, or it should have a delay/cooldown. Or make it DoT aliens and have it spread to the structures/teammates they bump into… Or combine those. There’s so much cool shit that could be done.
However wouldn’t this specific issue be a lot harder to correct than the ones suggested? Or is this just as simple as speeding up the lasgun projectiles?
@bird you should try the flamer on the test7341 server, as ckit mentioned it is currently the goo flamer which has changes that already makes it more effective than the 1.1 flamer. Such as having the player’s velocity add to the flamer’s projectile velocity so that you are generall not walking into the projectiles. But this doesn’t mean that the flamer can’t use further improvements than what gpp did.
I like the napalm idea, that is to have residual burning on map surfaces. Maybe some residual burning on players as well so that the flamer can act like the human’s equivalent of poison.
increasing the repeat of the flamer (and adjusting some other values to accommodate this adjustment), would probably be good to make firing the flamer more smooth.
That can be changed by simply adjusting one line in the tremulous.h file:
#define FLAMER_SPEED 500.0f
However, as I have mentioned the adding of the player’s velocity to the flamer projectile velocity already addresses the problem of the flamer projectile speed.
I have seen game play where a burning effect would spread between nearby buildables and imo that is too op. having it spread between just players by collision might not be bad, but if the players could have it spread to the buildables by bimping into the buildables, then there is too much new potential for griefing, as well as for catastrophic damage team damage resulting from new players.
