Ok, so I spent the last month or so playing primarily as a mini pyro, with a few rolls into pyro Spec to see just how good or bad fire was (apologies to every marine I gave third degree burns to).
I‘ve made a list of pros and cons from what I observed regarding that experience.
Note: this is primarily regarding regular incinerators acquired either from the SL, or the mini pyro kit.
Pros:
1: Rule of cool; setting things on fire is fun.
2: Most Xenos avoid fire like the plague.
3: Fire is good for clearing weeds.
4: Incinerator provides decent area denial if fired diagonally.
5: Fire continues to do damage over time even if you can’t hit the target again.
Cons:
1: Friendly fire (with actual fire instead of bullets) that will more often than not earn you a punch from your fellow marines.
2: The Xenos that don’t avoid your fire will run up to you (usually through your fire, while on fire) knock you down, and then drag you through your own fire, setting you ablaze.
3: Not good for advancing through weeds unless using the very limited availability gel fuel, which you run out of very quickly if you actually use it.
4: The area denial works more against marines than xenos, since xenos will usually risk running through flames to escape or attack, but marines will not. Which brings us to:
5: Fire does significantly more damage to marines than xenos. Both being on fire, and walking through fire.
6: Between the abysmally low fire rate and the limited range, it is almost impossible to hit a Xeno with the incinerator unless they are standing still, or walk directly into your line of fire.
7: Two of the most dangerous xeno castes, which are always at the front lines, which is the only place where incinerators can be used due to their range, are 100% immune to fire.
8: Fire extinguishers can only put out flames in 1x3 tiles directly next to you in the direction you are facing, while an increasing number of xenos can just barf on their sisters from 5 tiles away to put them out, and they even have a very large AOE barf that can put out a whole bunch of xenos at once.
9: The current incinerator tank setups make it incredibly difficult to carry extra equipment, including a backup weapon.
10: Fire doesn’t spread, except in a few rare cases (the grass on LV, and even then, it doesn’t always spread).
TLDR; Fire may be fun for the inner pyromaniac in us all, but is ultimately very close to HEFA in terms of how effective/ineffective it is against xenos, and how dangerous you are to your own teammates when using it.
I have some proposed fixes to handle some of the worst of it. I’d also like to hear from others, because I’d rather get feedback so I can tailor any suggestions that I might make on Gitlab, to increase the chances they get looked at. I’ll break it down by problems, and give the suggestions that are probably easiest to code first. I say probably because me and programming don’t mix well.
- Problem #1: Low Rate of Fire (RoF)
The incinerator RoF is obnoxiously slow. If a Defender has time to walk around the 5-tile wall of fire you just created, and you still can’t fire the weapon, then the RoF is probably too low. One of the supposed benefits of using a flamethrower in real life is that it’s pretty close to impossible to miss your target if you just hold down the trigger and sweep side to side. I don’t know if the weapon’s current RoF was a dev attempt to keep the number of animated sprites down, or if the low RoF is from a time where Fire was much, much more deadly to the xenos, but it needs to be upped. Current fuel limitations would prevent a marine from being able to spam flame for very long periods of time. Besides, as is, even using the incinerator as a primary weapon, I’ve almost never run out of the 4 initial tanks of fuel, even when making it to round end. Refueling from the backpack tank only ever happens if I accidentally refuel one of the tanks on it when I’m trying to swap tanks.
- Proposed solution: Remove the fire delay on the incinerator entirely. Yes, this means a marine can blanket the screen in flames in a matter of seconds. But that’s an entire tank of fuel. Then, to balance it, either make refilling a tank take a windup, or make attaching/detaching a fuel tank to the incinerator unit take a windup.
- Implementation: Removing the fire delay shouldn’t be that difficult; if I understand it correctly, it would just involve changing a variable on the incinerator units. Adding a windup to the attaching and detaching of fuel tanks is probably slightly more involved, but plenty of things have windups, so it shouldn’t be incredibly difficult.
- Problem #2: Queen & Ravager fire immunity.
