Guild Wars 2

One of my biggest gripes with the flamethrower is that the auto attack- that long stream of ferocious fire-does not burn until the last tick. What exactly is it shooting the rest of the time that makes people not light up in a blaze of glory?

I feel that this moment is one of the best times to rework flame jet a bit. Give it a .50 (or even .25) second burning duration per hit. Now before anyone goes yelling PERM BURN OP let me point out that burning only stacks 9 times meaning that if each tick in the flame jet hits for .50 on its 2.5 second cast time the maximum burn time would be 4.5 seconds, 2seconds of burning after taking the whole load. If each hit ticks for .25 then a full load lasts onl about 2.25 seconds, meaning as soon as you stop getting hit by the flame jet you stop burning.

Burning on last tick always felt like a placeholder until a better idea came along. Anet, please help us bring the flamethrower to full pyromaniac status!

PERMA BURN IS- ….. Oh wait, that’s actually a very good idea! >looks at Anet.

Flamethrower should burn with every hit, its a fire afterall kitten, but it would be to good for engineer, we can not have anything good, we would be overpowered…

Perma-burning is very easy to do… anyone who complains about it has never played a condition build.

Zaviel.1245:

Perma-burning is very easy to do… anyone who complains about it has never played a condition build.

How does the ability to apply burning outside of the flamethrower have anything to do with the desire to have the flamethrower apply more burning? Your argument has no bearing here. It makes perfect thematic sense for the FT auto attack, for example, to maintain permanent burning in the same fashion that the EG auto attack maintains permanent high bleed stacks + permanent weakness, or how the TK auto attack maintains permanent vulnerability.

the flamethrower applies a lot of burning already. achieving perma burning with the auto attack would just make it overpowered in pvp.

I’ve been saying this one since I first saw the flamethrower. It’s so disappointing =/

ellesee.8297:

the flamethrower applies a lot of burning already. achieving perma burning with the auto attack would just make it overpowered in pvp.

I agree that the flamethrower has a lot of skills that apply burning, however it is far from applying a lot of burning.

• Flame Jet – 1s burn on a 2.57 sec channel, no cooldown
• Air Blast – 2s burn duration added if target already burns on a 15 sec cooldown
• Napalm – in PvP 1s burn, in PvE a possible 10 sec burn if your target does not move, on a 30 sec cooldown,
• Incendiary Ammo – 9s burn on a 45 sec cooldown.

The only skill on flamethrower that applies a considerable burn is the toolbelt skill which funnily enough works without even equipping or slotting the kit. Even with increased burn duration and cooldown reduction it is hardly possible to keep burning up on a target in PvP with just the flamethrower.

Now for a comparison Elementalist:

• Drake’s Breath (dagger) – 12 sec burn, 2.25 sec channel 5 sec cooldown = perma burn
• Flamestrike (scepter) – 2 sec burn, 1.54 sec activation no cooldown = perma burn

Flamethrower’s #1 is one of the weaker autoattacks of the engineer, even with Deadly Mixture and the 10% bonus from a burning target and Retaliation is quite a nice counter to it.
Making it apply a burn that is only slightly longer than the channel duration would be far from overpowered in my opinion. It’s a flame thrower after all.

you have to take into consideration the other kits that you run with the flamethrower. in the standard condi build with FT, you also run bomb kit. having access to near permanent burning from the auto attack, plus the huge spike burn from incendiary ammo, on top of fire bomb that covers pretty much the entire point, and incendiary powder with 50% burn duration from nightmare runes + smoldering. idk it seems pretty overpowered to me considering the bomb/ft condi build is already very strong.

i like having the engineer a strong contender in pvp, but i also fear what anet will do if they buff us too much. engineers already have abilities that need nerfing. i don’t want my favorite class being smacked down into useless tier like eles.

also in comparison to engineers, elementalist condi builds are terrible.

Mork vom Ork.2598:

• Incendiary Ammo – 9s burn on a 45 sec cooldown.

You would destroy my beautiful incendiary powder?! Blasphemy I say DX
tbh though i can give perma burn if I use flamethrower + incendiary powder + koi cake (+40% condition duration). I use this for that tar monster in arah.

ellesee.8297:

you have to take into consideration the other kits that you run with the flamethrower. in the standard condi build with FT, you also run bomb kit. having access to near permanent burning from the auto attack, plus the huge spike burn from incendiary ammo, on top of fire bomb that covers pretty much the entire point, and incendiary powder with 50% burn duration from nightmare runes + smoldering. idk it seems pretty overpowered to me considering the bomb/ft condi build is already very strong.

i like having the engineer a strong contender in pvp, but i also fear what anet will do if they buff us too much. engineers already have abilities that need nerfing. i don’t want my favorite class being smacked down into useless tier like eles.

also in comparison to engineers, elementalist condi builds are terrible.

