can we increase the flamethrower range?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Pretty much. We got nice tools but at what cost? Ammo and rng procs, reloading, pre WF pattern identification, heat management, an actual WF that felt good... And a useful flamethrower, never thought I'd actually praise the ability in SB considering how ping discriminatory it was, but at least it was useful for the kit.

At least it feels intricate and good in pvp.

The funny thing is, what made Overheating so shit in terms of how strict the timing was is what they started fixing utilising buff stacks per GCD later on.

[Valence]

"Later on" is an euphemism. Took them what, all of ShB + half of EW?

[Taranok]

Pretty much. We got nice tools but at what cost? Ammo and rng procs, reloading, pre WF pattern identification, heat management, an actual WF that felt good... And a useful flamethrower, never thought I'd actually praise the ability in SB considering how ping discriminatory it was, but at least it was useful for the kit.

At least it feels intricate and good in pvp.

Unfortunately the design's best aspect, heat management, was aborted in keeping the core of its HW rotation, 'ammo' management and piano bursting. I would have loved if they kept the class as a heat management class where you wanted to exclusively juggle heat. I feel if they focused on heat management, it would be better overall.

That said, I have no love lost for that version of the class. Needing to intentionally overheat the class and wildfire burst and still piano burst while managing ammo and doing that bizarre 323121 rotation that existed back then just wasn't worth the headache. That said, I do actually miss the 323121 ammo burst. That was actually fun.

Machinist as a heat management class could have been so interesting, but instead it's a cooldown class which is...fine, but not the best.

[Valence]

It's boring is what it is, much like GNB. Just press a lot of different long cooldowns on cooldown, else they drift. Whoo.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

You could reasonably do what Drill/Bioblaster is.

Make it a Ogcd with shared Air Anchor recast
give it 20 heat
give it a lingering dot

Maybe limit it to one of those dots at a time, or even create a interaction when both are active at the same time.

[wereotter]

It is a good DPS gain in AoE but I agree it needs to be better. However, increasing it's range would help a ton as OP says it's slightly too short especially in the latest dungeon with the mobs' giant AoEs.

Someone feel free to point out if I'm wrong here... but I'm pretty sure flamethrower is still a DPS loss to use.

In the 10 seconds of Flamethrower you'd miss out on:
4 uses of Scattergun 150 potency each for a total of 600
40 heat gauge, and comparing the DPS per point of heat to Auto Crossbow, that's 560 DPS
Flamethrower stops your auto attacks, which is minimal loss during AOE pulls, but still 4 auto attacks at approximately 50 potency a piece for 200 potency

This brings the total DPS that would be done during the normal skill usage to 1,360

I believe Flamethrower ticks every second, and it hits for 80 potency per hit, bringing the potency total to 880 if I'm right. (10 ticks plus one on hit)

Comparing the two, even if you don't count the potency on the auto attacks, or even if I have the potency wrong (I'm going off someone else's estimate here) it's still 40 potency more to not use Flamethrower at all. So I do think Valence is correct that range isn't the only thing at issue with Flamethrower, and a simple heat generation while you use it would solve that... or just increased potency so it doesn't matter you're not generating heat.

[CKNovel]

Increase its range to 30y and its duration to 60s
So I can finally truly AFK during dungeons.

[Valence]

Someone feel free to point out if I'm wrong here... but I'm pretty sure flamethrower is still a DPS loss to use.

In the 10 seconds of Flamethrower you'd miss out on:
4 uses of Spread Shot 140 potency each for a total of 560
20 heat gauge, and comparing the DPS per point of heat to Auto Crossbow, that's 280 DPS
Flamethrower stops your auto attacks, which is minimal loss during AOE pulls, but still 4 auto attacks at approximately 50 potency a piece for 200 potency

This brings the total DPS that would be done during the normal skill usage to 1,040

I believe Flamethrower ticks every second, and it hits for 80 potency per hit, bringing the potency total to 800 if I'm right.

