39 replies to this topic

[Sandpit]

Ok after having played on the test server for several drops I feel the burn time on the recent laser nerfs is too much. It needs to be dialed back a bit more. There's several reasons for my thoughts regarding this past the obvious burn time just being too much of a nerf.

First (the obvious one), the nerf is just too severe. The amount of time it takes to put all of a single lasers damage on target (notice I said target, not hit location) is nearly impossible unless you're sniping at long range form a secure position and not under fire from anyone else. After the first few matches I decided to start collecting a little anecdotal info.

On average I was lucky to get half of the damage from a single laser on target without having to either pull back myself and get back under cover, or the enemy mech drops behind cover themselves. That means you're doing half damage many times for all of the heat. Not much of a trade-off.
(Now please, before any of you throw out the "L2P", I may not be the most "leet" player in MWO, but I DO know how to play and do quite well in laser boats"

Now beyond that is another factor I noticed. The rate of fire coupled with the long burn really messes with being able to cycle through on chain fire. I wanted to test out a 4 CERLL Twolf. I quickly noticed that the RoF was outclassed by just about every other weapon systems out there including Clan ACs. This came out to roughly 1.5 (give or take, remember this is anecdotal I know but feedback nonetheless) to 1.0. That's a 3-2 in dealing damage. That's quite a bit and adds up very quickly if you're involved in any kind of brawl or facing down multiple opponents or just plain on a small map and not a whole lot of options.

There was also another quirk I noticed. Due to the longer burn times and the current RoF it can be nearly impossible to overheat if you just chain fire and cycle through. That sounds like a good thing on the surface but it's caused by a near impossible feasible and viable way to actually use this tactic. The beam duration wrecks the weapon's synergy with others.

I can understand they needed to be nerfed a bit but this just isn't working too well. Range and heat could have been much more effective without making it this harsh. It seems like PGI is systematically nerfing long range combat to make room for the "players wanting 600m combat range" and it kinda sucks. You don't have to be so harsh on weapons like this. Instead, consider looking at other nerfs, for months (years?), players pleaded with PGI to reduce the 3x effective range of ACs. You guys nerfed every which way you could think of except that one.

The complaints continued. You tried heat, ammo, RoF, projectile speed, and FINALLY you reduced the range. How many :ACs are OP" threads do you see floating around now? Not many. Many are asking you to change the nerf. Why not, instead, think about buffing other weapons that you think are designed to counter that weapon? Why not build the game UP instead of nerfing it down.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

I've been calling for buffs over nerfs since CB. Sadly, Paul only knows how to nerf.

[aniviron]

Lord Scarlett Johan of Yazoo, on 30 August 2014 - 12:00 AM, said:

I've been calling for buffs over nerfs since CB. Sadly, Paul only knows how to nerf.

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

[Sandpit]

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

even still, I laid out several examples of different ways to nerf that weapon. The burn time is just ridiculous

[Kilo 40]

I thought they were rolling back burn time on CERLL somewhat.

[YueFei]

Yeah, increased burn time hampers both offense and defense.

Would make more sense to just restore the weapon heat/damage to the TT levels. Right now the heat is 9, damage is 11.25.

TT puts heat at 12 and damage should be 10.

With 2 second burn time, if you can only land 1 second's worth, you're really only doing 6 damage for 9 heat. Or roughly 0.66 damage-per-heat.

With a 1 second burn time, if you can land 1 second of damage, you get 10 damage, for 12 heat. That's 0.83 damage-per-heat, so actually more efficient. But still a *lot* of heat, which would prevent it from being spammed too much.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

Not sure you and I are playing the same game. When clan mechs hit, TTKs went up. The only mechs with shorter TTKs are shitlord IS builds like the XL Atlas. Prior to clans, duels were a "who shot first and truer with PPC+ERPPC+Gauss." And once the firing commenced, someone was going to die within 10 seconds. Now duels last anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. If you're losing 20% of your mech in a single peak around a corner you got focus fired. Welcome to Mechwarrior.

I don't know if you understood my intention. But if one or two things are out of wack and too good, you nerf them. If one or two things are underused, you buff them. Doing so brings them in line with the rest.

But this game's balance is so bad that there are entire weapon classes that need buffs across the board. The entire line of pulse lasers on both sides comes to mind.

[Reitrix]

Personally I'd be happier with a function that would kill a Laser beam in progress.

It'd be nice to be able to fire off a laser, then kill the beam midshot (Incurring the full natural recycle of the laser of course) if an Ally happens to blunder into the path of the laser, or in the case of the CERLL, kill the Beam midshot if I'm taking return fire so i don't accidently dump that damage into an ally who moved up nearby.

