Machinist Flamethrower

I am wondering if flamethrower has any use now as Dawntrail has increased the potency of its weaponskills. I know it has been a questionable ability for a long time, but I am wondering if it is still better to use flamethrower over scattergun or if scattergun's potency upgrade has made flamethrower useless.

There is possibly one corner case when fighting trash mobs if all of this is true:
- Bio Blaster DoT up and not expiring in 10s
- Drill/Bio charges not capping in 10s
- Air Anchor not available for 10s
- Chainsaw not available for 10s
- Wildfire not available for 10s
- Barrel Stabilizer not up for 10s (since we want to keep Full Metal Machinist on cooldown)
- You won't have to move for 10s

It is a tiny DPS increase over Scattergun when factoring in the ~40 heat gauge you miss out on.

For a capstone ability, it is really bad. SE should consider it filling your heat gauge and upping the DoT potency. Or maybe make it an instant ground effect DoT like Salted Earth.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dspguy

Or maybe make it an instant ground effect DoT like Salted Earth.

---

That's a decent way to salvage the skill. Set the ground on fire then just continue your normal GCDs.

Only if they let me place it like Bishop. Slipstream on SMN somehow manages to be the only nuance on new SMN and yet it's unwelcome with how little control tanks have over boss positioning.

Even if Flamethrower were just AoE, trash with e.g. the fat Strayborough elephant are much less annoying when I have more control over how I get to aim the damn thing.

If some players prefer enemy-centered ones, fine, give them that too. Let us use both. How hard is it to put in two versions of the same action in the spell book?

The animation is even already there, from that old Bard skill. Forget what it was called.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sacae

The animation is even already there, from that old Bard skill. Forget what it was called.

---

Flaming arrow? I always thought SE removed that because people kept confusing it with an enemy AoE indicator, and moving mobs out of it. So maybe change it up a bit if they're going to reuse it xD

There is many simple to more convoluted ways to fix flamethrower but SE probably thinks the skill is fine at this point...:
- Make it consume heat like a very powerful AoE heat spender on 60s cd
- Make it generate heat, probably would need to be per mob hit to limit some wonky abuse in single target bosses if it does 5 heat per tick natively (would need to see how it compares with the normal filler on effective pps)
- Make it interact with bioblaster dots
- etc

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TSI

I am wondering if flamethrower has any use now as Dawntrail has increased the potency of its weaponskills. I know it has been a questionable ability for a long time, but I am wondering if it is still better to use flamethrower over scattergun or if scattergun's potency upgrade has made flamethrower useless.

---

In a vaccuum it's barely, a little better than the normal AoE rotation on 4 targets or above. In reality it's better used if you know you won't be able to spend your heat properly before the end of the encounter.

Which in dungeons could be argued that it's whatever since the only time heat is truly lost is at the very end of the last boss. Enjoy it as a glorified emote or a coffee break during pulls.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

- Make it interact with bioblaster dots

---

That got me thinking... what if something like bioblaster (but not bioblaster) put an "oil" effect on the enemies... then flamethrower added to it further increases the damage.

Just spitballing.

That's the literal description of wildfire.

Considering that Flamethrower uses the gun model in its animation, what they could do with Flamethrower is rework it so that it is AOE Blazing Shot, and then rework Auto Crossbow -- which uses the multitool in its animation to be AOE Air Anchor. Auto Crossbow could work like Blue Mage's Winged Reprobation spell where you can spam it a few times before it goes on cool down.

I would make it something that scorches an area of the ground for a while, causing persistent DoT damage to anything standing inside. The cost of this is that it causes a double GCD-cycle (5s) which is a full cast during which you can move albeit slowly (see Bard shots in PvP), causing 4 ticks of instant damage + then setting the ground on fire for 15s or so. Since it's a 5s cast bar, no oGCDs, no nothing.

I just love the idea of it igniting bioblasted targets for more damage, and removing the animation lock to boot.

As it stands, Flamethrower is a gain on 4+ if you have literally nothing else to use, which is fairly rare. Apart from that it has a very niche use in high end content for tick farming during boss downtime. Oh and Balmung Quicksands party trick ofc, lest not forget that.

Speaking of tick farming during boss downtime, enjoy your 10k tick in M4S after downtime, accounting for a whooping 16 DPS gain.

( i'm still doing it though )