Commando Archive

I think a second glance needs to be had at people calling the flame thrower over powered.

I play both a master commando.. Master carbiner.. and a master combat medic. Looking at the flamethrower as it sits I see alot of the imbalances with classes are from a direct result of the underlying issues.

My example includes:

Combat Medics, Mind Poison - C's: Combat medic was nerf'd to require LoS because their poisons were too powerful. This wasn't the case of peoples gripes, it was mind poison. Combat medics mind poison is still over powered, and the underlying problem hasn't yet been addressed.

Carbineer, Chargeshot1-2: Knockdown was nerf'd, and a widly accepted one at that, knockdown was completely out of hand and pretty much put the no skill spamming routine back into common practice. However the Carbineer line relied almost soley on the knockdown, and the posture changes to remain effective, aside from those they have a bleed, 1 pool specific damage, 1 high damage move. and stun.

Now for my explanation of what I see to be the issue(s) with the commandos being overpowered

Commando, Flamethrowers: This is a problem/issue I seen coming and I think it's really a very very simple problem that people are over complicating. Flamethrowers have, max 16 meter range on all special moves, Long (10+ secs approx at flamer level4) they are inaccurate at anything but short range, are considered melee damage and no accuracy modifiers while moving.

For riflemen .. that's bad news. even at long ranges.

They are currently considered a melee attack, styles, specifically stun devistate the damage output on a commando using this move. will take flame2 attack from 6.4k to around 2.6k damage in pve.

I'd like to address .. specifically.. PvP .. and even more exactly.. Flamethrower vs AT-ST. As I previously mentioned the problem with underlying problems quickly displaying themselves thru other classes... I believe this is one of them. The problem on the weapon isn't the damage.. or the damage on the dot even. It's how the dot is handled. At the moment as of 9/15/03, all dots in game completely negate all armor.

At-st's on display .. vs lets say a Graul, Gurreck or a Rancor don't really tower in ham. in most cases they have almost less. What makes the AT-ST so indestructable is it's armor. The Flamethrower firedot ignores all armor.

Two suggested fixes I have for dots; that would easily end this problem without major 'nerfage' are the following.

#1. Have all dots do damage equal to the net damage they do, not the gross damage. If I bleed a target and with a pistol for 600 damage, and the mob in question has 100% heat resist (same type as my pistol) I do a 600 damage bleed per tick. reguardless if I did zero damage. in this case the flamethrowers dot vs at-st's with the (I believe it's 75% heat resist and Armor-3 .. don't quote me here would be doing a dot something in the neightbourhood of 200 damage a tick with about 50 wounds to an at-st. possibly less.

#2. My alternate suggestion is to possibly leave dots as they are with the acception that every 'tick' is counted as a hit, and also being a hit, would be effected by appropriate armor. I believe this would also add some much needed leverage to PC armor as at the moment with dots, player armor is a hinderance vs such things rather than a help.

These are my thoughts; anything constructive is appreciated.