Comparing the two, even if you don't count the potency on the auto attacks, or even if I have the potency wrong (I'm going off someone else's estimate here) it's still 40 potency more to not use Flamethrower at all. So I do think Valence is correct that range isn't the only thing at issue with Flamethrower, and a simple heat generation while you use it would solve that... or just increased potency so it doesn't matter you're not generating heat.

It's more complicated than this to be modeled, because one needs to take into account a longer curve of using the actual AoE normal rotation of scattergun then hypercharge then scattergun, etc, by taking into account bioblaster segmentation in between that adds some constraints to it all (and potentially Air Anchor at 3 or 4 targets), versus a rotation using flamethrower then scattergun then hypercharge etc until you loop back to flamethrower.

You end up with longer curves of damage that can also vary depending on the amount of targets. The FT rotation tends to edge out especially in the first 10 seconds for obvious reasons, then peter out until 60s later. During ShB both curves were almost identical, FT rotation edging out by an inch, especially over 2 targets. No idea for EW, I wasn't the author of that calculator, but as said above I don't see how it can even still win out considering that everything else has been buffed for EW but FT (unless they cheated when they lowered physical damage potencies to align them on magical and didn't lower FT as much as it should have, which I doubt).

Also, Flamethrower works like a ground dot but with 1s ticks, so it will tick for a total of 11 ticks (1 tick at activation, then 10s of 10 ticks).

[wereotter]

It's more complicated than this to be modeled, because one needs to take into account a longer curve of using the actual AoE normal rotation of scattergun then hypercharge then scattergun, etc, by taking into account bioblaster segmentation in between that adds some constraints to it all (and potentially Air Anchor at 3 or 4 targets), versus a rotation using flamethrower then scattergun then hypercharge etc until you loop back to flamethrower.

You end up with longer curves of damage that can also vary depending on the amount of targets. The FT rotation tends to edge out especially in the first 10 seconds for obvious reasons, then peter out until 60s later. During ShB both curves were almost identical, FT rotation edging out by an inch, especially over 2 targets. No idea for EW, I wasn't the author of that calculator, but as said above I don't see how it can even still win out considering that everything else has been buffed for EW but FT (unless they cheated when they lowered physical damage potencies to align them on magical and didn't lower FT as much as it should have, which I doubt).

oops I'll edit my post, but that even if Flamethrower gets 11 ticks, there's also another issue where I was going off Spread Shot instead of Scattergun but even then that means that Flamethrower is doing a total potency of 880 while with the additional potency and heat from Scattergun over what I calculated thats still 1320 potency from just using your normal skills.

I guess I'm not seeing how in what you laid out, though, where you're actually getting more damage from using flamethrower when you're actually losing 440 potency if the source I found was correct about the potency on auto attacks, or 240 if you're not counting auto attacks at all.

Also, Flamethrower works like a ground dot but with 1s ticks, so it will tick for a total of 11 ticks (1 tick at activation, then 10s of 10 ticks).

Also off topic but wanted to do a correction here... not sure about Salted Earth, but Doton doesn't tick every second, it's still every 3 seconds. Important to know since I've seen several ninjas thinking that Doton does more damage than Raiton. Slipstream is every 3 seconds as well.

[Valence]

I guess I'm not seeing how in what you laid out, though, where you're actually getting more damage from using flamethrower when you're actually losing 440 potency if the source I found was correct about the potency on auto attacks, or 240 if you're not counting auto attacks at all.

I never said that the FT AoE rotation was better than the strict auto xbow rotation...

I just said that your methodology is too simplistic to model the problem accurately.

Also off topic but wanted to do a correction here... not sure about Salted Earth, but Doton doesn't tick every second, it's still every 3 seconds. Important to know since I've seen several ninjas thinking that Doton does more damage than Raiton. Slipstream is every 3 seconds as well.

I said, quoting: "works like a ground dot BUT with 1s ticks".