Wouldn't cause any issues with allowing it to do more damage, since you'd be incurring the recycle time anyways, and would allow you to manage your heat better by killing the beams that aren't on a target.

[Deathlike]

Kilo 40, on 30 August 2014 - 12:17 AM, said:

I thought they were rolling back burn time on CERLL somewhat.

Yes, but unfortunately that came with increasing the duration of the ISLL, even though it does nowhere near the same damage as the CERLL.

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

TBH, the PPC/ERPPC nerf has increased TTK because the effective range @ the speed of the weapon makes it difficult to lay the shots where you want them to.

Since Clans were added, "TTK has increased", but generally for Clan Mechs over IS mechs. IS mechs never really changed... it's that Clan XL engines has extended their lives and tend to be as practical as a STD engine (durability), with the XL benefits (tonnage savings).

Quote

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

Well, Clan mechs didn't really reduce TTK... (well, only vs IS mechs where that is technically the case). I've gotten used to the Gauss charge now, though I've ended up not using the weapon altogether until it feels appropriate (probably waiting for "that mech" to use it with though no mech in specific in mind that I'd want to use it on).

Quote

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

Yes, SL and SPL is on that table (including pulse weapons in general), but both buffs are nerfs are necessary. The question is which weapons need it more than others. Increasing the heat on the CERMED seems a tad much IMO, I'd rather have the ISMed back to lower/stock heat. For weapons that have lesser range, making it beneficial for the IS to brawl is probably better than nerfing the Clans range advantage through what amounts to be a tad too much heat (although a heat increase is probably warranted, but I'd rather have the IS getting a benefit first and see the results before going this route).

A pure nerf or a pure buff "economy" is bad.

There was no reason back in Open Beta to overbuff PPCs/ERPPCs until hitreg/HSR gotten better. That is what made the PPC meta so dominating that the buffs eventually became nerfs back to where we started (for the most part). That's the kind of thing that has lingering effects over questioning the validity of the changes in the first place.

Edited by Deathlike, 30 August 2014 - 08:49 AM.

[Sandpit]

One mechanic I think might help is make lasers a "hold" weapon. Instead of having a set burn time you can hold the trigger down for up to the max burn time.

This means if a laser had a burn time of 1 second you can hold the button down for up to 1 second or if you let off tje trigger prior to that it stops tje beam. This would also help prevent FF when a teammate walks in front of you.

[Deathlike]

Sandpit, on 30 August 2014 - 09:54 AM, said:

One mechanic I think might help is make lasers a "hold" weapon. Instead of having a set burn time you can hold the trigger down for up to the max burn time.

This means if a laser had a burn time of 1 second you can hold the button down for up to 1 second or if you let off tje trigger prior to that it stops tje beam. This would also help prevent FF when a teammate walks in front of you.

That could work and yet be annoying.

I'd rather have something resembling MW3 pulse lasers... the longer it is in use, the longer the cooldown/charge.

[El Bandito]

Dunno about you, but I find laser duration to be perfectly in sync with Gauss charge. 1-shotted a sprinting Spider yesterday.

Edited by El Bandito, 30 August 2014 - 10:04 AM.

[InspectorG]

(ERLL) Why not cut the burn time and increase the cooldown time?

[Koniks]

The CERLL duration in PTS wasn't that different from where it was at launch. I didn't have a problem with it. The 4xCERLL build was overpowered again.

Edited by Mizeur, 30 August 2014 - 11:02 AM.

[n r g]

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

who says it's "not a twitch game" or cannot be one? you?

personally I want a relatively "average" TTK aswell, but I definitely want a game where reflexes and aim are important.

[lsp]

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

DOn't make stupid mistakes and you won't die, being bad shouldn't be rewarded. TTK is not too short, I've been saying the same thing as the op. Stop nerfing everything into the ground. You even play the previous mechwarriors? This is NOT a mechwarrior game, it's team deathmatch in robots that look like mechwarrior. Also, GR was never a bad weapon until it was ******* nerfed. PPC and AC5 where also never too good, they where working perfectly. Until all the cry babies probably yourself included whined endlessly until they where nerfed. Now you hardly ever see any ppc/ac5 builds. That's what this game should be called, cry baby online.

Edited by lsp, 30 August 2014 - 12:46 PM.

[Dolph Hoskins]

aniviron, on 30 August 2014 - 12:09 AM, said:

Because time-to-kill is just too darn long right now, yeah? I mean, peeking out and losing 20% of your mech's integrity for peeking in under a second is too much, you should be able to kill anyone instantly anytime they're exposed.

