8 replies to this topic

[Revya21]

Hello and good day to all you mechwarrior fans, players and devs alike. I have been thinking a lot recently as to how to make heat penalty work in a both logical and functional way as well as balancing PPCs. I know tons of ideas have been tossed around by a lot of community members, and I know the devs can`t incorporate all ideas into the game, but as long as it`s read and considered by this great community I`m satisfied. So without further delay I shall just put in my 2 cents.


Heat Penalty:

I`m going to start with a small physics lecture here, just bare with me on this one. As we all know there is no such thing as a 100% efficent system, be it heat or otherwise. In fact this is the reason why firing weapons generates heat in the first place. Therefore, this so called "ghost heat" does actually make sense and is a step in the right direction. The problem is how this idea was implemented. Simply put, linking together weapon systems seemingly at random and using huge hidden multipliers is very counter intuitive for the most part. However, the concept of generating extra heat when firing many weapon simultaneously is correct. Allow me to give an example:

Lets say we have weapon "a" and "b" mounted in a mech. For this example, both weapons generate 10 points of heat. In a perfect world when fired simultaneously they would generate 20 points of heat altogether, but this is not the case, in reality they would generate somewhere along the lines of 24 points of heat, the other 4 points heat come from resistances in the wiring. And thats not all, if they where energy weapons, they would suffer loss of power and range because of energy leaks in the system, and would be unable to operate at 100% capacity. Now i`m not sugesting that the devs bring down the power and range of weapons since this is a game and doing that is always a bad idea, no. What i do suggest is firing weapons at the same time, no matter what weapons or weapon types, should generate a "percentage" of extra heat. I would personaly suggest a value around 15% for all weapon systems. I think it`s reasonable, though this could be adjusted for individual weapons for gameplay balace.

One advantages of using this type of heat penalty in place of the current are several. One is the gradual, more intuitive increase of heat as more weapons are fired instead of the huge spike in heat after the hard cap is reached. Another advantage is this system will punish high-damage alphas in general and not just specific weapon configurations. Also it would allow for transparency as the percentage could be included in the weapon stats so idividual players would know the amount without having to search for information in some long lost forum posts.
The disadvanteges are that this would probably requiere to bring down the heat threshold in order for it to be efective. Though I`m not sure by how much. also the percentage values will need extensive tweeking to get it just right. And finally, the ac20 is perfectly balanced with it`s hard cap. Though, in my opinion, it is an isolated event.


PPCs

Everyone agrees, PPCs are a problem, they are just to good. Some say that they need a larger recycling time. However that`s not the right solution: increase in recycle time actually makes them more heat efficent. Others say more heat, but that only becomes a problem when firing more than 2 of them. I belive the Devs already have the solution to this one, they are just applying it to the wrong weapon: Charge up time of the PPCs. It makes more sense for 2 reasons:

1) The gauss rifle is just a series of magnets, all they need is an electrical current and they`ll shoot an iron proyectyle of death.

2) There is a existing gauss weapon and it doesn`t requiere charging time. besides, it`s a machinegun.

Therefore, the logical choice is the PPC.

There is another reason why i`m inclined to choose the PPCs for such a feature, and that`s the capacitor. Under normal circunstances the capacitor would be a way to decrease recycle time on the PPC, but if a charge feature is implemented, the capacitor would now serve the funtion of decreasing the charge time for the PPC. That said, my suggestion would be that the capacitor eliminates the charge up time altogether but at the expence of a small increase in recycle time and the probability of blowing up upon a critical hit to the PPC.

Another balancing feature I would suggest is to make the PPC a mix of instant and over time damage by spliting the damage into: 5 points of instant damage upon first impact or "the head", and 5 points of damage spread though out "the tail".


General Balancing on the ideas proposed above

Certain mechs were originaly designed to boat certain weapons and the current system in place of heat penalty directly hinders such class of mechs. Boating weapons isn`t inheritly bad, it becomes bad when you can boat an execive amount of weapons or, if the weapons being boated are to powerful. The system I propose will not hinder these designs but will keep them under check so things won`t get out of control. It will also make balacing mech chasis and variants simple with some elemental qwirks. let me give you a few examples:

1)Swayback has a 10% redution to extra heat generated from firing multiple medium lasers since the mech was built to use them

2)Awsome 8q and 9m have an 8% redution to extra heat generated by firing multiple PPCs for this same reason.

And there are many other mechs created in this fashion that could be more similar to there intended battletech iterations without breaking the metagame.


Well, anyway, thats what I think would work. I hope anyone to stumble across this thread like it and give it some publicity if they agree. Thank you very much for your time

Revya21 - Black Crusaders

[Khayron]

The main problem with the game atm for me is not the heat of the weapons, the problem is how the mechs are designed, they are a pseudo-omnimechs by now, you can put anything you want as long as it's the same type of weapon its designed for, for exemple, if you have an energy slot on a mech which variant has a single medium laser, u can convert that slot into a slot for a ppc, its the problem, the volume and space needed to place a medium laser in a inner sphere mech can not be the same as the needed for a ppc, you need major reforms in the mech to be able to put the weapon.

