can we increase the flamethrower range?

[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).