Warframe needs a good flamethrower, here are some ideas

[Occulticat]

I love flamethrowers. Adore them. Can't live without them. I need to be able to burn my enemies in a righteous spray of napalm in as many games as possible, and alas, in Warframe I cannot. It is true I can turn to the Penta and Ogris augments, but... does that really count if it being launched in a projectile rather than sprayed? Is there no other way? And I'm gonna just nip the "what about the Ignis" in the bud- it is true that it throws flames, but mechanically it functions more like a heat ray, being a beam weapon with a thick beam and an AoE at whatever point the beam contacts a surface and fails to punch through. As an experienced video game flamethrower connoisseur I must object to the classification of the Ignis as a flamethrower, and here I will detail two methods the game's internal mechanics already support, more or less, by which a proper flamethrower may be made to throw flames. If I had my way both styles would be used on different weapons, so that multiple flavors of flamethrower might be added. As an additional point, I am well aware that Warframe's time to kill is low enough that anything like what I am going to describe is not going to be particularly amazing, but people use the Stug for giggles so I think it is still fair to set forth the concept, as someone (me) will use it.

 

So what makes a good flamethrower, you ask? Simple- a good flamethrower lights things on fire. In Warframe, just about anything can cause heat procs if modded correctly, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. Napalm lingers and sticks to things, clinging to the ground and continuing to burn, and gouts of burning gas linger in the air somewhat as the fuel burns off. Therefore, the primary thing that a flamethrower needs to do to feel like a flamethrower is produce a lingering effect after the initial beam/projectile/ect. has swept through a space.

 

METHOD 1: IGNIS BUT CLINGIER

So for the first concept, lets start with what the Ignis gets right- to its credit, the mechanics of the AoE where it strikes a surface combined with infinite body punch through do encourage you to fire at the ground to some degree to get the full AoE, sweeping the ground like one might want to if they were using a more proper flamethrower rather than a cheap imitation. That being the case, let us start with the Ignis as a base and mix it with another weapon to get the results we want. For this we will turn to the Torrid. Not the Incarnon, the regular gas-bomb launcher. The actual mechanics of the gas bomb is what we want here- it embeds and creates an AoE that ticks for damage every second, creating a lingering area of denial and pain, much like what we want in our beautiful, perfect flamethrower.

So what we would be looking at here is a beam weapon with infinite body punch through, which leaves a lingering AoE every damage tick at the point where it meets a surface. Compared to the Torrid, we will need to do two things- firstly, as much as I would love for the flames to linger that long, with a beam weapon the number of embedded spots of flame would become outrageous very quickly, so we will need to set the timer on the embedded portion of the attack to something like two or three seconds to keep it from having the problem Peculiar Growth/Amprex used to have together, before the cap on spawned flowers. We will also need to reduce the AoE significantly, so much so that the radius is not overwhelmingly larger than the beam itself. With the Ignis's 0.15 m width, I could see a 0.5-1m area for the embedded fire, though it could be brought up to be more in line with the Ignis if we were willing to risk silly levels of overlapping AoE DoTs. This will add up to a beam weapon that punches through bodies and leaves a small fire patch/cloud anywhere it does a damage tick against a surface, lingering briefly and doing 3 seconds worth of additional ticks of damage. Sweeping this through enemies will result in additional hits against enemies even briefly touched by the beam, though again I am not expecting any of this to be powerful enough to be a "touch of death." In an absolute ideal world, of which the Origin System is most certainly not at times, there would be a way to give the beam projectile dropoff so that it arcs downwards like a proper stream of napalm from a proper and glorious flamethrower, but I am not hopeful on that last bit and the weapon we have created is more than adequate without said feature.

