u/AveryAveyAve

Saw some people saying "We have proof they're removing reactions from their posts to cover up" and things along those lines, but DCON cleared that up in the Official Discord.

It's just Discord caching being weird.

So, as shown in this video (which I plucked from the Helldivers 2 Official Discord), there's currently a problem with the Flame Sentry, and by extension the Lumberer since it uses the same stats, not damaging enemies correctly at close range.

From what I've been able to find, to increase the range of the Flame Sentry and Lumberer's Flamethrower the original fire cone was shifted forwards, but they seemingly forgot to enable damage before the cone starts. This ultimately means that it has the same 20-24 metre damage range but it starts approximately 10-14 metres ahead of the Flame Sentry / Lumberer.

The other Flamethrowers (Flamethrower, Cremator, Torcher, Crisper, and Hot Dog) still do damage at point blank before the main projectiles start spawning, but they just deal less damage and still apply the burning status effect to enemies. That's of course a problem and has been a problem since they reverted the Escalation of Freedom changes to Flamethrowers, but the Flame Sentry and Lumberer Flamethrower don't even do that.

This is a pretty large problem for two options which are supposed to be strong in close range engagements and I hope Arrowhead are able to fix this quickly.