Flame thrower: Awesome against the spawnery

Tried it on a whim. Knocked out all of the egg pods in a single hit.
Left it with 480 bleed and 40 burning.

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Nice. I’ve been wondering if it really has any practical use. It’s generally a pain to use tactically due to range, but a static target like the spawnery, or maybe the sentinels, would be more viable.

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At the moment it’s absolutely devastating against any targets (including multiple targets) with body parts with 20 armor or less (almost all Pandorans), but as in the case with the Spawnery it’s due to an elusive bug

It’s targeting has been improved considerably in the last hotfix, so as long as when you move around the aiming cone you can see white spaces in the enemies health bar it should deal damage (and a lot, often one-shot killing).

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I also use fire (flamethrower or “purification” grenades) as an interdiction tool : one spray (2 AP) and a corridor is almost impossible for Pandorans to walk through for 3 turns. They don’t always seem to notice, though : trying to walk through the flames, they loose their armor, get their legs burnt, then disabled… and end up slowly crawling to their death in a fiery inferno. Quite funny.
Very handy when you’re assaulted from every sides (just block one or two), you can’t realy overlay 5 overwatches to stop a bunch of foes coming in, need to exterminate a nest of little things (death-belch and such), can’t have that pesky Umbra or a mind-fragger charging in next turn or you need to hurt everything hiding in mist : just set the area on fire.

I like that application. I may need to carry those as support weapons on my Heavies.

I don’t find it so useful against the Umbra since the 40 fire damage doesn’t stack and you can’t disable body parts. I’ve managed to hit it once before it spawned and wiped it but that sometimes ‘misses’ or doesn’t do 500 damage.

The Dante is pretty good vs the Hoplites surprisingly, much more effective than explosives. It ignores the shields and will disable body parts.

Anything with high armour will resist the fire. 40+ armour opponents are virtually immune and the Forsaken/Anu with the regenerating chest get a flame resist buff too.

I tend to fall way back and set the assaults w/shotguns up with really short overwatch ranges when an Umbra is about to spawn. Those things are disgustingly fast and dangerous, so you have to blast them hard on the way in or you lose troops.

Even then the damn things have like 500 HP so it takes a few hits to drop them.

The trick is to set the pre-Umbra on fire and kill it while it’s on fire. If it dies while roasting, the Tar Shadow will not spawn.

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Good to know. War Cry and Mind control are also good in a tight spot.

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Flame Throwers are awesome … Until some knucklehead tosses a grenade and blows out the flames, or keeps it from spreading. Which is kind of weird, when you consider it doesn’t snuff out the flames on burning people. :open_mouth:

If it dies while roasting, the Tar Shadow will not spawn.

That’s a great tip. I’ll have to try that.

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But it’s direct damage is very low… You expect to kill your target but mostly it cripples a bit.

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Yeah, but crippling is as good as removal. If they can’t move or fire then they are basically done.