Attention SE: Flamethrower is USELESS to MCH in PvP

[Zojha]

Another thing Flamethrower does is control the movement of the enemy. They will want to actively avoid it, limit melee to attack from range if they don't want to risk running through the flames and give your team time to recover if one is about to die.

I think you're overestimating it - It's roughly 750 potency per second, depending on how you calculate the DoT (250 upfront, 500 delayed in DoT). For single-target, that's nothing to write home about. For AoE, it's quite good, but only bots are gonna allow you to just keep it up. If you don't have a healer backing you up, people can just gib you through it and even if you do, there's still CC - It's probably gonna be broken by stuns, sleeps, draw-ins and knockbacks.

The skill will probably shine bright in Rival Wings to take down the Mammets, but I'm not seeing much use in actual player combat. I mean, with the frontline bots, it'll be good as well, since those also ignore you, but, uh... yeah.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Yes, even if the dot stacks and. . . rough mathing. . . amounts to 4000 potency over 16 seconds, the issue then is the obvious startup, range to enemy, ease of disruption, and being forced to remain stationary for it. No one's going to stand still for 10 seconds in a PvP match, and stuns last 2 seconds.

EDIT: If the dot stacks, that math is wrong, but the rest of the issues remain. Mulling over it a bit, I can see potential defensive applications for it in say, the Feast, but outside of choke point control/area denial, or - ick - ice damage, I retain my previous statements about Flamethrower.

[Synestra]

It can be handy in seize if you need to interrupt capping, now that almost all AoE is gone capping tomeliths became way too easy if you just throw bodies on it.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

The moment you see a MCH position and stop before a group, you'll know it's coming. Stun, sleep, Unmend, Holmgang, Blank, Fluid Aura, Aura Blast and crush.

I retract my statement that it's useless, but MCH could be served FAR better with other skills.

[Myon88]

I'm really disappointed in flamethrower as a skill overall, it's nothing but a liability in PvE for the same reasons (stationary, channeled) and it's totally underwhelming as a level 70 skill. I'm sad to see that its now come to plague mch in PvP as well.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

This only serves to show that PvP could REALLY benefit from an actual two-way communication between the players and devs. . . When did ANY of us say "Hmm, MCH could really use Flamethrower in PvP because [insert reason here]?"

I know several of us noted that Report offered too little MP for the lengthy cooldown it had, and rather than fix it, they just removed it.

Like, seriously, what feedback was THIS based on? Because I certainly didn't see any MCHs asking for this.

I am absolutely furious right now.

[Magic-Mal]

I realized I misread it. I thought the duration was 6 seconds. It's 10. 10 seconds of being stationary for a conal aoe. . . I am really struggling to find any semblance of logic behind this.

Again, Gauss Round would've been better. Ricochet would've been better. Giving us back a bind would've been better. OUR TURRETS would've definitely been better

At least BRDs get a bind with Repelling Shot on top of self-knockback! And even a 5% damage up or vulnerability down with Troubadour! Balance!!!

[Myon88]

Bard getting a bind is pretty amazing tbh. The trade-off they've always had for being able to silence was their lack of hard cc/peel, while MCH had that utility in the form of stun gun and leg graze. Now bard gains the ability to control movement as well which rounds out their already amazing toolkit even more.

Of course if you use a bind carelessly it will be broken almost instantly, but there are many situations in frontlines for example where stopping someone for even a moment to let your alliance catch up with them is all that's needed. I might add that if dots work the way they do in PvE, periodic damage from existing dots doesn't break binds either - which makes them slightly better duelists by letting them kite in a 1v1 situation.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Shadowbind, even in all of its heavy nerfing early on was an effective bind.

Also this serves to show that perhaps it wasn't such a great idea to arbitrarily strip down each job to a 9 button standard. . . Not when players had the freedom to remove less effective skills from their hotbars (the very same ones they used for PvE) and customize it as needed for PvP.

Still I stress, for all that MCH lost from 3.x PvP, and now the removal of Report, we have gained nothing. Flamethrower is a disservice, and answers none of the issues we had in PvP, and no one asked for this.

[Levy9]

You could theoretically interrupt your enemy's burst with flamethrower to peel for your healer or other DPS. Either the enemy stays in the flames and gets a bunch of DoT stacks before you overheat or they have to fallback. This is assuming they already used their CC to try and kill the person they were targeting. It won't work against ranged DPS but i'm assuming they're primarily balancing around Feast, especially ranked Feast, where the team composition auto-balances to include one melee DPS on each team.