Had a short play session with buffed flash grenades + bandoleer and pump action shotgun, I have to say - they are really strong now. For all intents and purposes, they're pretty much detonate on contact. The fuse timer is short enough that you can bounce off a doorframe, but the detonation is quick to follow. This makes flashes so much more interesting than frag grenades, because they give a nearly instant result. Example situation from today: I was peeking over the fence and saw enemy HA and engi doing their thing. I throw grenade, duck for a second for Flash to explode, fly over the fence, kill disoriented HA, engi managed to run away tho. Frags wouldn't have helped me here at all. It's still not as OP as EMP, but in a good place now, worth using. Probably not good enough to want to sacrifice suit slot for nanoweave. The only problem with short fuse timer is that you can't throw them with a high arc, as they explode somewhere high above. Not sure if you any of you use that trick, but with frags, if you look up and throw, the grenade will fall down on a high arc and explode a couple of meters forward and a couple of meters higher than your throwing position. This is helpful when you wanna grenade somebody on a roof of a building in front of you. Well, can't do that with flash grenades. I'm also not sure hit marker is working properly, because I wouldn't always get it, even when it looked like the flash grenade actually hit the enemy. And then of course there are versatility issues. Can't blow up deployables, can't get random kills. And can't accomplish anything on their own, still require you to manually kill every enemy. But at least it's much harder to friendly fire with them now.
