3
The weapon choices:
BBY - The starting gun, pretty solid all around, but produces too little heat to keep those big fireballs cranking. The spinup time on this thing is manageable, but I feel really silly walking around while firing it into the air just to keep my damage ramped.
PPA - This weapon is too difficult to control, plain and simple. Even if you're shooting big fireballs as quickly as they will come out this weapon will overheat if you don't burst fire it. You need to keep a steady rythm to keep this gun going, which can very easily get messed up if a friendly with a high heat weapon walks near you and dumps some extra degrees on you. You also have to constantly nurse this guns spin up, which is just stupid.
M4MA - This weapon is IMO the most fun on this mech, because it has just the right amount of heat generation where you can shoot fireballs very quickly, but not so quick that you need to constantly let up firing to stop your mech from overheating. The problem is that with this gun on your mech people can basically render your entire arsenal useless by hitting their space bar. This gun also applies a status effect to your opponent that makes them generate more heat, but it's hardly noticeable for mechs that have decent heat management.
None of these weapons are really worthy of being called a chaingun. Their rate of fire is extremely unimpressive for a rotary gun, their damage isn't overly impressive when compared to weapons like the assault rifle or sub machine gun either. The fact that you have to shoot them wildly into the air or tease the trigger to keep them revved up just completely flies in the face of HAWKENs usually extremely well imagined technology that seems plausible, because seriously nobody would ever design a gun that is only combat ready if you constantly attend to it outside of the fight. Game balance isn't really a good argument here, because quite frankly, the Incinerator isn't balanced, but we're getting to that.
The secondary:
SAARE - Terrible synergy, lame alternate fire mode, and a liability to boot. Basically this weapon is the biggest culprit in making this mech incapable of dealing with decent players. For one, given that you basically HAVE to fire both guns at the same time in the Incinerator, because you neither want your mech to overheat nor your chaingun to wind down, this weapon in absolutely no way synergizes with the chaingun. It fires extremely slow projectiles that arc while your chaingun fires much faster projectiles. Even the M4MA which does have a bit of an arc fires bullets that are significantly faster than what the SAARE shoots, so there is simply no way you can aim both guns at a moving target at the same time, certainly not one that's dodging and weaving.
The fireballs are also exceptionally difficult to hit flying targets with, and in a game where every single enemy is capable of flight that's kind of an insanely crippling weakness for a weapon.
The alternate fire mode on this weapon also just sucks. You get to choose between grenades and... slightly different grenades_ Wow, what a treat! That's like two slightly different things for the price of one useful secondary fire mode.
Another big problem is that this weapon is a massive liability for you, because in order to keep your chaingun going you HAVE to fire this thing off, whether you want to or not. Not only are you constantly giving your position away with this thing, you are also creating a hazard for yourself, because it does fire explosive projectiles, and that means if a friendly jumps in front of you while you're dumping heat with it, or you're dodging behind a wall you will take damage. Of course you'll try to avoid that, but trust me, never ever looking directly at a wall is a lot harder than it seems.
This weapon basically turns this entire mech into a noobstomper. If you're dealing with bots or really inexperienced players who stay on the ground and can't move much while keeping their aim you will annihilate them. If the target doesn't move much you can get both guns on it, keep both guns cranking, output insane damage and just annihilate any mech in seconds. If the target starts flying around, dodging or otherwise effectively making itself a hard target though you cannot get both weapons on it, you cannot effectively land your secondary at all anymore, and your primary is a massive liability that isn't even significantly more powerful than any regular old primary gun that doesn't need to be babied around the clock.
It feels like the contest between hitting and dodging with this gun has a disproportionately high skill ceiling for the defender, while the attacker really can't do much. Trying to hit a mech that's flying around with a slow arcing projectile is difficult, but it can be done. In bot matches it's decently easy to nail the flying drones with the fireballs from across the map - but that's because the drones move predictably. For a player it's possible to still dodge the fireball, even if it was shot to perfectly intercept their flight path at the time of it leaving the barrel. That means the shooter is not the final authority on whether or not the shot hits, and that means your skill at firing the weapon doesn't effectively scale along other peoples skill to evade it.
The special ability:
Terrible. Easily one of the worst special abilities in the game. Now don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a heavy mech that doesn't lug around a bunker, but a big weapon instead. Unfortunately this weapon is absolute garbage.
