Large swings of the nerf bat will always be met with equivalent backlash and negative feedback tends to overshadow the positive.
They acknowledged that they should not nerf the fun stuff and proceed carefully with balance going forward, and then deliver this update. On the one hand the nerf to the incendiary breaker is small enough and feels fair, on the other the complete neutering of the flamethrower feels like taking away our toy entirely.
I have to respectfully disagree. I think that the breaker nerf was massive. I don’t find it fair at all. They should have nerfed the outgoing damage rather than make it impossible to actually use as a primary. 4 mags is functionally nothing. My friends run supply backpacks pretty often and I just kept hearing a chorus of “damn, you’re out of ammo again?”
I switched to the Slugger and it’s just a better weapon all-around, even with the changes. The recoil is heavy but the armor pen is choice against everything. Mag size is fine, single reload is great because you can’t fuck that up, and when it hits you feel the punch.
Flamethrower nerf is a huge travesty. Makes me really upset overall. It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
Same. I’m finding myself constantly out of ammo having to use my secondary a lot and running out of ammo there too, as I wait for a resupply.
They mentioned they mostly do their testing at difficulty 5, which is nothing.
I tuned into the live stream the other day to get the orange armor and it was massively painful watching the devs play the game worse than your friends. Watching them try to deal with chargers by mag dumping them in the head was kind of infuriating. Apparently the “peel the leg” meta is not obvious? They said something about thinking the easiest way to kill a charger was to attack the head, which is for sure not the case.
It was the only tool consistently good at clearing chargers.
I feel like this is maybe the root cause issue more than anything else
I enjoy the slugger again, adding back the punchy stun was all I wanted for it, and adjusting the falloff and accuracy to match is a fair compromise to their initial issues with it.
Now you get a real choice of the punisher for light pen damage, and the slugger for medium pen stun but lower damage overall. It makes both of them useful.
I’ve been happy with the update, but I also rarely use the flamethrower or incendiary breaker. I normally play on 7s and my friends that use the incendiary said they are mostly fine in groups, but soloing objectives is harder.
The flamethrower change made chargers harder… But I prefer rocket pods for them anyway.
