After a couple recent fights with pirates crewing the Burning Blade (BB), I noticed that if you have limited options to actually sink the BB whilst on board.
The problem is further exacerbated when you are running solo and you decide to board and kill the players and npc skellies. On a lot of normal player ships, they will usually kill the pirates on board and firebomb it to help do this but as the BB is pretty much non-flammable so once your on board you could be successful killing the crew but then it could get to the point you would be spawn camping. And whilst toxic spawn camping can be avoided by scuttling and changing seas normally if you happen to have a enemy that's deliberately doing so instead of trying to actively sink you, it's not something that should be an issue when using the BB.
Now if you had a capable crew who was able to pepper the side of the ship whilst you were busy engaging on board it would be fine but I do feel that there needs to be other options should you not have that choice.
The Burning Blade needs a Weakness
I don't suggest this to nerf the capabilities or the power that the BB has as a very powerful ship because it certainly needs to be a formidable foe as his flagship, but like Flameheart there should be a way that capable pirates can still sink it whether they board sneakily and subterfuge from the inside that's not just killing all the crew or for good helms to take advantage of an area not usually fired upon.
The weakness that I suggest should be "Flameheart" himself, or his statue to be more precise. It's located in the aft of the ship right in front of the lovely view outside of the window. I'll list the suggested changes below:
- Let the Flameheart statue work similar to Cursed Mermaid Statues but slightly tankier.
- You can damage from OUTSIDE through the Stern window. Normally when your shooting a ship, the stern isn't a viable option as it doesn't have that big of an area to make holes for sinking but this can still be a way to damage the statue inside (plus backstabbing Flameheart's ship just makes sense)
- Damage can be made by any weapon in game including kegs, there's no one-shot method with any one weapon. Stockpiling kegs is a risky move but if your sneaky enough to load them on the balcony outside without detection it could work.
- The statue can heal (whether very slowly like Mermaid Statues do or they also need to heal when they do a ritual to refresh the npcs).
With three sides of the BB being a very huge threat to players taking it on, it just makes sense to have an area that a bit more prone to taking damage whether it was inside or outside. The idea came to me from playing the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 space stages way back in the day as there areas you needed to target outside of the enemies ship whilst avoiding hostile spacecraft and if you landed in the hanger you had to contend with player and/or npc enemies while also destroying areas internally as well.
The point is that players have more options to take down a BB whilst soloing or at the very least aren't falling into the trap of spawn camping when they can actively try to destroy his statue and on the other side of the coin, players defending have more breathing room because they know that there is a good chance the invading party will be preoccupied with trying to destroy the statue and they may have more a chance to retaliate. Either way, there needs to be more ways of avoiding the pitfalls of spawn camping players on board and also giving more opportunities for crews to take down the BB whether they are solo, duo or more.
What are your suggestions on this?
- Do you think this is something that could help you whether your crewing or attacking?
- Should the statue's strength be scaled to crew size (weaker on a larger crew/stronger smaller crew)?
- Should the statue only be able to be destroyed whilst pirates are manning it or for both skelly and pirate crews?
