melta torpedoes are pretty weak even if you somehow get some to land
not horrible, but also a long way of from strong
pyroacid batteries have trouble getting trough voids and even with the upgrade their crit rate isnt great especially with nids apparent inability to aim contrary to what their stats say
these are the main things that use fires
there is also a tau boarding upgrade, but who builds a tau boarding fleet

fires could really use a uncapping
limiting them to 4 is just an unnecessary limitation especially in a setting like 40k where you are supposed to be able to BURN THE HERETIC!!!!
and no matter the number a single repair can fix it
the ui is also more then capable of showing more then 4 bars and remaining very clear and readable
almost as if it was designed to also show something else that had way more things counting down

please uncap the number of fires that can be on a ship so we can truly reduce our enemies to ash instead of those crits being a minor inconvenience

even the nid puke special skill isnt going to unbalance things and it would actually give a reason to have pyroacid
possibly alongside the pyropuke skill
and trough some miracle you hit a complete melta torp volley the enemy will truly feel the burn and giving a airpunching good feeling to the guy pulling that miracle off
and if someone can really do a tau boarding build with firecaste do you really have the heart, can you really be so cruel that you can limit a masterful player like that his success to a puny 4, for fleet diversity sake that kindof of daring tactics needs rewarding

please uncap the fires and let the galaxy burn, and the ships inside that galaxy burn along with it

Some nice ideas here ...hopefully this can somehow be included in the general balancing of the game.

With 12 factions the quest for balance will be an arduous one

Its a tricky one. Removing the cap is not the way to go. Maybe tweak damage values to scale with how many fires are there.

@canned_f3tus scaling isnt really going to work if its capped on 4
and will still leave fire heavy weapons as massively underpowered while just buffing random fire crits
fires arnt too weak, its just that the weapons whose whole point is doing lots of fires do nothing

why shouldnt fires be uncapped? its still limited in time and counterable by repairs
the ui can easily represent it clearly
and there is way more room in these miles long ships then 4 fires
really dont see a reason why uncapping it is not the way to go
if you somehow hit multiple melta volleys, should you not be rewarded for that? why not? you are rewarded if you hit multiple regular torpedoes or boarding torpedoes
why do melta torps need to be the exception with an arbitrary cap

maybe keep the cap and have every fire proc you get over the 4 do instant damage for 25 to 50 percent of the total damage of the fire over time. not because of lore or realism but simply because if you are running a lot of heavy weapons then you should be bursty

@imptastic but that would just make the damage uncounterable and more significant for morale that you also cant stop
and the fire weapons arnt burst weapons, they are made for doing the dot
torps you can say are bursty, but melta torps whole deal is that their damage isnt burst
and pyroacid is the least burst weapon nids have
none of these are really burst or particularly heavy weapons

i really dont understand why people are against more fires considering how easily the ui can deal with more fires

@ashardalon if they actually fix brace as a hard counter to ords then i could see fires getting out of hand. if the game stays as it was during the beta then sure your right limiting fires or rather limiting it to 4 is a little redundant but my biggest problem with fires is how easily they are countered for the amount of damage they do which is y i would want to see procs. ofcourse realisticly you could have hundreds if not thousands of fires on ships as big as 40k boasts. maybe after 4 fires troops drop dramatically as they would theoretically start taxing the life support systems.

@imptastic just dont see how uncounterable instant half damage would prevent that
only thing i see that doing would be making it impossible for a doomed ship to do a glorious suicide ram
being able to acknowledge that a ship is burning to death and has already wasted its repair and charging it forward into a suicide ram is a skill and very fitting for the setting

and i wouldnt call it out of hand, they are going to be approximately as effective as regular torps
more effective if the repair is used, less if not so evens out
skill in using fires would be about baiting out the repair to get maximum damage out of it

@ashardalon iono seems like meltas should be more powerful then regular if you can get a good amount to land. As it stands y would you even bother using fire when you can just simply get instant damage torps. If they didnt share the same charge counter maybe but playing the bait game so you might get a few extra fire charges seems like it would be easy to miss something trying to line all that up.

