Is flame Thrower designed to miss a lot?
No one is sure. Several cone AoE attacks have hit detection issues. It seems they are tied to camera angle; if you play like a third person shooter you may experience more success.
Similar to projectiles, if an enemy is too close the cone fires into the ground. If the enemy is close but to the side then some weird bug ensures everything misses.
It’s important to note that standing still will prevent the bug, so it’s some combo of movement, a close enemy and the tracking system from what I can tell.
We can’t be sure why cone AoE hasn’t been looked at yet, but it’s probably not the highest priority bug since it is only really particularly prevalent in PvP where there is lots of movement. Come AoE still works fine a lot of the time at least.
I think it’s an issue with auto-tracking combined with the limited aoe size. For example, holding right mouse button and actively leading a target will hit it all the time if done correctly.
The really annoying thing is that certain enemies use cone aoes with perfect accuracy! That one type of Risen in particular has a chill-breath attack that will hit perfectly even with swiftness and after a dodge roll – despite the animation usually being stuck in the original casting direction…
We can’t be sure why cone AoE hasn’t been looked at yet, but it’s probably not the highest priority bug since it is only really particularly prevalent in PvP where there is lots of movement. Come AoE still works fine a lot of the time at least.
I believe it has been looked into and tweaked in the past to improve performance, but it’s still not working perfectly.