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Thread: Fire Could Use Some Changes

  1. #1
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    Fire Could Use Some Changes

    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?
    Last edited by Moosetasm; 04-02-2020 at 03:48 PM.

  2. #2
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    These are all fairly good suggestions, many of these things have been suggested before. For some reason, devs seem intent on keeping fire useless.

    One idea I had for making fire a bit better was to make it deal only a little damage to the xeno itself, as it currently does, but seriously damage the armor of the xeno if they have it. It'd give fire a niche as the anti-armor weapon, since there is nothing for that currently.

  3. #3
    Senior Member Destrok's Avatar
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    Waiting for lagless CM
    Manuel Conrad - Human
    Alexander Keys - Human (Command)
    SA-D5 - Xenomorph
    Har'Kittak - Yautja
    Thomas - Synthetic

    I'm awesome

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by Moosetasm View Post



    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.
    this is literally just you saying you are bad. Quit reading after this because everything else you say is invalid.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Destrok View Post
    This almost looks like lag is making it happen, but I know fire is actually this shitty.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Just L View Post
    These are all fairly good suggestions, many of these things have been suggested before. For some reason, devs seem intent on keeping fire useless.

    One idea I had for making fire a bit better was to make it deal only a little damage to the xeno itself, as it currently does, but seriously damage the armor of the xeno if they have it. It'd give fire a niche as the anti-armor weapon, since there is nothing for that currently.
    That would certainly be an interesting use for it. Even if it did significantly less damage overall, the armored xenos wouldn’t want anything to do with it since it’d make the squishy.

    Quote Originally Posted by Destrok View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Just L View Post
    This almost looks like lag is making it happen, but I know fire is actually this shitty.
    Yeah, this is what I’m talking about when I say you can’t hit anything with fire.

    Quote Originally Posted by MasterShakeEZ View Post
    this is literally just you saying you are bad. Quit reading after this because everything else you say is invalid.
    Go back to your benomain cave, you troll. I bet you use HEFA on purpose too, ya fucking monster.

  7. #7
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    I have seen one or two marines do some damage with fire, but it's mostly against castes that would die anyway to bullets. Like a hivelord or carrier getting lit on fire, retreating, and then the marine chases them down and finishes them off with a pistol or something.

  8. #8
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    Hehehehe...

    I abandoned flamer for a reason. In truth, to keep it balanced, flamer only needs to have a lot higher RoF and thats it. Keep the retarded fire immunity on other benos, adjust flaming RNG and I'm good with that. Atleast something to replace almost as garbage slugs.

    All of those suggestions were pretty much suggested in the past. There was a time when flamer was actually good because of a bug that actually removed firing delay. Other then that its HEFA level of useless, you have to be both lucky and skillfull to land HEFA directly under a beno to explode and you also have to be as lucky and skillfull to successfully use flamer in a way that won't halt marine push, in a way that won't give benos (that are not fire immune) chance to stun you and drag you trough your own flames, in a way that will actually make beno run away, ressist and spend half of minute to regenerate health, instead of running to multiple benos who can spray acid and immediately put fire out.

    To those suggestions you might also add the same body temperature mechanic as marines have. Even if you get immediately extinguished as marine, you will cook yourself, because body temperature sky rockets immediately, but beno who is immediately extinguished suffers no consequences. Simillary Pyro and fire immune benos, because pyro still gets "hot".

    There also is a reason why Pyro is the least picked spec. It takes a baldo to roll spec for pyro to appear in the round. But benomains don't see it.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Just L View Post
    I have seen one or two marines do some damage with fire, but it's mostly against castes that would die anyway to bullets. Like a hivelord or carrier getting lit on fire, retreating, and then the marine chases them down and finishes them off with a pistol or something.
    I‘ve gotten kills with fire against pretty much everything, obviously not Queen or Rav, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a crusher or praetorian yet, due to their stupidly large health pools. And the kills aren’t as consistent as with other weapons. I’ve also surprisingly kept a positive Xeno kill to marine kill ratio with the incinerator, which after all the horror stories, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage. It’s more useful for making the Xenos run away, to be honest. But if you’re not the only marine and you torch the xeno, and your partner(s) unload on it, some xenos miscalculate and don’t run away fast enough then burn to death before getting to rest.