 

METHOD 2: JANKY KOMPRESSA, AKA THE PYRO METHOD

The second concept takes a different approach to somewhat emulate the mechanics of a flamethrower from another game- I do not know exactly how said flamethrower works, but this is an estimate of its mechanics using everyone's favorite bubblegun as a base. The Other Game flamethrower does not attempt to make flames cling to surfaces, instead emulating something more akin to burning gas. As far as I am concerned, as lingering fire is the primary goal, this means it is still a righteous and true flamethrower, and we can somewhat adapt the concept to cause the flames to stick a bit more convincingly as well, if we are clever. We will start with the base Kompressa, which is a projectile based automatic shotgun pistol. Its projectiles are slow and linger somewhat, perfect for what we want. Firstly we will remove the explosions, as they are not necessary for our second pyrotechnic object of adoration. We will also then slow the projectiles further, so they linger in place just a little longer. We will give these projectiles infinite body punchthrough, as they will be representing burning gas and not a physical, solid projectile. This is where the fun begins- we will now inject two mechanics from other existing weapons in. Firstly, the way Quanta alt-fire cubes bounce on terrain and lose some momentum will be employed to enrich the fire's physics in an interesting and interactable way, causing some of the "sticking" I mentioned earlier. Secondly, we will modify an aspect of the Grimoire's alt-fire so that our pho-gas cloud of projectiles continue to burn. The Grimoire's alt-fire projectile fires off an attack every second as it travels- the Grimoire's is a chaining direct attack, but it seems to me it could just as easily be a micro-AoE explosion on our newly minted gas-powered flamethrower.

 

This, mechanically, creates an automatic projectile shotgun, firing a burst of slow moving "flame" projectiles that strike enemies, move through them, and create small repeated bursts of additional fire damage as they go, so that the same projectile "flame" can hit a target multiple times in its lifespan, assuming the target lingers in the projectile's area. With the Quanta alt-fire bounce mechanic in place, these flames bounce against surfaces and linger somewhat close by. Again, I anticipate that the actual numbers and percentages needed to balance this weapon would necessitate it not being terrific considering how many overlapping AoEs it would require, however this is a small price to pay for a true blue flamethrower for us pyrotechnically inclined Tenno to enjoy.

 

IN CONCLUSION, both of these methods produce something akin to a flamethrower using bits and pieces of weapon mechanics that already exist. I have approached the concept in this way as I understand that there are technical and engine limitation that curtail flights of fancy- things like a true spray-on lingering area of damage matching the exact space swept with an attack, as far as I can recall at the moment, are not really present in the game, and as such means of emulating them are necessary. I have done my best to reference things that are currently present in this endeavor, rather than approach it with novel mechanics. I have not spoken to the specifics of damage or crit and status numbers, as I believe capturing the spirit of the flamethrower is more important than trying to finesse a good weapon out of this concept.

 

P.S., I like the Ignis too but I'm greedy and want something more specific to my tastes.

[Zakkhar]

1 hour ago, Occulticat said:

This, mechanically, creates an automatic projectile shotgun, firing a burst of slow moving "flame" projectiles that strike enemies, move through them, and create small repeated bursts of additional fire damage as they go, so that the same projectile "flame" can hit a target multiple times in its lifespan, assuming the target lingers in the projectile's area.

What you are describing here exists IRL and is called Dragon's Breath:

Dragon's breath (ammunition) - Wikipedia

 

[Raarsi]

11 hours ago, Zakkhar said:

What you are describing here exists IRL and is called Dragon's Breath:

Dragon's breath (ammunition) - Wikipedia

So Steflos?

[Occulticat]

11 hours ago, Zakkhar said:

What you are describing here exists IRL and is called Dragon's Breath:

Dragon's breath (ammunition) - Wikipedia

I mean Dragon's Breath is primarily incendiary ammunition, I was alluding more to the way that TF2's flamethrower uses shotgun-like mechanics with super slow projectiles to emulate a cloud of fire. The intended effect is that while the weapon emits waves of projectiles akin to an automatic shotgun, it does so rapidly and with no recoil and the projectiles move incredibly slow such that it feels like a continual stream.

 

If you WERE going to emulate Dragon's Breath, which hey if we're talking incendiary weapons in general here, I feel like the avenue would be something like a traditional shotgun but the pellets hit once for the projectile and then a second time for pure heat damage. I would also use this weapon, to0.

 

Edit- And while we're at it, why no Space Molotov? I suppose that role would sort of be filled by the Pox, but I mean hey its free real estate

Edited May 21 by Occulticat