Originally Posted by Nakauri
OK, here's my take on flamethrower since I was asked for a follow up regarding my mission to get stacks...
Blizzard obviously decided the stopcasting was an unintended exploit. I probably overreacted to the change, because you can still more or less do the same thing, but it's a lot slower. Which, for a mythic fight, makes sense. Stacking to 20-30 within a minute over the course of a 9 minute fight is - like they decided - too overpowered, silly, and trivializes burn mechanics. It means you don't have to do any maintenance on your stack at all because you can just /stopcasting to manage individual moss flakes at the cost of no or minimal heat whenever convenient.
IE Instead of becoming a positional strategy for best flamethrower up time in your cast allocation to make sure you get X/Y number of mosses to a more than 1:1 ratio with seconds it had become a strategy of button mashing the cast off within 1s to get the same ratio effect instead. Obviously far more effective and less skill based. But I still really fucking hate that it changed midtier.
So after the change I think the best use of flamethrowers falls in two categories:
- getting stacks within a 1-2 minute time period up to a maximum of 8-15 in order to burst certain "hard spawns" such as a problem group of spores or large add. This means you'll sit at 0 heat for a while but will do the most amount of damage to AoE things as they're relevant and thus probably have more overall damage. This will be good for farm when moss isn't a hard enrage worry, DoT classes or if we have problems with difficult spawn points (spore 4, etc). It can also be a fallback defensive way to use the flamethrower if you fuck up midfight - IE, instead of starting to recap your heat to stack debuff stacks you hold onto your heat for the remainder of burst spawns and trouble moss in the end-fight.
- getting stacks throughout the entire fight without letting it drop below 1 stack at a higher than 1.1:1 stack to second ratio. This means you'll constantly be moving and going to the places with the most moss in order to get the most effect out of your flamethrower. You'll sit at above 50 heat most of the time but cull a lot more moss throughout the encounter and do substantially more direct damage in the end-fight. IE on the kill I was up to 12 stacks in the first 2 minutes before I locked up and came back to 8 stacks, then died with my pro-disengage at 9. If I had kept that up instead I would've easily had up to/over 20 stacks by the 5/6 minute mark and been ready to lick up Brackenspore at an enrage burn, with the added benefit of having stacks to sit on in order to let heat dissipate for end-fight moss issues [though tbh I'd probably maintain it into execute because OP 35% marksman execute]. If you don't get to the end fight your damage winds up being lower. If you die and lose all your stacks GG.
Checking your heat / debuff ratio is really easy. If you have 3 stacks and 30 heat you're at a 1:1 ratio and not gaining stacks. If you're at 9 stacks and 66 heat you're at a 1.36:1 ratio. You up your heat to debuff ratio by burning more patches of fire per cast of flamethrower more effectively. When you turn the flamethrower off you're going to gain 10 heat (or 15, need confirm), so I find the most effective way to do this is to burn a minimum of 3 patches of fire within 1.5s by standing in the 4th quadrant of a 4 block grid:
Brack Fire.png
The reason you preferably want to be at a place with lots of moss is that the more you can do this 3 moss swing through a large pile the better your ratio will be after you turn the flamethrower off. This is something you have to do at increasing amounts throughout the fight, so recommend starting slow to begin with (and also to see where moss is going to grow). IE: start of fight burn to 50 -> dissipate to 30 -> burn to 60 -> etc. If you only burn 1/2 patches of moss you're not going to gain stacks and actually will go backwards in ratio instead, thus in trying to raise ratio it's not worth it to burn 1/2 patches unless it's an imminent threat to the raid. Burning one stack at a ratio of 0.8:1 when you could wait 5 seconds and burn 3/4 stacks at a ratio of 1.3:1 is more efficient. Also, your range is about a square and a half, so burning on an edge with more inside will also be more efficient since you'll reach the inside blocks too.
You can sort of combine the two "strategies" by trying to time your stack management in between spore / fungus / big dude spawns, but it means you'll go out during exploding fungi and infesting spores. Exploding fungi run-outs are actually easy because you can maneuver around them, granting you're not fuck-tarded impatient like I am and gamble with a disengage when you know they're about to explode. Infesting spores is also easy if you can clear your own, either by waiting in the green until 6 stacks -> clearing and going to burn or by going to burn -> clearing then using a survival cooldown on your way back to the raid.
How To: A Fungus Among Us
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