We've been getting buffs for a long time, and now a set of super OP mechs and weapons came out, and that dropped TTK even more. It's not about making weapons bad, it's about making combat fun. Remember how after the gauss rifle got a charge time everyone cried and loudly declared that it was garbage and they were never using it again and PGI how could you do this to us? And now it's back in vogue, and relatively popular at higher levels of play? Weapon balance does not occur in a vacuum. What made the gauss rifle bad before was the PPC and AC5 being too good. Now that those are somewhat toned back, the GR is in a pretty decent spot.

I'm not saying I approve of weapon balance right now, there are a lot of things off; the fact that there are weapons that are never ever used means there's a problem. But I'd much rather see nerfs than buffs to raise the TTK, and bring back that mechwarrior feel. This is not a twitch game. I'd rather see everything evenly nerfed than evenly buffed right now.

Quoted because this guy pretty much said what I was about to type.

I've always thought that some weapons will always be used less just because of their conception in MW in general. Some weapons like small lasers, machine guns, small AC's were ideal for light craft, small armor, and infantry. In MWO we only fight other battle mechs which ideally leaves certain weapons out of their most proficient use.

Of course numbers can be made to do whatever you set them for, but MWO is the only MW game where it is 100% mech on mech fighting so they are more hard pressed to give every weapon some sort of use.

Ultimately I think their overall balance was in the name of INCREASING TTK for all sides. Looking at the longer burn times and reduced damages for PPC it is clear it was done for both clan and IS.

EDIT: had to edit to increasing TTK.

Edited by The Ripper13, 01 September 2014 - 06:51 AM.

[Ultimax]

Sandpit, on 29 August 2014 - 11:40 PM, said:

Ok after having played on the test server for several drops I feel the burn time on the recent laser nerfs is too much. It needs to be dialed back a bit more. There's several reasons for my thoughts regarding this past the obvious burn time just being too much of a nerf.

First (the obvious one), the nerf is just too severe. The amount of time it takes to put all of a single lasers damage on target (notice I said target, not hit location) is nearly impossible unless you're sniping at long range form a secure position and not under fire from anyone else. After the first few matches I decided to start collecting a little anecdotal info.

On average I was lucky to get half of the damage from a single laser on target without having to either pull back myself and get back under cover, or the enemy mech drops behind cover themselves. That means you're doing half damage many times for all of the heat. Not much of a trade-off.
(Now please, before any of you throw out the "L2P", I may not be the most "leet" player in MWO, but I DO know how to play and do quite well in laser boats"

Now beyond that is another factor I noticed. The rate of fire coupled with the long burn really messes with being able to cycle through on chain fire. I wanted to test out a 4 CERLL Twolf. I quickly noticed that the RoF was outclassed by just about every other weapon systems out there including Clan ACs. This came out to roughly 1.5 (give or take, remember this is anecdotal I know but feedback nonetheless) to 1.0. That's a 3-2 in dealing damage. That's quite a bit and adds up very quickly if you're involved in any kind of brawl or facing down multiple opponents or just plain on a small map and not a whole lot of options.

There was also another quirk I noticed. Due to the longer burn times and the current RoF it can be nearly impossible to overheat if you just chain fire and cycle through. That sounds like a good thing on the surface but it's caused by a near impossible feasible and viable way to actually use this tactic. The beam duration wrecks the weapon's synergy with others.

I can understand they needed to be nerfed a bit but this just isn't working too well. Range and heat could have been much more effective without making it this harsh. It seems like PGI is systematically nerfing long range combat to make room for the "players wanting 600m combat range" and it kinda sucks. You don't have to be so harsh on weapons like this. Instead, consider looking at other nerfs, for months (years?), players pleaded with PGI to reduce the 3x effective range of ACs. You guys nerfed every which way you could think of except that one.

The complaints continued. You tried heat, ammo, RoF, projectile speed, and FINALLY you reduced the range. How many :ACs are OP" threads do you see floating around now? Not many. Many are asking you to change the nerf. Why not, instead, think about buffing other weapons that you think are designed to counter that weapon? Why not build the game UP instead of nerfing it down.

They added more heat, cut down the range, reduced the damage AND kept the burn time longer than it was originally.

Our pleas will fall on deaf ears. Unusable, unfun mechanics will be added to appease whoever it is they are trying to appease.

[Viges]

Lol OP did you just miss one patch at all? They reduced the burn time on most clan laser and increased it on IS erll.

At first I thought this topic is about ISERLL but no clanners again...

http://mwomercs.com/...-weapon-values/

[Sephlock]

Viges, on 30 August 2014 - 01:28 PM, said:

Lol OP did you just miss one patch at all? They reduced the burn time on most clan laser and increased it on IS erll.

At first I thought this topic is about ISERLL but no clanners again...

http://mwomercs.com/...-weapon-values/

He's talking about the changes on the PTS which (I think) got pushed to the main server quite recently.

I've been out of the loop for the past few days though, so take that with a grain of salt.