The complete Queen and Ravager fire immunity is a balance issue. As far as game balance goes, this is weighted beyond in favor of the xenos. If you take an incinerator, and find yourself up against a Queen or Ravager, you are 100% useless. That’s not fun.
- Proposed solution: firstly, I do not think the solution is to make Queens and Ravagers take damage from fire. But they should be allowed to be set on fire. And when a Queen or Ravager is set on fire, they should be either blinded, slowed, or maybe even that new stun effect that makes Xenos unable to use their cooldown abilities, while on fire. Whether the blindness/slowness/stun would apply to all mobs set on fire is a matter for a different debate, I’m just proposing this as a way to make it so that the pyro has at least some usefulness in case a Ravager or Queen is running right at them. If the Pyro successfully sets them on fire, they and other marines might be able to run away or might delay a screech or pounce.
- Implementation: The blind effect exists from getting exploded, the slow effects exist for neurotoxin spit, and the ability stun is on shotgun slugs, so I assume any one of those could also be applied to the on-fire tag. Thinking about it from a programming standpoint though, it’d prolly be easier to blanket apply the effects to all mobs than to specify just the Queen and Ravager. But I’d gladly be blind or slowed while on fire as a marine if it meant that I actually did something to help the fight or allow for a retreat. Note, I’m not saying add all three effects, I’m saying add one of those effects.
- Problem #3: Easy for Xenos, but hard for marines to put out flames
With the number of Xeno castes and strains that can now spray down their fellows and put out fire, in addition to others being able to pat the fires out, it almost seems as if xenos were bred specifically to be a species of fire fighters. Meanwhile the marines, who supposedly have gear specifically designed for either fighting fires (extinguishers) or for surviving fires (pyro suit, firefighter coat/helmet) catch fire with much higher regularity, and have great difficulty in using their equipment.
- Proposed solution for extinguishing: This needs to be tackled from two different angles, I think. First, remove the safety from marine fire extinguishers, and then make it so that they don’t automatically waste a spray when you place them in a container. This one is just a QoL fix; making an extra step that punishes a player for trying to do a vital function quickly is just damned annoying. It would be like having safety caps on all medical autoinjectors, where if you don’t take the cap off, you can’t inject someone, but then if you put it in your pocket without the cap on, it injects you with a dose. Second, either increase the water volume held by extinguishers, reduce the units of water expended when spraying, or increase the area of effect extinguished.
- Implementation: I don’t know how hard it would be to remove the safety, but spray bottles exist and operate just fine without a safety. As for capacity, spray bottles hold 250u of solution, fire extinguishers carry less than half that. That’s just a variable change.
- Fanciful extinguisher solution: Unfortunately, I feel this one has very little chance of being implemented in the near future, but hear me out; have an underbarrel mounted fire extinguisher as a weapon attachment it could even be set up where you use a screwdriver on a pocket extinguisher and it becomes an attachment, like with flashlights turning into rail lights. One of the most important features of this is it would have to be attachable to the incinerator units in addition to other weapons that normally mount attachments. This means if you accidentally ignite a friend, you can click the activate attachment button (or press your bound macro key) then click your associate to put them out.
- Fanciful extinguisher implementation: this would require making a whole new attachment, with new sprites, and would be a ton of work. But the idea is neat, so who knows.
- Proposed flammability solution: make the Pyro completely immune to fire in their fire suit. There is no reason not to do this. We have heat suits that people can wear to study lava up close, I think the future can manage a fireproof suit for a guy who specializes in spraying it everywhere. And make the fire suits and helmet either completely immune to fire as well. If someone is willing to move slow and forgo bullet, slashing, and acid protection, then they deserve that fire immunity.
- Implementation for flammability: Just change the variables on the gear.
Ok, those are what I would say are my main three gripes about using an incinerator. I have some other ideas (crazy, probably) about how incinerators could be changed to more closely mimic how flamethrowers and fire actually behave, but those changes would probably take a lot of coding, so I’ll save those for another time.
So, feedback anyone? Constructive criticism, please. Any pros or cons that I missed? Are my suggestions even close to being good fixes? If not, what might work better?