Flame Engine question

[damasta]

Ok, so I've been leveling a shield tech spec'd BH and I finally got Flame Engine. I love this talent, but I'm confused about one thing. The wording on the talent seems to imply that not only does it deal its damage in half the time, but it also deals twice the damage it normally would. This doesn't appear to be the case, but I'm not 100%. I've done a lot of google searches and I've come up with nothing. So now here I am, posing this question to you guys, which is, if you aren't sure, is whether or not Flame Engine causes the flamethrower to deal double damage, as the highlighted, bolded, and underlined part says ;p. Thanks in advance.

[Dropfall]

I dont think it does twice the dmg. I think that if it just channelled twice as fast it would miss out on the later ticks and only give you half the damge in half the usual time.

 

Lightning Barrage btw is similarily worded.

[damasta]

Thanks for the clarification. Being a serial mmo'er, most channels I've encountered work in a way such that they deal dmg over the channel and it takes x time to channel, where as I guess flamethrower is designed to do dmg every x seconds with a channel of x seconds. I honestly always thought flamethrower worked like the former, since it's own wording says "dealing x damage over the duration". Bah, oh well. It ends up not as good as I thought it was originally, but it still is a good talent regardless. Thanks again.

[ellenbec]

The way that Flame Engine works is that it takes the damage that you would deal over 3 seconds and compress it into a 1.5 second channel. It goes from a 3 tick attack to a 4 tick attack, which allows for one more crit on the flame thrower to happen, which is increased threat gen for the attack. In addition to that it also allows for the Flame Thrower to be free, making that 1.5 second channel very heat efficient. It also refreshes the cooldown on Flame Thrower if it is able to proc during the cooldown (which is very rare due to the ICD on Flame Engine).

 

Ive actually been trying to work it to delay my Flame Engine proc to allow me to use Thermal Sensor Override for a free 3 sec channel Flame Thrower, then using my Flame Engine Flame thrower, since Flame Engine finishes the cooldown of Flame Thrower no matter what the time left on it is.

 

This can allow for 4.5 seconds of heat free threat generation, 6k+ damage (with crits), and 12k+ threat generated (with crits) in a very short time frame dumped out without generating a drop of heat.

[damasta]

First of all, you're brilliant. Second of all, if it adds an additional tick, which was something I thought I encountered in my small testing, but disregarded as an anomaly, would be quite awesome.

[ellenbec]

You know, I am actually wrong about the extra tick of Flame Thrower being added after looking through a log that I did.

 

Flame Engine does not add an additional tick, it just speeds up the time between them. I must not have noticed that there were 4 ticks without it. Flame Thrower is a 4 tick over 3 second attack, with Flame Engine it is 4 ticks over 1.5 seconds.

 

Looking at it though, during Flame Engine (for me with 4 crits) I can put out 9728 threat in 1.5 seconds. WIthout Flame Engine that 9728 threat is done during the span of 2 globals so your threat per global is 4864.

 

The fun of playing with Thermal Sensor Override and then a Flame Engine is just an added bonus.