If you have the Bomb Kit equipped there is absolutely no reason to ever use Flamethrower #1. In a condi build, FT is only used for Incediary Ammo and cc.
And 1 out of 2.57 seconds is not nearly permanent burning. Also, Fire Bomb with cooldown reduction already applies permanent burn by itself (4x 2.25s @ 8s cd).

Now if you want to consider other sources to apply burning, which have nothing to do with the FT (other skills, other trait lines), we already have the means to keep almost perma burning on our target if we want to. As burning only increases in duration not in intensity adding more burn duration to FT #1 would not make us any stronger (perma burn is perma burn). It would however make FT more independent from other traits/skills.

FT as it is now, is a utility kit. Its damage is bad in condi builds and mediocre in power builds.

As for Elementalists, they gain 10% damage on burning targets if specced fire and 60% damage for Fire Grab. Also, burning is a condition that adds quite some damage even on a power build. Potentially, engis have a 10% added damage on FT skills, only we can’t use it if we stay in FT, unless helping out with a lot of other skills/traits/runes/buff food.

Depths.4051:

Mork vom Ork.2598:

• Incendiary Ammo – 9s burn on a 45 sec cooldown.

You would destroy my beautiful incendiary powder?! Blasphemy I say DX
tbh though i can give perma burn if I use flamethrower + incendiary powder + koi cake (+40% condition duration). I use this for that tar monster in arah.

Please read thoroughly. Incediary Ammo is FT’s toolbelt skill, Incendiary Powder is a Master trait in Explosives (and much more powerful).

I agree with the first post, at least so that we could make some more use of that condition damage we must take along with the traits.
Even if a rework of that autoattack should include something about retaliation, too.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I’ve been saying this one since I first saw the flamethrower. It’s so disappointing =/

I know the idea has been out for a while, I just felt like reminding anet

It completely makes sense.
Almost hysterical to think of it NOT doing that already.
You could always make it a weak burn.
But seriously, a short bow auto bleeds but a FLAME thrower doesn’t burn?

What next, a freeze grenade that doesn’t chill?

Mork vom Ork.2598:

ellesee.8297:

the flamethrower applies a lot of burning already. achieving perma burning with the auto attack would just make it overpowered in pvp.

I agree that the flamethrower has a lot of skills that apply burning, however it is far from applying a lot of burning.

• Flame Jet – 1s burn on a 2.57 sec channel, no cooldown
• Air Blast – 2s burn duration added if target already burns on a 15 sec cooldown
• Napalm – in PvP 1s burn, in PvE a possible 10 sec burn if your target does not move, on a 30 sec cooldown,
• Incendiary Ammo – 9s burn on a 45 sec cooldown.

The only skill on flamethrower that applies a considerable burn is the toolbelt skill which funnily enough works without even equipping or slotting the kit. Even with increased burn duration and cooldown reduction it is hardly possible to keep burning up on a target in PvP with just the flamethrower.

Now for a comparison Elementalist:

• Drake’s Breath (dagger) – 12 sec burn, 2.25 sec channel 5 sec cooldown = perma burn
• Flamestrike (scepter) – 2 sec burn, 1.54 sec activation no cooldown = perma burn

Flamethrower’s #1 is one of the weaker autoattacks of the engineer, even with Deadly Mixture and the 10% bonus from a burning target and Retaliation is quite a nice counter to it.
Making it apply a burn that is only slightly longer than the channel duration would be far from overpowered in my opinion. It’s a flame thrower after all.

look im all for buffing the burning, i have an engi myself, but dont you dare compare things from profession to profession like that. It serves no basis for justifying the buff. We all might as well carry a stick that does 1 damage and everyone should have 10 health.

Agreed how is it we get bathed in almost none stop fire and only come out with 1tick of burn damage. What anet should do is add that effect per successful hit. Lots of other classes that can keep up perm burn without even trying with attacks that don’t even look like it would even burn for a second.

