ah yes, 1ed was the version with variable success requirements for staging?
(i got into SR late 2ed, so i never experienced that in play)

didnt the flamethrower (weapon, not spell) have a staging requirement of 20 successes or something?

I think the lowest staging was 4 for something like mana dart or I guess flamethrower. Where hell blast had a staging of 1. Heck even with a staging of 1 there was no chance of you getting damage to a level that really hurt at any of the levels of play we games at. I guess if you were a high enough initiate grade, through a powerful enough spell so they would get basically no successes in the resistance test, and then your sorcery skill was like 15 you had a chance to one shot with SR! combat spells.

It has been a long time since I played it so I' sure I am missing something though.

The problem was that nobody knew if a high staging was a good thing or not. For example, the original MP laser was a 12M8 weapon. You were virtually guaranteed to wound someone with it, but it was nearly impossible to kill someone. They'd be taking a moderate, and that was about it.

Back then armor granted automatic successes, which meant that high Staging numbers was good. They were guaranteed to get more hits than you would ever roll, so a high staging weapon was guaranteed damage, while a low staging weapon was pretty much assured to do nothing at all. Standard equipment came in at 6/6 armor, so any L2, M2, or S2 weapon was actually going to do no damage automatically.

-Frank