On the subject of Flames of the Faltine negating Doom and Iron Man’s beams, I thought I’d toss in that it also negates Sentinel’s s.H.
Some thoughts and experiments on why this works the way it does:
It must have a special property, because the durability is what it says. It cancels out Wesker’s gunshot, which is 3 projectile hit points, so it must have the same value.
A lot of people just don’t understand how durability works. When they see Unibeam has “11 frames x 1 low priority durability points”, they think “oh okay, 11 durability”. And if you do something like Unibeam vs. two Hadokens, you’ll see that Unibeam wins. But that’s not all that’s going on. The Unibeam’s hit points drain differently from the Hadokens. Basically, the Unibeam rotates its hitpoints, and the more it loses, the weaker the beam becomes (thus if you Unibeam vs. Hadoken, Unibeam wins, but it hits fewer times).
If you pay close attention, though, you’ll notice that the Hadoken doesn’t get blipped out immediately. It has to be “worn down” as it chugs through Unibeam’s rotating frames. For this reason, even though 10 frames x 1 hit point is mathematically the same as 5 frames x 2 hit points, the latter is superior because it will grind down opposing projectiles faster.
This is why Flames of the Faltine won’t beat EMD, Psionic Blaster, or Mighty Spark. EMD L, for example, has 1 frame x 5 low priority durability points, so EMD L is basically the same as Hadoken in durability, and there’s no “grinding”.
This is also why Eye of Agamotto is a piece of shit. It has 10 frames x 1 low priority durability points, so it has to slowly “grind” down projectiles. It generally rocks beams because they grind each other down, but the following all pass through Eye of Agamotto:
Samurai Edge
Magnum
Hadoken
Yes, Hadoken > Eye of Agamotto. Basically, Eye of Agamotto is only able to grind through 4/5 of Hadoken’s hit points before Hadoken leaves Eye of Agamotto’s hitbox region. You can test this hypothesis by running Eye of Agamotto vs. Akuma’s Gohadoken. Gohadoken L gets eaten by Eye of Agamotto, while Gohadoken H passes through Eye of Agamotto. This can only be accounted for by considering the speed the projectile is traveling at, which allows for Eye of Agamotto to spend more time to grind the projectile down.
None of this explains why Flames of the Faltine beats Unibeam, Plasma Beam, or Sentinel’s s.H - it’s just a weird property (glitch?) it has. However, I tested all the beams in this game, and Flames of the Faltine only beats projectiles that have “# frames x 1 hit point”. So, it seems like Flames of the Faltine has a weird property that says something like “Unless the opposing projectile can beat Flames of the Faltine in a single hit, Flames of the Faltine will not lose durability”, which allows it to beat Unibeam, Plasma Beam, and Sentinel’s s.H.
Edit: Aaand I just proved my hypothesis wrong by testing Flames of the Faltine vs. Deadpool’s Trigger Happy, which fires 10 bullets that are 0.8 durability each. Trigger Happy grinds on Flames of the Faltine and wins.