Dragon's Breath Buff?

[Yeowskii]

I've been using this weapon more lately out of curiosity and it's pretty disappointing. I'm noticing that it really has no damage. Hitting every pellet on headshots still takes more than a full mag to kill a fleshpound, and sometimes it even takes two shots to kill a clot of all things when the spread screws me over. I figured the ground fire would be nice for killing trash, but because it comes from pellets that penetrate zeds, the ground fire is only ever applied to the ground way behind the things you're shooting at, and I don't think I should have to shoot my gun at the ground in front of enemies to deal damage.

I don't think a basic base damage increase would help, so instead, I'd like to suggest increasing the number of pellets by a lot. Right now it only has around a half dozen pellets with a huge spread, but if it kept that spread with, say, more than double the pellets it would be way better at actually applying fire and damaging more zeds. It would also be far more forgiving when so many pellets miss while firing at scrakes and fleshounds. Obviously, each pellet would have reworked damage, I'm not asking for an over 100% damage increase.

Also, there should be a slamfire option that drastically increases the fire rate as well as recoil. It'd be a fun/useful panic button when 3 quarterpounds trap you in a corner.

 

[s5yn3t]

That's why you shoot the ground in front of zeds to benefit fully from ground fire.
Honestly the ground fire buff to the weapon was so major, that its now a decent alternative to spitfires (if you got tired of using it)

Those both were never meant to tackle fleshpounds, so idk why you even bother using them for it... That's why Helios exists, the hx25 flare gun which is difficult to use tbh but dishes out ton of damage if you hit the head with it.

The only buff i would actually accept is increasing ammo pool in the trench gun.
As it stands it has too little of it for pyro, barely enough to last a whole wave, and current meta requires cheesing the game by switching to support with ammo skill, get ammo, drop the gun and switch to pyro... All that work just to have larger ammo pool for the next wave.

 

[OnionBubs]

The Trenchgun is a Tier 2 weapon on a perk that was not designed at base level to be able to deal with Scrakes and Fleshpounds, so I'm not too sad about its inability to do that exact thing. It's designed as an anti-trash tool, hence the tremendous spread (catch more Zeds with one burst at a distance) and afterburn (what it doesn't kill outright should burn to death).
It does have just enough damage to kill Gorefasts and Gorefiends getting in your face, which is fair enough given that they're weak to shotguns in general. But it's not meant as an anti-HVT tool. Even at Tier 5 it lacks for that.

In past years, the Trenchgun had fewer pellets but stronger damage-per-pellet. I presume that was changed to make it better at applying crowd control to begin with.

It later received a buff that it can leave ground fire when pellets hit the floor, which is bigger than most give it credit for.

IMO the ammo issue is best dealt with by using it in tandem with a flamer weapon as originally intended, and in all honesty, between that and the Zed-Time: Pyromaniac skill, I've never actually run out of ammo in a wave barring where I had to LMS through a ton of Scrakes and Fleshpounds. Which is more my stubbornness than the weapon being bad.

 

[Yeowskii]

To clarify, I've been using the gun across Firebug, Support, and Survivalist, and to me, it underperforms in all three.

As Support, the damage doesn't even compare to any other shotgun, so it's just handicapping yourself to use it. (No surprises here, not worth ranting about.)

As Survivalist, I figured a fully upgraded one would be good for normal zeds, and then I'd carry an RPG to deal with the big zeds, but because of the problems I mentioned before, it ends up being more of a hassle than it's worth.

The only one that gets any use out of it is Firebug because ground fire is ground fire, but doesn't anyone else see what's wrong with that? The Dragon's Breath is a shotgun that's only useful when shot at the ground to do something that most Firebug weapons can do better anyways.

 

[OnionBubs]

It is very much a downgrade to the starter shotgun on Support, yes.

It's terrible on Survivalist because all shotguns are bad on the Survivalist except maybe the Boomstick. No stacking damage bonuses, no penetration, no Tight Choke, not hitscan, and the burn does nothing for you and makes other players hate you. Survivalist has so many better options it's not funny, but not playing Survivalist in the first place is the best way to fix lack of damage.