FT like it is now its a freaking joke, like 80% of engineer skills, either cd is to big, dmg is pathetic, it was nerfed few times to promot “build diversity” , what a joke, its like taking sword from warrior to further promote “warriors build diversity”. Stability on jaggernaut was not op – you were walking very slow after all, flame should be appling burn every tick , i would even extend the ticks, so it would be a real ft not just an empty, pathetic way to mirror it.

I do not like firewall either it should be rounded not a tiny strip on the ground, enough said , nothing willb e changed, just enjoy playing broken class as it aint going to be fixed folks.

Not sure what all the debate over perma burning is about. The meta FT build has 20 points into Explosives for Incendiary Powder. Eating Koi Cake with 20 points in Explosives gives you 60% burning duration increase.

60% burn duration increase adds an extra 2.4 seconds to your burn from Incendiary Powder. So you’re essentially burning your target for 6 seconds every 10 seconds. You can fit 4 Flame Jets in 10 seconds that each add a second to your duration.

Congratulations. You’ve now maintained burning doing nothing but spamming Flame Jet.

A lot of people in this thread have clearly not done Arah path 1.

Or you could just save yourself the trouble, use Fire Bomb and keep burning up on 5 targets instead of one, while doing something useful. The flamethrower is an engineers worst source of burning, while our best direct damage kit stacks it best.
Isn’t it ironic?

That’s a little hyperbolic. Fire Bomb may outperform Flame Jet when it comes to stacking burn on multiple targets, but the flamethrower is still a hell of a lot better at maintaining burning compared to anything on the elixir gun, tool kit, or grenade kit.

You also have to make sure targets sit in your Fire Bomb the entire time. And I would never suggest running the bomb kit against Shoggroth, which is probably the only boss in the entire game where perma-burning actually matters: you’re much too squishy with it.

Besides, the purpose of my post was to address the claim that the flamethrower cannot perma-burn, not that it was the best at it.

What I was trying to say is of all sources of burning, Flamethrower is the worst. EG, toolkit and grenades have no innate burning.

Fire Bomb with 20 points in Explosives has 240 radius and 8 sec cooldown. With coi cake you get 12,8 seconds burning out of it. If incendiary powder procs on one of the adds, your perma burning with flamethrower is gone.

maybe the ft should give torment or something like how the elixir gun gives permanent weakness. Makes sense since you wouldn’t want to fan the flames if you were on fire I don’t know. I don’t think they’ll make it so you get perma burn from the auto because of the 10% damage buff it gets when an enemy is on fire. Also would like to see number 4 and 5 be fields. Another post had a good idea on making 5 player based like necro plague that would be interesting too.

if we’re talking about pve, then why do we need incendiary powder or permanent burning? ft has a lot of burning already and there’s 4 other people in your party that can possibly apply burning unless you join some elitist kittenbag warrior group in which case they wouldn’t invite you, a ft engineer, in the first place. there will most likely be permanent or near permanent burning without incendiary powder in most dungeon groups.

if you want to add an innate permanent burning to the flamethrower, well like i said before pvp and pve skills aren’t separated. ft is already a powerful utility in pvp. adding permanent burning to an already strong kit is just overkill. a better change would just be to buff the auto damage by 10% and remove the additional damage to burning targets.

and you can’t compare bomb burning and ft burning in pvp. first of all nobody runs short fuse in the bomb/ft kit build. incendiary powder is always better. second, fire bomb is a huge fiery stationary red circle that can be dodged and predicted. it’s usually always the first bomb to be dropped. imagine if ft auto gave permanent burning; someone dodges out of your fire bomb only to be blasted with permanent burning with 0 cooldowns on top of all of the other strong utilities that build has. i just have to disagree with that nerf magnet.

and finally i personally run this as my pve ft build. i’m not about that incendiary powder.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAElIqrbp1i6dEZ8hOD0j66uGRxMyvGD-jgBBYfAUGAZmFRjtypIas6aYKXER1A-e

I’ve noticed the flamethrower bundle at Steampipe Steading applies burning per hit and has a lot more base damage than the engineer’s standard flamethrower.

The damage is pretty good, but retaliation is still pretty killer haha.

ellesee.8297:

if we’re talking about pve, then why do we need incendiary powder or permanent burning? ft has a lot of burning already and there’s 4 other people in your party that can possibly apply burning

The thing is, that this is almost every players mentality. So when I show up in PvE with rabid gear and 100% condition damage, I am the only one applying conditions because everyone else in the entire game avoids conditions because they have the same out look as you do. Personally I enjoy the 900 dps that I maintain with simply burning alone from fire bomb. Add in my AoE bleed stacks and AoE torment, mix in permanent poison, a dab of confusion, then add in my direct damage with high crit chance, and your doing great damage with an easy level of survivability.