Basically what it does is create a shockwave around your mech that sets your heat to zero and deals damage according to how much heat you just dumped. That sounds insanely awesome right_ Anyone would kill for that kind of ability... Well, anyone EXCEPT for the Incinerator.
The problem is this: Your heat is your ammo for your secondary weapon, you need that heat to shoot fireballs. So the second you hit that special your secondary weapon cannot fire until you've warmed it up by firing your primary weapon. Your primary weapon needs to spin up, and depending on the gun this takes several seconds. Using the ability will stop your chaingun and it has to rev up from a standstill before it can shoot again. So basically if you use your special ability you are completely unarmed for several seconds afterward. If your target doesn't die from you using this ability it will kill you. If your opponent has 1 HP left after getting hit with this thing he will kill you and walk away victorious.
Now you'd think that just means you use the shockwave when the enemy is already low as a finishing move, but that doesn't really work either, because in order for the shockwave to deal good damage you need to have high heat. So this means you're in a fight with an opponent, he's getting low on HP, but you can't shockwave and kill him then, because you had to use fireballs to get him low, which means you have to wait a second or two to build heat whithout shooting your secondary to get the heat you need to use your ability which then may or may not kill your opponent.
Basically using this ability is a huge gamble and rarely pays off. You have to gamble that the target doesn't kill you or leave in the time you take to build up heat to use this instead of the SAARE. You have to gamble that you won't accidentally overheat your mech and die on the spot trying to nudge the heat bar as closed to the top as you can get it. You have to gamble that you will actually hit the target, since you're not exactly so fast that you can easily force an enemy into shockwave range. You have to gamble that the target is actually dead after the shockwave, because if it isn't you will die. You have to gamble that nobody sees you use the shockwave, because that renders you stationary for about a second, and there are a lot of things in Hawken that severely punish you for not moving for a second.
It's a really cool concept executed in a terrible way.
The other special thing this mech does is take some of the heat from nearby allies onto itself, which is pretty cool in theory, but in practice kind of fizzles out. Pretty much all of the mechs in the game have adequate heat management as it is, and most pilots instinctually know how much they can fire before overheating, so changing the heat profile of their mech is only really useful if you're in a really protracted battle where you just have guns blazing nonstop for a substantial amount of time. (Like in a bot match)
The reason why this is less than amazing is because it creates an unpredictable element in a mech that has weapons which largely rely on you managing their heat carefully. The PPA for example is a decent enough weapon as long as you manage it very carefully, but if an ally walks past and fires a high heat weapon it can easily upset your rythm and overheat you, or force you to shoot an extra fireball, meaning the gun will slow down.
Also there seems to be no score awarded for absorbing heat at all, which means it's kind of unrewarding to try to stick close to people and help their heat generation.
The role:
I realize that this is a support/suppression mech, and it actually performs very well in that role. Simply bombarding a group of enemies with fireballs does make them duck for cover, and you can use it to simply fire into a hallway and enemies will think twice about actually moving through there. The problem is that the game does nothing to recognize suppression in the scoring. I can see on my radar that enemies are coming up to the bottleneck I'm fire-bombing, then turn around and look for another path, and that is somewhat satisfying, but at the end of the day, you're still just standing there shooting at the ground while everyone else is racking up kills.
So to sum it up:
The Incinerator is amazingly good at killing bots and noobs. Any combination of its weapons and abilities absolutely demolish targets that move relatively predictably and stay on the ground. If you like Co-op, this mech is fantastic at it. Especially the fact that you never have to upgrade its heat management makes it a huge boomer late in the game.
Unfortunately the Incinerator is terrible at killing good players. The fireballs are incredibly easy to avoid, and the chainguns are all demanding on your attention while not being anywhere near powerful enough to win a fight without the fireballs landing, which you need to fire just so you can keep the chaingun going. The special ability is way too risky to use in a real fight, by the time you're sure you can safely use it you could just as well kill that enemy without it.
It actually works very well in its intended role, it can fire indefinitely and fill an area with dangerous amounts of damage, but that role is not rewarding either from a player perspective, nor from a score perspective.
Rant over.
Edited by Aetrion, March 09 2014 - 11:46 PM.
