Advanced Flamethrower Guide

Many players believe flamethrowers to be useless weapons, but IMO they are incredibly strong. Problem is, they require a bit of knowledge and lots of experience in order to be used correctly. They are extremely hard to master.

Here I explain how flamethrowers work and how to use them to best effect, provide some recommended builds, and show off my flamethrower techniques in a video of a Cataclysm run with bots.

Videos

This guide consists of 3 YouTube videos that I'll link below, but for those who don't want to watch the videos I'll provide a short text summary in the next sections. If you choose to watch the videos, there's no need to read the text. The first video is the most important one – it explains the mechanics and techniques. The other two are not essential.

https://youtu.be/cQeHb8EsSTI
https://youtu.be/5AZpFYtJhzg
https://youtu.be/05W_wpHSiNg

Flamethrower Mechanics

• Flamestorm Staff and Drakegun are essentially the same weapon, so I'll be referring to both as "Flamethrower".
  
• Left click attack: instant, high heat cost, no DOT, moderate damage against everything, very high stagger, prevents weapon switching for a short time after use.
  
• Right click attack: requires charging up, high heat cost of charging up, low heat cost of shooting, applies DOT, high damage against everything except armor, low damage against armor, moderate stagger, doesn't prevent weapon switching.
  
• Both attacks do zero damage against Super Armor (Chaos Warriors, etc.) unless you crit. Right click attack applies the DOT that does damage Super Armor.
  
• Both attacks do higher DPS when shooting a single enemy compared to when shooting several enemies.
  
• With the right click attack, the cone of effect that damages enemies is much wider than the cone that damages teammates.
  
• Crits do not increase damage, but do increase stagger.
  
• Bug: while shooting the right click attack (so you're holding both your mouse buttons), if you get hit, you will shoot a left click attack once the hitstun wears off.
  
• Surprisingly, Battle Wizard's Volcanic Force talent affects the damage of flamethrower's left click attack. This might be a bug.

Flamethrower Techniques

• Use left click attack against Stormvermin, Rattling Gunners, Warpfire Throwers, and Bestigors. Use right click attack against everything else. If mixed horde, still use right click.
  
• Do not use Flamethrower against Chaos Warriors. Bring a melee weapon that can deal with them. If you're Battle Wizard with Lingering Flames talent, apply flamethrower DOT then use melee.
  
• Left click attack costs a lot of heat, but you can spam it with this technique: get to 100% heat, wait for your heat to naturally dissipate to about 97%, shoot again, repeat endlessly. More effective on Ironbreaker than on Battle Wizard because Ironbreaker has a faster heat dissipation (if we disregard BW's passive ability).
  
• When using the right click attack, do not fully charge it. Instead, use short bursts: charge for a about a second, then shoot. Never charge more than you're going to release. When you need to start firing as quickly as possible, start holding RMB and then immediately start holding LMB too – then the weapon will automatically start firing upon reaching the minimum charge.
  
• When overheated, do not switch to melee and wait for the weapon to cool down by itself. Instead, hold R to vent manually, paying with your health. Use Natural Bond trait on your necklace to offset the health cost of venting. If you're Battle Wizard, you can rely on passive venting most of the time.
  
• When teammates obstruct your line of fire, aim your flame cone above their heads. You will hit the enemies behind them while not causing friendly fire (because your damage cone is much wider for enemies than for teammates). However you will blind them and distract them, so only shoot above their heads when can't shoot otherwise.
  
• Don't ever use your melee weapon to fight hordes. Your flamethrower does it much better. When you you're surrounded by enemies so you can't use flamethrower safely, use block/push/ult to reposition in such a way that all enemies are in front of you. Then start flaming.
  
• While you can't kill far away specials, it's your job to kill the ones that come close. Flamethrower is excellent at this. Use left click against Rattling Gunners and Warpfire Throwers, right click against all other specials. You can easily kill Packmasters and Assassins that are coming through a horde. If you're Battle Wizard with Lingering Flames talent, once you apply a DOT to a special you mark it for death – even if it escapes, it will die.
  
• In boss + horde scenarios, your job is to nuke horde. If you're confident enough, you can do this even while kiting boss.
  
• While flaming a horde, you can't see it. Spam your "mark" button to notice specials and elites (especially monks/zerkers) that are coming through your flame cone.
  
• Know which enemies you can stunlock with your right click attack and which ones you can't. Ironbreaker with Drakki Wrath talent is better at stunlocking than Battle Wizard.
  
• As a Battle Wizard, your Soot Shield talent can reduce the damage you take from manual venting, while your Reckless Haste passive and Rechannel talent can improve the heat efficiency of your right click attack.
  
