Let's talk FIRE.

[bobucles]

Fire deals 3 sources of damage. The simplest is direct damage. This is the only type of damage the tank's flamethrower does, dealing 13 7 damage 60 times a second. It is reasonably potent but is crippled by short range and lacks the sheer damage output against behemoths.

Fire also sets the ground on fire. This fire can be stacked up multiple times, burning hotter and longer. A good blaze can deal over 1000 damage, which is nothing to scoff at.

Anything hit by the fire hose gets a flame debuff. The debuff deals 100 damage per second, for 30 seconds! Anything less than a behemoth biter gets an instant death sentence, and a single flamethrower research seals its fate.

What's your opinion on fire?

[Ranakastrasz]

Was weak, is crazy OP now. Needs a nerf. Reduce range, cut burn time to like 5 seconds. Leave area fires alone (more or less)

Make big/behemoths fire resistant.

Dunno. It is kinda the best man portable weapon atm. Nukes are better, and artiller makes the whole problem go away.

[bobucles]

Even 5 seconds is enough to destroy anything that isn't a behemoth. It needs both a time and damage reduction to avoid shredding absolutely everything (research buffs it).

I've been toying with a 5 second/15DPS burn sticker and it seems pretty good. The damage doesn't dominate everything (75) and it barely scratches against green biter regen, but with high research it can half the health of a blue biter. Changing the debuff damage makes behemoth biters nearly impossible to kill with the hand flamer; it turns out that the debuff was doing all the heavy lifting. A dozen flame turrets will absolutely obliterate everything of course.

[BlakeMW]

I think the main change which should be made to the Flamethrower is turning the 100dps non-stacking debuff into a much smaller but stacking debuff. Exact numbers would need tuning, but the basic debuff could be something like 2 dps over 10s, each additional hit adds 2dps and 2s (resets to 10s if less than), note that it's very hard to fire only one fireball they tend to come out in 2's or 3's, so the minimum amount of damage would be like 6 dps over 14s, a basic squirt would thus have no problem incinerating a medium biter. Hosing a target for half a second, would result in 60dps for 40s, enough to incinerate a Behemoth Spitter, or with a good amount of upgrades, a Behemoth Biter.

This change would require actually hosing down larger enemies rather than just firing off a token fireball to sentence them to death. It wouldn't make a serious difference to players who are ignorant of how much heavy lifting the fire-sticker currently does and use the flamethrower in a natural manner.

I also have to mention that I find cooldowns to intensifying fire patches very objectional. How it works is a fire patch can only be intensified in damage every 10 ticks, that means when hosing a single tile, 9 out of 10 fireballs do basically nothing, another way of looking at this is by rapidly and in an epilepsy-inducing manner flicking the mouse around you can create 10 intensified flame patches in the same amount of time as 1 intensified fire patch, I see literally nothing good about this game mechanic. I understand that it's probably to limit the potency of multiple flamethrower turrets firing at the same target, and if that is a real problem then fine, make the cooldown 1 tick, so only one firestream can intensify a fire patch per tick. Otherwise, just let it stack every tick and adjust the amount of damage and duration added to 1/10th. Then the flamethrower is optimally used in a natural manner, just hosing down stuff which needs to burn down. I don't mind if there is some mild benefit to sweeping with the flamethrower (i.e. if fire patches start with several charges, so 3 firepatches is better than 1 intensified 3 times), but at the moment the reward for sweeping is just way too high and the reward for hosing way too low.

[bobucles]

Hosing a target for half a second, would result in 60dps for 40s, enough to incinerate a Behemoth Spitter, or with a good amount of upgrades, a Behemoth Biter.

It sounded reasonable up to this point. Behemoth biters are behemoths! Killing them with a tiny squirt of ammo is not okay. Anything that can kill a behemoth automatically renders all smaller biters completely trivial. Behemoths should feel tanky and scary. They're supposed to be the biggest and meanest.

I don't know how to make a stacking debuff. Maybe there's a trick to it but I can only tack on a single fire effect.

make the cooldown 1 tick, so only one firestream can intensify a fire patch per tick.

Flame turrets shoot every 4 ticks.

The ground flame is definitely not a weak effect. It can deal over a thousand damage if the stacks pile up, which is enough to kill everything below a behemoth. But fire is an AoE type of weapon. Anything that it does against a single target gets multiplied across every target it hits. Fire is already an amazing AoE and doesn't need high yield single target damage to be good. Lasers and gun turrets can pick up the slack against behemoths because that's what they're good at.

[BlakeMW]

Hosing a target for half a second, would result in 60dps for 40s, enough to incinerate a Behemoth Spitter, or with a good amount of upgrades, a Behemoth Biter.

It sounded reasonable up to this point. Behemoth biters are behemoths! Killing them with a tiny squirt of ammo is not okay. Anything that can kill a behemoth automatically renders all smaller biters completely trivial. Behemoths should feel tanky and scary. They're supposed to be the biggest and meanest.

I don't know how to make a stacking debuff. Maybe there's a trick to it but I can only tack on a single fire effect.

They need to be killable with handheld weapons though - and even if a half second hosing sentences it to death, it still needs 40s to actually burn to death. And it's not like Behemoths are immune to getting obliterated with other handheld weapons with +100% level upgrades. And as I said the numbers would need tuning. Half a second, two seconds, whatever. Just hosing it for more than "0.016s" to sentence it to death.

The fire patches are already kind of a stacking type of thing. Each time the fire patch is refreshed it gains some damage and then each tick it loses some damage - a very small amount, but still enough to make the damage of a fire patch decay significantly over time. That means a fire patch tracks two values: the remaining duration (or expiry time), and the damage.

At the moment I assume that the fire-sticker only tracks the remaining duration (or expiry time), so it would need another value added - or at least, made dynamic - the damage value, in a manner which is really not any different to the fire patch damage value. As such there is no tracking of separate debuffs, just one debuff that has its duration and damage increased with each splash of fire, it doesn't actually stack, "intensified" would be more descriptive.

[bobucles]

They need to be killable with handheld weapons though

Do they? Really? Fire is already amazingly powerful at crowd control. If you need extra damage against endgame enemies use endgame items. Capsules, exosuits and personal lasers give all the damage output you need against behemoths without ever needing to touch an ounce of fire. There is no functional requirement for every single weapon to be able to solo behemoths.

[BlakeMW]

Because they're like roaches, just end game roaches. Fire should kill them.

In another thread though, I suggested a high evolution factor nest-guardian enemy that spawns in very low numbers, but is basically laser and fire immune with a lot of flat resists, so you can still use the flamethrower to clean out the trash, but to take out the guardians you need proper armor-piercing weapons like rocket launcher or tank cannon. But trash units shouldn't be hard to kill however big they are (the bigness after all is largely to reduce enemy counts to keep performance up).

[bobingabout]

Because they're like roaches, just end game roaches. Fire should kill them.