@imptastic yes thats why fires shouldn't have a cap
make it worth baiting out a repair and then dooming a ship even if it takes time to die
its close to double damage if the repair has recently been used
but now its capped at 4 so even best case scenario is barely above a regular torp runs damage, with the negative that its slow and cant do crits as regular torps have a pretty good crit rate
they are just worse torps now
a positive with uncapped fires is also that it can be used to bait out a repair so you can then follow up with more fires or boarding to make use of it
4 fires are only scary enough to force a repair on an escort and nothing bigger
but fire shouldnt be more dangerous, it should just be functional for weapons that focus on it

i dont want to see them in the state that melta (and boarding) torps are in BFG1
where "dont use melta torps" is one of the first advice given to anyone starting to play imperials

@ashardalon heres an idea have fire reduce ship effectiveness as a whole the longer they burn and if they reach full duraion have them temp crit a system.

@imptastic that would be cool, but i think its too late to request something like that
at this stage it needs to be a realistic request
uncapping the max number of fires shouldnt be hard to do (i think) so something fast and easy to change
completely reworking the system, adding it affecting all systems, think its too late for something that big

Why not just give fires themselves a huge morale penalty only while the fire is active. Would give them a late-game strategic use: While you might not be able to destroy the ship with meltas, you might be able to make it mutiny, or leave it vulnerable to other morale issues. But if you miss your window, they'll be pretty much fine.

@romeo again, thats just buffing fires
not fire specialized weapons who are the actual problem
fires arnt underpowered, they are actually pretty good, but there is no point in having a weapon that you try to make 8 fires with especially if there are several in a fleet

Burst damage isn't very thematic, and taking the cap away seems insane without neutering further fires somewhat, so that's what I'll suggest. Further fires above 4 are 'minor fires' or some other status, of which there can be infinite, which do reduced damaged (along with whatever other balance issues might make stacking fire better, but not OP, like: burning out on a timer, doing more/less damage to crew, chances/no chances of crits over time to systems, etc...). To make coding simpler, make it so that if minor fire stacks are present, and there are 3 or fewer major fire stacks, they convert, so that you don't have 6+ fire sources hitting at a time, risking the system registering no minor fires, or similar bugs.

@underdarklord if you went by thematic then the fires would cause temp/perm crit damage as the systems them selves would be on fire the ships over all performance would diminish and if you got to many your life support systems would start to fail. which i think would represented in "bursty" damage. but as they are now they are silly and basically its the fail roll of the crit rng machine.

@imptastic I mean, if you want systems and life support to fail, that has in-game representation now: destroyed systems, and dying crew. If you want them to represent those impacts more in the game, then I'd guess that making fires have more impact on those things would help. At the same time, it may require a firefighting subsystem as well, to be fair (I mean, why can I not blow some decks: losing crew sure, but saving my systems), and to be really satisfying, and at that point it's starting to become rather complicated.

@underdarklord that kinda of the point of the thread tho... they are to weak as it stands to waste your repair on. If i did the fire system from the ground up i would give an emergeny flush button off the cd of the repair skill then i would make fires do less damage over all but do crew damage and the more fires that stack do exponetially more damage to the crew. If the duration of the fire reached its end i would make it do a temp crit. i would also add a slow/firing rate reduction while fires are going and i would make that emergency flush skill do some kind of crew damage. but as we are stuck with what we got really the only option is to add dot damage, give it burst, or increase the amount of ways to apply while eliminating the cap. to get them on par with other crits.

@imptastic I'd love it if fires happened more often, and other races got fire-inducing weaponry. Combine that with a minor buff, and I think you'd get what you're looking for. At the moment, fire just seems like an afterthought (oh, we should probably include some fire, I guess we'll do that).

@ashardalon maybe increase their chance of fire instead of removing cap first? Dont see how a ship ui with 10 15 red bars looks nice.

Increase chances. Slightly buff fire damage. Problem solved.