I think it’d be cool if defender had a strain that mimics ravager the same way steelcrest mimics crusher’s explosive resistance. My plan is for this to be a situational strain that can be used to supplement healers/spitters/boilers on the frontline, and to give the hive a second choice to combat flame heavy compositions without being overpowered or needing to use a t3 slot.
The Flameguard Strain trades the ability to headbutt and fortify, in exchange it gains a red headcrest similar to rav’s color and the following attributes. Heavy resistance (not immunity) to flames, it should be able to shrug off napthal and welding fuel, but spec/OT/INC OB fires should still be a threat, and additionally it gains firestacks slower and loses them faster, to reduce downtime when fighting flame based enemies, and cannot bleed out from fire damage alone (bullets accompanying it will do fine). Lastly, FG should receive less burn damage from enemy acid spitters so that it isn’t useless in XvX.
Flameguard loses some slash damage, lower tackle chance, and some armor in exchange. Creatures lit on fire can be extinguished much faster, similar to how runner can pull humans faster, as a special trait, and the defender’s slash and tail smash now do extra burn while on fire.
The tail swipe ability will fan out around itself and extinguish any nearby creatures adjacent to the defender, with a toggle to only extinguish xenos, but tail swipe gains a 30 percent cooldown increase to counteract this.
Lowering the Defender’s headcrest works like normal, but additionally will cause the defender to receive less damage from all incindiary small arms, as they shatter and find no purchase on the flame retardant headplate. While lowered, flamethrower weapons will not be able to spray through them, so the defender will physically block any flames sent at anyone standing behind them, although they can still pass beside/on the flanks of the Flameguard.
I really like the idea of a red coded fire defense defender, please let me know what you think.
I hadnt thought about survs, I guess you’d need to give them more AP ammo to compensate? as for flamer marines, just focus a different target, same with ravs
Ad that with more of its abilitys and you are in business. The idea of a xeno pruposfully setting itself on fir to spread set fire to marines sounds kinda badass.
+1
Its painful enough that the Pyro and Flamers are useless against Queens and Ravs, but allowing a T1 strain to be mostly immune to flames is quite painful.
blue flames can still mess FG up badly, and as for napthal, they can still burn FG’s allies, and FG itself should have less overall armor to make normal bullets/AP more effective
maybe just immune to fire status effects like slow down and armor reduction to emphasize the Defender being just that. not damage reduction. or like -20 armor for a percentage damage reduction, armor is extremely valuable even over fire resistance. but it would be cool to have a Crusher strain thats like a red enormous ravager that had no aoe slash and fire resistance.
if defender strain didnt get fire resistance the tradeoff of extra damage would not mean much. It would be weird to model a strain after the fireproof ravager and not have fire resistance.
You can just pull out your secondary… a Mod88 or a VP would do good. A m39 would be a very excellent secondary because of the reduced defense, plus it would give a good use for the m39 belt holster.
I think flamer users can deal with having a single T1 strain that’s capable of dealing with their flame spam. Bring another weapon if you want to deal with them.
If it ended up being the case where everyone goes flameguard then I could understand the complaint of flamers becoming useless but I can’t imagine that being the case, it’s a niche strain that will probably only be picked by a couple of people at most.
And if pyro blue flame still does a lot of damage to them then pyros can’t really complain.
I’d rather have a mix of flameguards and steelcrests than the incredible gameplay of 100% pure steelcrests fortifying and spamming me"stares." over and over we have right now.
It’d be some nice variation. Steelcrests are immortal to almost everything unless flamed, flameguards are immortal to flames but damaged by bullets- I think it’d be a good mix and be more enjoyable for both xenos and marines imo. We can just TM it and see what happens if this ever gets made, anyways
edit: Of course, flameguard 100% must have pants-shitting resistance to flames EQUAL to that of the pants-shitting resistance to bullets that steelcrest has, in order to make people actually want to play it.
Fire immunity is mandatory- And yes, it should block all flames from passing through it, thus it can protect fellow xenos similar to the steelcrest equivalent.
I do believe it should be immune to X-fire, considering that bullets are far, far more numerous and are actually capable of damaging it. If anything, pyros should be pushing with other marines anyways- If the marines have no one with a real rifle nearby, that’s on them. Plus, base flame sentries fire X-fire too. What’s the point of the FG if it can’t walk up to a flame sentry and tank it for the other xenos like the steelcrest does to well… basically everything else?
Flames should be more terrifying not more of an annoyances. Same way a marine steps into flame they are basically in crit after they pat the flame down alone unless they carry an extinguisher.
But still crest is real annoying when it spams stares in front of survivor cadeline as it chomps on it.
Nothing in this game is terrifying as a xeno because the ambience does not lend itself to that. Compared to marines who have a lot more environmental factors playing into the possibility of fear.
Something being scary for xenos would inherently be counterproductive as it would either ruin the ambience for marines by virtue of its strength or simply be unbalanced.
These are inconvenient and dangerous, but that is far from evoking any semblance of fear. It’s like trying to cross a busy street. You’re wary of the vehicles driving by, you understand the danger they pose, but if you’re afraid you’ve got some problems.