The only one that gets any use out of it is Firebug because ground fire is ground fire, but doesn't anyone else see what's wrong with that? The Dragon's Breath is a shotgun that's only useful when shot at the ground to do something that most Firebug weapons can do better anyways.

Saying it's only useful for ground fire is shortsighted.

It does perfectly fine direct damage for its tier and gives you better spike damage at an appropriate range than the flamer weapons. It's better than the Mac-10 at actually killing medium Zeds, still lets you clap Husks nicely since you can trigger their flamethrower and not care while you put a couple of shells in their brain, and Heat Wave allows you to take advantage of stagger by swapping weapons. Direct burn will stack with the Ground Fire, allowing you to pile on three (3) separate sources of damage from a single weapon. ZED-TIME: Pyromaniac allows you to spam it for free at anything within range, which does allow you to put out lots of projectiles downrange and has the added effect of reducing the ammo burden. The ground fire has a nice clumping pattern to it and it lasts for an absurdly long time compared to the actual flamer weapon groundfire, so it has its place.

What it's not good at is HVT, which Firebug on the whole really isn't supposed to be good at in the first place. You want the Helios Rifle for that.

 

[Yeowskii]

The ground fire has a nice clumping pattern to it and it lasts for an absurdly long time compared to the actual flamer weapon groundfire, so it has its place.

This isn't true and goes back to the last point I made. The dragon's breath ground fire lasts the same amount of time as all of the flame throwers. It's actually one of the only weapons that doesn't have an increased ground fire timer (whether it be a direct time increase or a secondary ground fire pool that isn't affected by the perk skill).

The basic burn DoT effect is something equally shared across all fire weapons. In terms of direct damage, it's a bit less reliable than either the spitfires or mac-10, though a bit of that could possibly depend on personal preference (i.e. Someone who plays SWAT often will do a better job with the mac-10 than the shotgun).

Overall it's a net loss for the Dragon's Breath because pretty much everything it does can be done better by another fire weapon. (Even when you commit and upgrade it all the way.)

 

[OnionBubs]

This isn't true and goes back to the last point I made. The dragon's breath ground fire lasts the same amount of time as all of the flame throwers.

My bad. I forgot that changed with Neon Nightmares. It used to have a 5-10 second ground fire.

In terms of direct damage, it's a bit less reliable than either the spitfires or mac-10, though a bit of that could possibly depend on personal preference (i.e. Someone who plays SWAT often will do a better job with the mac-10 than the shotgun).

That's both arguable and kinda throwing the goalposts around.
Mac-10 has been a throw pick on both Firebug and SWAT for a long time. SWAT has literally every other gun in its arsenal; they don't inflict fire panic and don't have bad recoil/spread. Firebug has the HRG M16 that's just a flat-out upgrade to the Mac-10 in literally every capacity, and yes, it's better than the Trenchgun too.

Spitfires are great in Zed-Time but I can't really think of a projectile weapon that isn't at least good in Zed-Time (maybe the Scorcher?) and they just kinda suck outside of Zed-Time. Nasty spread, slow reload, and slow singular projectiles only take you so far.

Overall it's a net loss for the Dragon's Breath because pretty much everything it does can be done better by another fire weapon. (Even when you commit and upgrade it all the way.)

Well, like I mentioned above, using it exclusively as a fire/DoT weapon is missing the point of it; it bodypunches well enough to get heavy trash/medium Zeds off you without requiring headshots to do so and it spams as well in Zed-Time as anything around its tier. Headshots on Gorefiends, Gorefasts, Sirens, etc. do just fine. It's there for killing things in lower waves without waiting for stuff to burn to death.

It's a perfectly fine stopgap weapon in the current meta like most of the T2 weapons and I don't really see a need to change that. It's something you get as a secondary for flamers before getting a better secondary. There are other weapons I'd rather tackle before the Trenchgun.

It does lose out in endgame usefulness to the HRG M16 and Helios, but that's TWI balancing for you, because neither of those should've existed to begin with. Firebug already has enough weapons that do more or less the same thing--easy as hell AoE spam while not having to aim that much--and it doesn't really need any more buffs at this stage of the game.