I do not care what argument you care to use, thematically it would make sense that the flamethrower should be the single most burn damage applying utility in the game.

More burning on that would even really help engineer, we don’t lack burning.

If anything I want to see a 20% dmg buff on that OR make it say “deals 30% more damage to burning enemies”.

coglin.1867:

ellesee.8297:

if we’re talking about pve, then why do we need incendiary powder or permanent burning? ft has a lot of burning already and there’s 4 other people in your party that can possibly apply burning

The thing is, that this is almost every players mentality. So when I show up in PvE with rabid gear and 100% condition damage, I am the only one applying conditions because everyone else in the entire game avoids conditions because they have the same out look as you do. Personally I enjoy the 900 dps that I maintain with simply burning alone from fire bomb. Add in my AoE bleed stacks and AoE torment, mix in permanent poison, a dab of confusion, then add in my direct damage with high crit chance, and your doing great damage with an easy level of survivability.

I do not care what argument you care to use, thematically it would make sense that the flamethrower should be the single most burn damage applying utility in the game.

i think you misunderstood my meaning. i was talking about the burning in the sense that it boosts the ft auto by 10%. but i agree with you. many a time i go into fractal 50 with rampager gear because i just know everyone else is running zerkers and i get the full damage from my condis. but you have to remember that perma burning doesn’t mean permanent 900 dps. inevitably your burning will get replaced by someone else’s burning for a time. my point was that FT provides enough burning and when combined with another party member’s burning, like guardian, or ele, or another engineer, it’s sufficient enough so you get the benefit of the 10% increased damage most or all the time without investing 20 points for incendiary powder simply to boost the ft auto’s mediocre damage. i put the 20 points i saved into alchemy for the percentage damage increase and tools for permanent swiftness, which i can’t live without, and crit damage. that’s just the way i see it at least.

and i agree with you on your second point too. but thematically bombs shouldn’t detonate at our feet without our legs being blown off and we shouldn’t be able to throw grenades farther than we can shoot rifles. this is about balance and i feel ft is in a good spot atm. permanent burning would just bring it over the top.

coglin.1867:

ellesee.8297:

if we’re talking about pve, then why do we need incendiary powder or permanent burning? ft has a lot of burning already and there’s 4 other people in your party that can possibly apply burning

The thing is, that this is almost every players mentality. So when I show up in PvE with rabid gear and 100% condition damage, I am the only one applying conditions because everyone else in the entire game avoids conditions because they have the same out look as you do. Personally I enjoy the 900 dps that I maintain with simply burning alone from fire bomb. Add in my AoE bleed stacks and AoE torment, mix in permanent poison, a dab of confusion, then add in my direct damage with high crit chance, and your doing great damage with an easy level of survivability.

I do not care what argument you care to use, thematically it would make sense that the flamethrower should be the single most burn damage applying utility in the game.

Misunderstandings aside, I totally relate with you coglin. It’s strange to me (and very pleasing and validating) that I can show up to dungeon parties and be the main source of sustained damage over time because everyone has chosen to totally ignore conditions.

The Flaming Effigy and Ginva have a lot of regen going on. Who’s there to poison and mitigate their healing while dealing some damage? Surprisingly, not the necro. That thief isn’t venom sharing or using any conditions. For some reason people feel the ele should be doing this but I’ve never seen them apply. And the ranger (who has a great poison in the SB) isn’t doing it… They’re just being a, um, ranger. But here comes Poison Dart Volley and Fumigate from your friendly neighbourhood engineer.

Thanks for the 7 stacks of confusion, mesmer, we appreciate it! Wait, no…. no. They haven’t applied confusion at all this dungeon run. That’s actually my Concussion Bomb and Static Shot. You’re welcome.

A guardian, a warrior, a ranger, and an ele all try to light a bon fire. Who’s actually got the matches that does the damage? My pals Incendiary Powder, Incendiary Ammo, Fire Bomb, Napalm, and Flame Jet are there to proc the damage. There’s a lot of burning to be had even though I feel our FT auto should burn constantly in the same way the rangers SB or warriors sword auto bleed constantly.

Engineers pretty much rock.