Game Design Mob Spells: Flamethrower And Meteor

these two spells are the most aggravating pieces of crap i've ever experienced in my entire life


flamethrower:

• autolocks even if mob is stunned
• autolocks even if player is vanished
• death machine that follows you like a stalker
• mobs that spam this are basically untouchable if you want to avoid damage
• you cannot manually dodge this

meteor:

• i heard you like getting one shot so this should be a great spell for that
• flamethrower's brother, basically does everything flamethrower does but in 1 shot
• actually unavoidable if you're too close which some classes can't help but be too close
• not really a meteor
• too fast for the amount of damage it does

basically these are super poorly designed, being extremely hard to avoid whilst dealing absurd amounts of damage.
they really should be changed in at least some way.

 

Flamethrower I agree with. It's possible to outrun with enough walk speed, but Heavy Flamethrower is just way too powerful for its own good.

Meteor...uh...? Unless I'm being ridiculously careless, I never get hit by Meteor. Since the targetting is awkward and has to specifically track from blocks, standing at certain angles can cause the spell to never even shoot, the range is a lot smaller than it looks from the effects, and you can outrun it just by backpedaling.

However, the damage of spells is entirely based off of the mob's damage, since the spell damage is based on a multiplier. Generally, Flamethrower gets a lower multiplier(80%, 60%, etc) while Meteor, being a single-hit, gets a larger multiplier(250%, 300%...usually far less for endgame bosses to try and avoid oneshots). For ease of evasion, Flamethrower is far too sticky, but Meteor is a cinch.

 

Flamethrower is too powerful of a spell yeah. As an archer with >100 ws and speed 3 I still can't outrun it escpecially in smaller areas like the matryoska LI boss. It is just a guaranteed hit basically which makes it way too powerful.

Meteor however I wasn't even aware that endgame bosses had and have never had any issues with.

 

Qira has a meteor, if I remember correctly, but I hardly ever get hit by one let alone get killed by one. That honor goes to these darn skull projectiles, but that may just be my builds being actually terrible.
Anywho, yeah. Flamethrower is a nightmare and a half.

 

basically, with meteor
i play as an assassin, so i'm generally at close range to a mob. by the time i see that a mob is using meteor, it's basically already exploded and a huge chunk of my hp is taken out. it explodes whereever i was standing when it was cast, so if i'm too close it can basically explode instantly. in such a case there's no way to avoid it at all, which is part of the issue with dealing with such a spell.