wanderer, on 18 February 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:
The solution isn't fiddling with heat or group fire.
It's making the weapons incapable of delivering frontloaded, instant damage in the first place. That's the flaw in the system that got fixed with lasers, and it can be fixed with everything else that has the same point-click-big damage.
Honestly, I'm not sure that's really true.
The fundamental basis for the weapons design in battletech is most definitely that SOME weapons are designed specifically for large, front loaded damage.. The AC20 and Gauss rifle come to mind.
And I think that the system actually can deal with those weapons fine.. what tends to break the whole model is the fact that you can take an arbitrary number of weapons, tape them all together, and create single "uber-weapons".
For instance, we can look through the history of balancing in MWO, and see how this specific issue has resulted in a multitude of balance changes which many people agree are bad. For instance, the medium laser was nerfed very early on back in closed beta... why was it nerfed? In small numbers, its original stats weren't too strong. What made it very strong was that you could boat a huge number of them on the Hunchback 4P. In that case, even though they had a burn time, the fact that you could stack NINE of them together made it such that you could still create a super strong weapon.. far stronger than was really intended for 9 tons of weaponry.
Or the PPC.. No one really complained about single PPC's.. ever. It wasn't until people started using 4 of them (or more) and started cranking out single hits that punched through your mech with 40 points all at once.
Or the AC20... A powerful weapon, but even so, the complaints tend to center around mechs which are combining the ac20 with another weapon... whether that be another AC20, or PPC"s, or whatever.
I think you are making a mistake in thinking that the answer is to simply make everything into DOT weapons like lasers... because you are failing to take into account that the one really different thing between mechwarrior (in all incarnations to date) and battletech is this fact that all your weapons magically combine to form super weapons... thus breaking all of the original weapons balance, as well as the armor model. Basically, the ability to combine weapons fire means you need to totally revamp the entire system.
One way to do this is to try to force players to land MORE shots to accomplish the same task... Ghost heat was a misguided attempt to do this. Paul's idea was that if you created ghost heat for firing 4 PPC's, that players would fire those weapons in two groups. But what he failed to account for was that folks would just combine DIFFERENT weapons to achieve exactly the same goal.. because that is how you win mechwarrior, and as long as you can accomplish that goal in ANY way, then that is what people will do. No one had some great love for PPC's... they just happened to use them in those configurations because they were the most effective. When that changed, they just moved to the next most effective setup. The fundamental game didn't change.
The OP's suggestion here actually seems like it would BETTER address that same issue... Because it'd really put a hard limit on how many weapons you could group on a firing group. It would much more directly, and transparently, force you to stagger your fire, and thus force you to land more shots... giving your target more opportunity to twist and soak damage, etc.
And at the same time, it doesn't force you to make weird changes to weapons, and try to make them all into DOT weapons like lasers.. because really, that change will be terrible... because it will just mean that lasers, with no ammo requirements and instant-hit capabilities, become totally dominant, just like they were in MW4.
The OP's suggestion would achieve the same things that you want to achieve... in that it will prevent single, large point damage shots... but it'll do it by limiting a mech's ability to fire more than a certain amount of weaponry.
What I like about such a suggestion though is that it doesn't harm a good player's ability to crank out a ton of damage onto a target... as long as they are good enough to keep landing shots on that same location.
Ultimately, it would be a simpler, more transparent, and much less easily sidestepped system for achieving what Ghost Heat tried to do... And hopefully, it would help eliminate the need to go around and continually gimp whatever weapon current fits into the large-alpha-strike duct-tape configuration.. I mean, that's why they nerfed the AC10, which really was a totally ridiculous move given how that weapon really wasn't even that good.
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