Flamethrower gear, help please.

[LoverNoFighter.9413]

I'm a scrapper running with the flamethrower in open world pve. I know it's not the "best" weapon but I just love it regardless.
I need your help on which armor set to use and runes. I.e is it uselsess stacking condi dmg over strike dmg?

Thank you.

[jason.1083]

I've said it before stop violating the the Geneva Conversations 3rd protocol.

 

 

 

According to most people, even Flamethrower does mostly strike damage and not burning damage, so probably berserker gear and strike damage runes/sigils

[Stx.4857]

What kind of armor do you have access to?  Can you use four stat comboes like grieving, vipers, etc?  

[Stalima.5490]

It's the kind of weapon that wants literally every stat in the game so celestial is a good take since you never said what kind of FT you wanted

[Arantheal.7396]

Yea, need some clarification on what you want to run.
so far it sounds like flamethrower camping, so juggernaut. and since you likely stack it with scrapper, which only really bolsters strike damage, you likely want full zerker gear.
So firearms are locked in for you, and so is scrapper in your case. leaves one spot open.
Most intuitive would be to go explosions here, and that one generally works best with rifle on power builds, due to aim assisted rocket getting triggered relaibly by rifle's (or the omnipresent nade kit) AA. But since you will spam FT's AA like the pyromaniac you are, you should consider taking explosive temper. Ferocity scales with FT better than power anyways.

when it comes to relic, go chronomancer and run a full gyro setup (besides FT ofc). this leaves you with 100% quickness uptime. Hands down your best in slot relic for a gyro setup.
Also, consider switching into gyroscopic acceleration instead of mass momentum. You loose a bit of dmg, but since  you play open world, you will love the added (super)speed, and it pairs nicely to your permanent quickness.
same can be said about no scope + kinetic accelerators, instead of going applied force. You think you lose damage this way, but since FT scales so horribly with power, you rather want to spread quickness whereever you go. Your blast gyro will already make good use of it, and if you pair blast gyro with your FT's #2, followed up by hammer #3, you will spready pyrokinetic joy wheever you walk. Generally you always want a field ready to abuse FT #2 with. Be it your healing skill's water field(s), blast gyro, hammer #5 or shredder gyro's toolbelt. Make sure to abuse the heck out of the fields you have, and time their cd's with your leap and blast fnishers.

Runes are up to you. if you go runes of surging, you can easily skip on gyroscopic acceleration, due to their permanenet 25% movement speed, and the added boon duration pairs nicely with your boon uptime in general. but if you want to go the route of a fellow men of culture, and become a superspeed addict, you can go for the highest dps ones, like runes of the dragonhunter (again, since FT scales better with ferocity).

People say FT's sucks. And they're right when it comes to brain afk golem bashing.
But that doesn't mean you can't get one hell of a ride out of it.
Some men just want to see the world burn.

Edit: oh yea, forgot sigils.
can't go wrong with the ol' sigil of force + air combo on your zerker setup.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Arantheal.7396

[draxynnic.3719]

When playing solo, I think it's worth at least considering Diviner's. Getting your concentration up makes it easier to maintain might, fury, and quickness, which might result in more damage overall.

A common approach for running solo is to run Alchemy as the third traitline. Scrapper flamethrower typically generates a lot of boons, particularly if you also run Sanguine Array, so Compounding Chemicals and Iron-Blooded can do a lot to boost your survivability. 

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

You could go full power and pair it with Relic of Mabon to really capitalise on the passive might stacks from Juggernaut. Contrary to how it seems the burning from Flamethrower isn't great, it only applies on the final hit of the auto attack chain.

If you have other sources of burning too you could go with Grieving stats and Rune of Balthazar. If you also run Relic of the Scourge it's very easy to get 100% burning duration.

Since it's only open world it ultimately doesn't matter. But maybe something like this.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PewAwqrlRw6YPsQWJWyWltfA-DSJYsRbfgkHCJFRXi48UoIBx251AifLAA-e

You may already have a build you're happy with though so do with it as you wish, most of the utilities are flexible depending on what you need to do.

[draxynnic.3719]

2 hours ago, Remus Darkblight.1673 said:

Contrary to how it seems the burning from Flamethrower isn't great, it only applies on the final hit of the auto attack chain.

It is worth noting that the flamethrower auto does have the potential to build up on bleeding stacks through Sharpshooter. It's not a lot, but combined with burns from other skills, condi flamethrower mechanist isn't too terrible. (Scrapper is, unfortunately, a bit too committed to strike damage.)

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

5 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

It is worth noting that the flamethrower auto does have the potential to build up on bleeding stacks through Sharpshooter. It's not a lot, but combined with burns from other skills, condi flamethrower mechanist isn't too terrible. (Scrapper is, unfortunately, a bit too committed to strike damage.)

Yes, the rapid attacks from the auto chain synergize very well with anything that triggers on criticals.

I would say the flamethrower is a hybrid weapon, which I still think is counterintuitive to how one might expect. You'd think it a pure condition weapon based around burning. But it isn't.

[draxynnic.3719]

Not really all that counterintuitive - fire is essentially a hybrid element for elementalist too. Flamethrower used to be more power-oriented before they reworked skill 2 into more of a condition damage option.

The bigger problem is that despite having a lot of interesting trait interactions, the current balance state makes the flamethrower auto a DPS loss. I use it when playing casually anyway because flamethrower (and because there is some content which is much less annoying with regularly resetting stability), but it is what it is.

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

On 11/7/2023 at 10:49 PM, draxynnic.3719 said:

I use it when playing casually anyway because flamethrower

FALMMENWERFER!

Yeah thematically in open world running that pure juggernaut setup on scrapper is very satisfying, and definitely scratches a certain "burn them all" itch.

[Dayra.7405]

I would take Marauder stats.