Say that the solution could be a system like the older mechwarrior games where you have 1,2 or 3 slot weapons in each location of the mech, for example, small, medium and pulse medium laser could be one slot energy weapons, large lasers 2 slots, and ppcs 3 slots. And as now as we have the mech tree, we could have one or two master skills as much to be able to had an extra slot or even to change the type of the weapon in the specific location, for example by default my mech is equipped with a large laser in the arm, spending the master skill that i just unlocked i can add an extra slot for that 2 slot weapon so now it would be a 3 slots weapon so i can mount a cpp on it. This would be a way to custom your mech as Justin-Xiang Allard did with his Centurion changing his ac10 to a ac20.

Personally i like the way is done now as you have all the slots in the mech so instead of the 1/2/3 slots weapons, the weapons itself could have a grade A, B or C for example, one mech can have in his torso missile weapons up to B grade, so if i want to put a LRM20 weapon grade A or even to change it to a ballistic grade B i must first to unlock that skill in the mech tree so i could mount missile weapons grade A instead grade B in that torso, now what i need to do is to see if i can have free slots enough to mount the LRM20 plus the xl engine plus a pair of DHS in the actual way we do.

That way the customization could be a new and more personalized way and they would not differ too much from the original variant and the heat could be as always.

P.S.Sry for my bad english i hope u could be able to understand what i want to say

Edited by Khayron, 28 August 2013 - 01:47 AM.

[NeoMZ]

I didn't know about the change to gauss rifle, is pretty hilarious put a charge time in a machinegun(enormous, lethal, but machinegun) ... it have more sense...like REVYA21 suggest , set that feature to PPCS and ER PPCS. Nice posts dood...

[SmurfOff]

Complaining about PPC's and Gauss being unfair means you misunderstand the IP that PGI paid to implement. PPC's are meant to be feared. The issue that PGI has created is that convergence is instant, and therefore removed the concepts of misses. Basically it would be the equivalent of setting all weapons rolls to 2 or higher in the TT edition.

The current status of the game continuously moves away from the IP, and is creating a new, completely unseen entity, where eventually everything will have some sort of counter nerf / buff rule essentially making gameplay cold wet mush. When was the last time people said "oh ****, an atlas..."

The first indication things weren't on the level... No Voice comms in game. In a team game.

[M0rpHeu5]

I do think that giving a charge time or a spread damage to the PPC will do more damage than good, yes The PPC is overused but it won't be much better if noone use it. Here is my idea of balancing High Alpha shots

[Revya21]

i`m going of the information we know and the tendencys pirahna has shown till now. we know there will be a charge time for a weapon but ppc`s are the better choice for that in my opinion.

SmurfOff, on 29 August 2013 - 11:36 AM, said:

Complaining about PPC's and Gauss being unfair means you misunderstand the IP that PGI paid to implement. PPC's are meant to be feared. The issue that PGI has created is that convergence is instant, and therefore removed the concepts of misses. Basically it would be the equivalent of setting all weapons rolls to 2 or higher in the TT edition.

I do understand that ppc`s are meant to be feared, but they are also meant to be a long range weapon. Going by your TT example ppc`s where rarely fired at close range. By the way i was not complaining about it being unfair, i eat 2 ppc + gauss builds for breakfast. That said i do feal it is unbalanced when compared to other weapons featured in the game

M0rpHeu5, on 29 August 2013 - 01:22 PM, said:

I do think that giving a charge time or a spread damage to the PPC will do more damage than good, yes The PPC is overused but it won't be much better if noone use it. Here is my idea of balancing High Alpha shots

I read your sugestion along with a few other before posting my own. It is a good idea but i have to stick with mine. The reason is the advantages i gave in the post, mostly the transparency. Also you are right that the charge time is not the best solution, that would be convergance, hands down, but we just don`t know when or if convergance will make it to the game.

As for khayron the problem with this is people would naturaly gravitate to mechs with higher tier weapon slots, mostly assaults. Also it would confuse newcomers into thinking that higher tier means better weapon when in truth this is situational. and the mech tree thing would just place an even greater enphasis on exp which already gives substacial benefits against those who have not "mastered" a mech.

[M0rpHeu5]

Revya21, on 29 August 2013 - 04:25 PM, said:

As for khayron the problem with this is people would naturaly gravitate to mechs with higher tier weapon slots, mostly assaults. Also it would confuse newcomers into thinking that higher tier means better weapon when in truth this is situational. and the mech tree thing would just place an even greater enphasis on exp which already gives substacial benefits against those who have not "mastered" a mech.

Larger mechs can mount more weapons couse they have more free tonnage if you think about deferent builts you'll see that almost every muilt get about the same alpha penalty. Yes, this is more complicated to newcmers but with the proper tutorial this won't be a problem.

[Revya21]

M0rpHeu5, on 29 August 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

Larger mechs can mount more weapons couse they have more free tonnage if you think about deferent builts you'll see that almost every muilt get about the same alpha penalty. Yes, this is more complicated to newcmers but with the proper tutorial this won't be a problem.

It was in reference to Khyron`s idea about tier slots for weapons. assault mechs naturaly carry bigger weapons therefore would have high tier weapon slots straight from the factory.

[Norhiak]

Like told you before Rev, its a great idea, i love if PGI think in this possibility.