8 replies to this topic

[JimboFBX]

It's fine. I bought the Awesome 8Q and found that yes, it's about as competitive as you'd expect a mech of it's inferior design to be, even with ERPPCs. I gave it as practical a load-out as you can give it: stock engine (240), 2 ER PPC, 2 large lasers, 2 medium lasers on the arms, and tag in the head. 30 SHS. And it works, to a point. It's still outclassed by heavier assault mechs in a 1 on 1, and is a big beluga whale that's easily overwhelmed, but in the right conditions, used correctly in conjunction with useful teammates, its effective.

I'd like to point out a couple other things:

DHS gives 1.4x cooling and 1.4x capacity making them approx. twice as good normal heat sinks (the square root of 2 is 1.41). There is no nerf here, since in table top you cannot increase capacity.

My presumption is thus that engine double heat sinks have the same capacity as engine single heat sinks, making them basically the same thing as external heat sinks if you do not alpha-strike your weapons too frequently.

Energy builds like this are {Scrap} on hot maps and good on cold maps. In the future we will be able to pick our mechs ahead of time, so why would you ever think that energy only mechs should be able to go toe to toe with a ballistic mech on a hot map? Especially since PPCs disable ECM and never run out of ammo.

Many ballistic mechs also have energy slots capable of mounting PPCs, so there is no way you can buff energy weapons globally without also buffing ballistic mechs. This is especially true since energy weapons characteristically have great DPT. If you're not heating up your mech you're wasting potential damage.

Suggestions:
Give the Awesome the movement profile of a heavy so it can scale hills better and move faster. Without jump jets, it needs to hill hump otherwise its just a huge *** target to draw fire (which is what you do with those ERPPCs at > 1 km). Also a boost to its torso turn rate would help as well.

Make the temperature override work like it used to. Players need time to engage it and when I engage it it needs to actually work instead of shutting me down despite the override engaged message being on screen. Likewise, the override needs to last longer than a few seconds. The engine damage aspect can stay the same although honestly I haven't really seen how much damage you take if you override because it almost never works.

Otherwise, I wouldn't waste much more effort tweaking weapons, I'd rather see new game modes

edit: actually this is probably the best build, since it has better heat sinks, a faster engine, and more armor:

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...438f14bbd4418d1

Edited by JimboFBX, 13 October 2013 - 10:48 AM.

[Satan n stuff]

Engine double heat sinks give twice the cooling speed and twice the heat capacity of standard heat sinks. I'm not sure how you've upgraded your mech but there's almost never a reason to pick SHS over DHS. You'd have nearly the same cooling speed and heat capacity with 17 DHS, more with 18. For the record, that number is low enough that you don't need endo steel or ferro fibrous ( which you couldn't fit anyway ) and you can use a standard engine.

[aniviron]

Not sure why it's okay that energy weapons work fine on cold maps but not hot ones when ballistics work just fine on both.

I'm also not normally one to question Elo, but I have to wonder what kind of game you are playing where your opponents won't overwhelm a mech with 2 ER PPCs, 2 LLAS, and 2 MLAS but still using single heatsinks.

[Bishop Steiner]

aniviron, on 13 October 2013 - 04:35 AM, said:

Not sure why it's okay that energy weapons work fine on cold maps but not hot ones when ballistics work just fine on both.

Because Energy Weapons don´t weigh ridiculous amounts, take up huge amounts of internal space and require copious quantities of ammo with a penchant for internal explosions?

Also, only Gauss, AC10 and AC5 ¨work great¨on hot maps. AC20 has the highest ghost heat multiplier in the game, and starts with a high heat burden, and ac2s heat you up faster than anything this side the ER PPC.

Edited by Bishop Steiner, 13 October 2013 - 04:42 AM.

[aniviron]

Bishop Steiner, on 13 October 2013 - 04:41 AM, said:

Because Energy Weapons don´t weigh ridiculous amounts, take up huge amounts of internal space and require copious quantities of ammo with a penchant for internal explosions?

They do all of those things if you want heatsinks in your mech. I'm not sure what about this says "has lots of extra crit slots for things like Endo steel" to you; it's an incredibly hot build despite the alarming amount of space all that takes up.

Ammo only explodes 10% of the time when hit, and it's always stored in places that get shot only rarely.