    Quote Originally Posted by CABAL View Post
    Hehehehe...

    I abandoned flamer for a reason. In truth, to keep it balanced, flamer only needs to have a lot higher RoF and thats it. Keep the retarded fire immunity on other benos, adjust flaming RNG and I'm good with that. Atleast something to replace almost as garbage slugs.

    All of those suggestions were pretty much suggested in the past. There was a time when flamer was actually good because of a bug that actually removed firing delay. Other then that its HEFA level of useless, you have to be both lucky and skillfull to land HEFA directly under a beno to explode and you also have to be as lucky and skillfull to successfully use flamer in a way that won't halt marine push, in a way that won't give benos (that are not fire immune) chance to stun you and drag you trough your own flames, in a way that will actually make beno run away, ressist and spend half of minute to regenerate health, instead of running to multiple benos who can spray acid and immediately put fire out.

    To those suggestions you might also add the same body temperature mechanic as marines have. Even if you get immediately extinguished as marine, you will cook yourself, because body temperature sky rockets immediately, but beno who is immediately extinguished suffers no consequences. Simillary Pyro and fire immune benos, because pyro still gets "hot".

    There also is a reason why Pyro is the least picked spec. It takes a baldo to roll spec for pyro to appear in the round. But benomains don't see it.
    I think any one of the suggestions in the thread so far would make for a nice change of pace.

    For the fire delay getting removed, I’d even be ok with them balancing it by reducing the burn time on all fires.

    Even if you land a HEFA perfectly after stunning with a HEDP, you probably won’t kill the target. HEFA just sucks.

    Truthfully, if they just made it so there was gear that made it so that you didn’t have to worry about your own fire, damage and temperature, I could live with it. But making xenos feel the pain of overheating just like marines... might be good for my schadenfreude.

    I choose pyro... for the lulz. I don't take it for my K/D ratio, that’s for sure. I take it so I can light up a xeno and scream: “Burn baby, burn!” or some other nonsense as I watch them collide with any and everything in their desperate rush to escape. My enjoyment is enough that it isn’t outweighed by the resulting salt when a xeno completely ignores the flames then drags me into my own fire.

  10. #10
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    It's still pretty obnoxious that you baldies still can't put in the effort to chase down the xeno you light on fire and then call flamer weak. TrollerNoob, Jeser, Avalanche can all come in here to tell you that flamer is a good weapon and you'll still sit there and bitch that you can't one shot xeno by just spraying fire out. Grab a rifle, a shotgun, or an L42, or a VP, and actually try to put in the effort to secure the kill for once. FF will always be inherent in every weapon, but flamer's FF is pretty negligible if you simply take an extinguisher with you. Like hell dude, fire can no longer be taken off by just walking in water tiles and now it disables both weed healing AND queen healing. By utility alone it's the strongest it's ever been, but you still have people using it wrong and calling it weak.

    Somehow you think that it's easier for xeno to put each other out of fire than it is for marines. Really though? When xeno only has 3 castes that can use acid spray, and one of them takes a strain that basically makes them useless (Vomitter spitter), and the other 2 castes are T3s, with one of them having strains that remove their spray (dancer, oppressor for prae); while every marine can take an extinguisher or a mini extinguisher and EXTINGUISH THEMSELVES, which is something no xeno can do.

    The only 2 problems with flamers are:

    1. Fire tiles sometimes don't work due to byond being byond

    2. Every PFC can take the flamer kit, therefore invalidating Pyro as a spec since fire is a quantity over quality weapon



    Also, if you want people to respect and want to discuss with you, stop calling everyone who disagrees with you a xenomain. It really kills your argument when you call MasterShake who's been playing more marines than xenos (like 2 times more) in 2020 a xeno main.
    Last edited by DefinitelyAlone0309; 04-03-2020 at 12:15 AM.

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