I got my hands on the flamethrower about 10 matches ago and gave it a try. Through my testing, I came to the following observations:
Very short range: Due to the poor mobility of an average infantry unit, it is pretty hard to traverse open terrain without getting shot by snipers. Combined with the very short range, makes it hard to get withing firing range of enemies
Risk of self-burn: One would suggest you used the weapon indoors, but due to inconsistent collisions between windows and doors, your flames are very likely to get stuck on the door post, and if you are too close, you will burn yourself.
Low damage output: It takes about 2 full seconds of holding down the fire button to take a player out. Combining this with the narrow cone of fire, makes this weapon about as fast as the bolt action to kill players
Attracts AI fire: As soon as you start spewing flames, any enemy AI soldiers in the area will face you and shoot you. This can also happen even when you are behind them. Ambushing a group of soldiers on a capture point should mean them burning alive, not you getting one-tapped by a quickscoping AI.
Upside: Area Denial: With the flamethrower you can light parts of a building on fire. On certain capture points, you can safely ignite all entrances without risk of burning yourself, resulting in a total area denial for enemy and friendly soldiers alike, as they can not enter the building without burning themselves. This can lead to (mainly AI) team kills, however.
Overall you need to jump through 4 hoops to get chance at kills, which makes the weapon very difficult to use. The main thing it needs is increased damage on direct hits and more consistent flame hitboxes to be used as anything else than a glorified barricade spawner
I think one of major things that could improve flamethrowers is disabling weapon use when on fire - there have been plenty of occasions where I have traded with someone using a bolt action rifle just because he was able to shoot me just before burning to death.
This would also help with the fact you can run through burning entrances and still kill people inside a point with an SMG, sacrificing one soldier for a capture.
I get it but it is a flamethrower in real life it was cumbersome and a niche weapon we don’t see any in service today for a reason. The area denial is pretty bad though I agree with that you can lock down all entrances to a building and the enemies can’t enter but your allies can’t either. The main selling point of this is the first cap in invasion mode I think, because you can crawl there and spray everyone on the cap most players won’t even realise you are there until they are about to die of burning. The first 3 points are just the characteristics of a flame thrower sure the range could be increased a bit but it wouldn’t change anything and this is supposed to be a close range weapon.
The flamethrowers used in-game have an historical range of 30-40 meters. Flamethrowers are not exactly a close quarters weapon, they are actually mainly used to clear out bunkers and other fortifications, so the area denial actually makes total sense from the historical point of view
I’d say what we currently have isn’t just weak, but also doesn’t work as it should and has no clear role. From what I’ve seen, the current version is closer to a lighter + deodorant than it is to an actual flamethrower.
I think the main thing that should be introduced is separate effects for just catching fire and getting the flamer liquid on you. Normally with flamethrowers you get a relatively narrow beam of liquid that travels pretty far, surrounded by burning fumes. There’s no putting out the former, not through normal means readily available to soldiers in the field. The latter just causes panic more than anything else, and can be put out with relative ease.
If you get hit directly it should be death sentence (maybe that’s a bit too harsh but I don’t think so). If you just catch fire from indirect contact, the damage should be rather low but you shouldn’t be able to use your weapons. Burning environment should have the same effect as indirect contact. Any additional balancing can be done by changing shape and length of direct and indirect contact zones.
This may lead to some cheesy defense tactics of small cap zones, but to that I can only say that cap zones need to be larger anyway.
There was instance in a match yesterday when I got knocked out by an enemy and I was on the floor healing. A guy marches in with a flamethrower, starts spewing it all over the place and built a barrier of fire between him and my squad(melee kill option is off). I healed and the full squad recovered and then killed the player rather comfortably.
The player was very close too. I was standing by the door in a room where I got shot, and the guy with the flamethrower was on the other side of the door.
Flamethrower is a joke in the game. I was so excited after unlocking it but one game later, I’m back to engineers and artillery.
Agreed, the flamethrower can be a very powerful crowd control weapon in the right situation, but its range is so short that unless you ambush a full squad at 10m an smg is strictly better.
Also it’d be nice if flamers couldn’t set themselves on fire, maybe they can take damage by touching their own fire but setting yourself on fire is annoying.