The problem with incendiaries on bots is that there really is no way to keep them fair and interesting on bots. There really does seem no way to balance their use by bots and get them to some sort of interesting place.

The problem is that an incendiary is designed to pretty much immediately kill anyone within their area of effect; no fuse, no warning, just immediate death.

What this means is that no matter how inaccurate a bots throwing is, if they so much as land an incendiary close to a player, that player will die with no actual chance of doing anything to prevent that death. And one can not make bots too inaccurate, since that throwing is necessary to allow the bots to throw any other grenade with any semblance of usefulness.

Combine this with the propensity of the the AI to literally inundate areas in grenades and you have a recipe for a weapon that is imbalanced and unfun by design and toxic to the gameplay in general so long as it exists in the hands of bots.

@cool_lad said in Why incendiaries on bots can't really be fixed and need to be removed:

that player will die with no actual chance of doing anything to prevent that death.

That's technically true of getting shot too. The best way to avoid dying to anything the bots can (literally and figuratively) throw at you is to avoid being exposed and discovered in a vulnerable location.

The only real problem with bots and incendiaries is the super long throws with pinpoint accuracy against a target they shouldn't be able to see.

@MAA_Bunny I get the point you're trying to make, but the issue as I see it is that even with reduced accuracy, so long as a bot can land an incendiary anywhere close to the player, its a guaranteed kill.

Any other grenade has a fuse delay, a few seconds between seeing the grenade land and having it go off which the player can use to protect themselves.

With an incendiary, there's no such room. An incendiary will immediately kill anyone within it's AoE the second it lands, and unless you're really lucky and see it coming, the death will be one that really doesn't fell like it's fair in any way.

The added problem is that the bots need at least some accuracy in their throwing in order to actually pose a thereat with any other grenade. This means that the same thing that is necessary for bots to use any grenade effectively is also what causes the incendiaries to be so obnoxious.

And this isn't even considering just how massive a return on investment an incendiary is. It kills everything in the AoE immediately, can be used to block off areas and also be used to destroy caches much more effectively than frags (2 frags as opposed to 1 incendiary).

The incendiary is IMO bad, both in the hands of players (as the rushers best friend, enabler of bad plays and meta grenade pick), and in the hands of bots (as the single grenade that has no counterplay and feels most obnoxious to face).

@cool_lad said in Why incendiaries on bots can't really be fixed and need to be removed:

With an incendiary, there's no such room. An incendiary will immediately kill anyone within it's AoE the second it lands, and unless you're really lucky and see it coming, the death will be one that really doesn't fell like it's fair in any way.

But frag grenades are really the outlier here. You get no warning or opportunity to save yourself when you get sniped in the head. Half the time the bots start shooting at you there is no option you have to not die. RPGs don't really give you a useful warning before blowing you up either. The best way to not get killed is to develop a sense of when the bots know where you are, and when you think you've been spotted move. About 3/4 of the time I get killed by a molly I had been thinking I should relocate right before I burst into flames.

They're not really an instant death within the radius either. There is a short radius that will instantly kill someone, further out from that it just does continual damage so long as you're in it. I've been able to flee an incoming molly several times and get injured but not killed.