Can someone help me understand the heat gauge?

[Id_Slayer]

The TL;DR of it is, don't overheat unless you have barrel stabilizer to put you back into the heated shots because its a huge dps loss otherwise. You lose an incredible amount of DPS using flame thrower to go from 0 heat to 50 heat, and You can't use ammo while manually building heat back up with the 1-2-3 combo so you are even more at the mercy of random procs to help sustain your dps. As a community of MCH we are hoping flamethrower gets adjusted somehow to not be a total waste as an alternate to barrel stabilizer, or that overheat will be boosted in damage to counteract the long period of lost damage afterwards, or something. Right now it just doesn't quite make sense to discourage/punish overheating so harshly, but then make it give you a damage boost. It's a trap, basically. You think you want to overheat, but everything is so punishing if you do. I'm not sure if another job can lose so much DPS from a single incorrect GCD press and we're already lowest.

[Greedalox]

Snip

Flamethrower has 4 primary uses IMO. One is in a group setting opener that delays your WF a bit to get group buffs- so it is used to go to 90 heat from 50 in that case.

The second is that in dungeon settings overheating isn't a bad thing on trash packs, so you Spread Shot until overheating, continue spread shotting til 1 second left on Overheat and then Snapshot the damage bonus on Flamethrower for the full 10 seconds. It's very strong AOE in that sense.

The third option is when you don't have issues with overheating anymore and can use it as a 1 tick of damage OGCD.

And lastly as a booboo fixer if you're not very good at heat management yet.