[Bishop Steiner]

aniviron, on 13 October 2013 - 04:45 AM, said:

They do all of those things if you want heatsinks in your mech. I'm not sure what about this says "has lots of extra crit slots for things like Endo steel" to you; it's an incredibly hot build despite the alarming amount of space all that takes up.

Ammo only explodes 10% of the time when hit, and it's always stored in places that get shot only rarely.

so in other words, when all is said and done they kinda balance out pretty well,

End of the day, ballistics gotta worry about ammo running out (very rare ballistic design that carries enough ammo) and Energy mechs have to practice trigger discipline, but are more likely to still have viable firepower at the end of a match.

[JimboFBX]

Hmmm, I thought someone used the Awesome as an example of where SHS pass DHS, however with a large engine DHS indeed cool faster not even taking into account the capacity of engine DHS.

[Blue Hymn]

A few things that I would like to point out that has been brought up to the community for a while now, and should be laid as general agreement in the current game:

• There are problems with the Awesome, because it steps on a lot of sensitive issues that is affecting the current gameplay in general. It's a lot more glaring because this mech is designed with a unique role in mind - a boat, per se, and particularly being an energy boat.
  
• 
  Boating is generally a specialized build that focuses on a particular aspect of gameplay, whether it is a sniper role, an indirect fire-support role (ergo, missile boat), or hard-hitting, superior firepower mode, ergo DPS.
  
• 
  A large majority of players within the community often fall into the last category of boating - superior firepower. The more firepower you can dish out within a period of time towards a target, the faster the target might fall, or at least retreat to safety while you press on the advantage.
  
• 
  PPCs were initially not a viable weapon to begin with in early open beta, because of hit registration and the amount of heat it produced. When the developers finally tweaked the hit-reg and lowered the heat on ppcs to make it more competitive, we acquired the so-called PPC meta that spawned the evil beings called 6ppc Stalkers and ppc poptarts. Highlanders and Phracts took poptarting to a new level of holy sh- moment, and the community QQ'd to no ends about it.
  
• 
  PPC meta created a whiplash of hate for the ppc from the community, which the developers then fixed by implementing the so-called "ghost heat", which brutally penalized anyone who sported more than 2 of the same weapons (even on lasers, of all things. What is this I don't even --)
  
• 
  Ghost heat also applied to Ac20 builds that were running rampant during the ppc meta. Hordes of Jagermechs and Catapults? I'm looking at you. Don't fully understand why the AC2 was penalized as well...
  
• 
  Because of the nerf on energy weapons, people looked for the next best thing, which was the DPS power of ballistics. Cue in any mechs with ballistics, and they now have a significant advantage over the energy-based mechs.
  
• 
  The maps that were introduced did little, other than agitate this issue even further. The repeated introduction of Tourmaline and Terra Therma, anyone?

And that's just the mere history of how we got ghost heat, and the growing issue of disputes between energy and ballistics. So when you're saying that energy weapons and ballistics are 'fine', I would have to disagree on that. You can argue that ammo is a huge factor that limits ballistics, but unless you were fighting against a group of mechs by yourself for a while, or you're a lousy shot, ammo shortages should not be a concern, given the 12v12 nature of the game now. That, and you never need to worry about resupply, since every start of the match your mech gets reloaded with all the rounds it needs.

So.

To then apply the Awesome into this state of affairs, it needs some fixing. I would personally prefer some unique pilot perks to it, as in, ability to dissipate heat better than other mechs, or some ability to counteract ghost heat on it. It's an energy mech, for goodness sake. It should have at least some edge on that aspect, and not be looked down by the community as an inferior mech to others.

/endrant

[nemesis271989]

Bishop Steiner, on 13 October 2013 - 04:41 AM, said:

Because Energy Weapons don´t weigh ridiculous amounts, take up huge amounts of internal space and require copious quantities of ammo with a penchant for internal explosions?

Also, only Gauss, AC10 and AC5 ¨work great¨on hot maps. AC20 has the highest ghost heat multiplier in the game, and starts with a high heat burden, and ac2s heat you up faster than anything this side the ER PPC.

It would work better if we had Equal amount of percentage of selecting a map.
Translation.
We got new maps like: Tourmaline Desert, Terra Therma, and Crimson Straight recently. When other maps been around much longer. So, if you take and look at your, and everyone else's statistics Those 2-3 maps are now the most played for everyone. Which makes it unfair playing with lasers as main weaponry.