I like how you're saying it's useless, a waste of ec, and a terrible gun. It has the exact same stats except now you have to tap instead of hold down fire so that if you want to use the 0.1 freeze and 0.1 fire rate you have to work for it. It does 5 damage plus fire damage AND has a larger hitbox area like the ac cannon does. When you see a player who is new to spar with 2000 wins beating sparrers with 11-20000 wins continuously using the flamethrower you can kind of tell something needs to be adjusted. Not only that but i've recently been seeing people abuse a reload glitch to cancel out its reload time making it as fast as bars reload.

Also when it was released it was semi, it was made auto when it was made 5 dam