• As an Ironbreaker, you have 30% damage reduction baseline and it goes to 80% while your ult is active. This affects the damage from manual venting and from overheat explosion. This means that when you are about to explode, you can use your ult to reduce the explosion damage to ~30 HP so you can easily survive it.
  
• As mentioned in the Mechanics section, if you get hit while flaming you will shoot an unintended left click attack, which will add a lot of heat and prevent you from switching to melee in order to block. This is a major threat, but if you expect it you can learn to mitigate the harm (e.g. rely on dodge rather than block when it happens, never get close to full heat when using right click attack).

Recommended Builds

My Ironbreaker build:
http://builds.verminti.de/#2c643272f11f-f8b0023f670c

My Battle Wizard build:
http://builds.verminti.de/#923e9712a357-3df5a9204934
UPDATE: Alternatively, you can pick Volcanic Force + Rechannel for a very different playstyle – whenever Tranquility is active, you can fully charge your flamethrower for a 50% damage and stagger boost. Personally I find this inferior to Lingering Flames with short bursts, but I've been getting a lot of comments from people who prefer this playstyle, so I suggest you try it and see if it works better for you.

For arguments supporting these builds, please watch the second video – I'm too lazy to transcribe them here.

[Olenhol ᶘᵒᴥᵒᶅ]

lingering flames...
no... just no...

[Malacar]

This is a very interesting talent that deserves an in-depth explanation. I should update my guide, but I'm feeling lazy right now, sorry.

Short version: the talent greatly improves your throughput at the cost of making your gameplay much more difficult. I suggest only picking this talent if you feel very confident while wielding a flamethrower. If you're just learning to use the weapon, pick Power for Nearby Teammates instead.

[Un Pingachu Warhammero]

So, anything worth commenting about the new Ironbreaker talent? Do you still recommend the same build for him?

[arqu]

@Malacar
I tested the 5 crit instead of 10 infantry and it proved to be much worse against chaos and beastmen hordes. They take a 'little bit' more time to be killed, which is enough for them to restart attacking (sometimes they die during attack animation), but most importantly they occupy the team's attention for longer. Crits are dealing only 10 dmg to CW so it's still very unreliable, and the stagger is random.

Have you tried it? I don't recommend.

[Malacar]

Interesting, I didn't know that!

[pizooox]

Cannot edit... I meant 2 shot SV with left click.

[pizooox]

Just a note that volcanic force also (perhaps unintentionally) increases the left click damage on the current version. This helps with 1 shot SV with only enhanced power on legend. Maybe you could reach the 2 shot armor special breakpoint with volcanic force? I haven’t done any test on cata tho, just want to mention this.

[Malacar]

@arqu
Swapping 10 inf for 5 crit might be a good idea, although I doubt it will let me reliably stunlock Zerkers. Nevertheless I will try it, thanks. As for curse resistance, of course it makes sense to swap it out if you don't do books. Personally I do books on Cata when playing with friends but not when playing with strangers, yet I don't bother swapping my builds every time so I just run curse resistance all the time.

[arqu]

@Door Master
Name 1 situation in which fully charged spell with volcanic force is much better than a fully charged spell without volcanic force? Because I can't see any. It increases the max dmg by ~20%, so some things may die in 4 instead of 5 ticks, but then you have the full duration of the spell so you kinda want them to survive for the whole duration for it to be worth. So the only monster would be a boss (or CW or SV or Bestigor, yes they also survive with volcanic force)

How probable is the situation that you are able to actually keep shooting the whole charged spell? I think highly unlikely.

That said, volcanic force does not introduce any new breakpoints, and even if it did the likelihood of actually using the whole duration is low.

Then it's almost always better to charge as little as you need, and it's better to charge less than more (because of burn dmg)

[arqu]

As a Sienna main I have some thoughts:

I think you should mention that STR pot has insane value for this weapon: it allows to "1 shot" SV with a fully charged right click stream, allows to kill CW with a double full charged stream (need increased potion duration for that).

Also is there any reason for taking 20 infantry 20 chaos, apart from "it makes dealing with horde easier"?

Because if there is not, then I'd suggest taking 5crit, 10 infantry, 20 chaos, because "it makes dealing with horde easy enough" and also gives increased stagger [which now can stunlock berserker] and crits do dmg armor (~10 dmg on cata CW).

Also the most efficient way of dealing with stormvermins and berserkers is rightlick a bit more than minimal charge, release (this stacks barrage to 5) then spam left click + vent. This combo saves heat, kills any trash mobs in the first stream and kills the SV in almost the same time.

Also for cata isn't it better to swap curse resistance for crit on trinket?

Cheers