 

[Maxotaurious]

i've fully ranked Firebug and i'm nearly there with support. safe to say i've used the trenchgun a fair amount. not one single person here has mentioned anything to do with map size. the trenchgun has only a moderate amount of burst damage but firing shells at ceilings causes ground fire to fall on top of passing zeds which in bigger, more open maps, just isn't as good as the other options. however, with groundfire and zed splosion on it becomes one of the best bottleneck weapons in the entire game. for just one shell fired at a doorway can hold off trash from coming through for quite some time for 1 shell. fully upgraded on the support with stumble and penetration it can actually be very useful as big zeds will either stumble or fire panic and everything behind it will do the same.

 

[The Blank King]

I think everyone else has said this already but the Dragonsbreath might honestly be the most busted weapon for firebug right now. Combine it with the ground fire perk and all you need to do to get top kills and damage is to just shoot the floor. You'll kill off the massive bulk of zeds without even thinking. Large Zeds will still requires you to use something bigger like a microwave gun or the helios but for EVERYTHING else, Dragonfire is both a destroyer of worlds and a massive money saver due to the low base price and its price for bullets.

 

[OnionBubs]

the Dragonsbreath might honestly be the most busted weapon for firebug right now

Firebug is a kinda busted perk but that's not because of the Trenchgun by any stretch.

It does the job fine enough until late levels but I wouldn't endgame it in Hell on Earth because it suffers from being a master of none where other weapons do specific things but better.

Combine it with the ground fire perk and all you need to do to get top kills and damage is to just shoot the floor. You'll kill off the massive bulk of zeds without even thinking.

See, about that:

That's literally every weapon in Firebug's arsenal that isn't the HRG Scorcher, Mac-10, Microwave Gun, and Helios Rifle, all 3 of which serve niche roles in the Firebug's kit. Even some of those have elements of floor-shoot.

Beyond that, literally every other weapon Firebug has is "shoot floor with Ground Fire, reap benefits." Some of them don't even mandate that much. Some of them require a bit more but the Trenchgun ain't special in that regard.

The CnB and Flamethrower have enhanced Ground Fire that does more damage, they don't have garbage reloads that take forever, and the CnB is probably the most efficient on-perk starter weapon in the entire game.
The Husk Cannon can shoot the floor with charged shots if getting directs is too hard for the user.
The Spitfires are basically the Trenchgun but for people who will only accept akimbo weapons.
The Thermite Bore is the Trenchgun, but with accurate remote bombs that can work from anywhere, in case you thought positioning was too much nuance to consider on a perk who had a weakness in initial stages of "needs to be close-range for best effect."

I could go on but my point's been made.

Large Zeds will still requires you to use something bigger like a microwave gun or the helios

...which disqualifies the Trenchgun from being "the most busted" by that alone, but I digress.

but for EVERYTHING else, Dragonfire is both a destroyer of worlds and a massive money saver due to the low base price and its price for bullets.

Again: a lot of stuff does that already on Firebug, it's a case of "what flavor do you want your damage to come in?" With all Zeds getting a burn incap resistance you don't even have to worry that much on misapplying burn DoT since the devs made playing Firebug badly less punishing than it used to be.

Now, this is less a thing with the Trenchgun and more a problem of "Firebug is really easy without requiring a lot of effort or skill or really much of anything and kinda can do everything well enough by this point in the game's lifecycle since it's been buffed into being a chaos generalist, which is terrible design," but it is a matter of concern nonetheless.


Oh, and on a point from the OP that I forgot to address:

Also, there should be a slamfire option that drastically increases the fire rate as well as recoil. It'd be a fun/useful panic button when 3 quarterpounds trap you in a corner.

No. Firebug already has enough "panic buttons" as it is, and getting trapped by 3 QPs as the one perk with on-demand flinch and knockback is a sign you really screwed up and deserve the L.

Hell, Firebug's already a panic button perk for when SWAT or Commando isn't working out for the player.