5
Clan mechs NEED energy weapons. And not because of lore or anything, or even the hardpoints (in some cases, it's all you can field), but because they have a lot less weight for weapons. Yes, you heard that right, they have less room for weapons than IS mechs. The only one that doesn't fit this is the DireWolf, but it is a very slow and clumsy whale.
Here are the stats for all current clan mechs, and the projected max free of some of the upcoming clan mechs (the heavier mechs). All the stats have been taken from smurfy, as it is a lot easier and faster than using the mechlab. All mechs were stripped of everything then put max armor. For the IS mechs, I tried to use the same engine as the clans, or the closest available, they only have the engines, max armor and 10 heatsinks. In the third column, I put alternative engines, closer to what we can see in the matches, some of them standard engines.
Finally, for the upcoming clan mechs, I used inner sphere mechs of the same tonage, with xl engines of the same size, and the engine full of heatsinks, as indicated in the wave 2 page. I reduced the 20% of the armor for ferro fibrous in the mechs that have it.
Here are the results:
As you can see, once you move into the medium territory, IS has a weight advantage. Even an standard 250 Hunchy has 5 more tons for weapons than a Nova.
And don't get me started on the heavies. The Summoner with 20 tons available, vs the cataphract than even with an XL340 has room for 28 tons, and the more usual XL300 has room room for 37 tons of weapons, half the weight of the mech.
Looking at the upcoming mechs, the 80 ton Gargoyle can put even less weapons than a 55 ton Stormcrow.
What this means is that Clan mechs are forced to use 1 big ballistic gun (Gauss, AC10 or 20), or too small ones (AC5, maybe 3 AC2), so the rest of weapons must be lasers and missiles.
Now, Clan big weapons are slightly lighter than IS (1 ton for large lasers and PPCs, and small ballistics like AC2 and 5, and 2 tons for AC10-20, 3 tons for Gauss). Even with that small advantage, you can't put 2 gauss and enough ammo for anything lighter than a Warhawk, while you can put 2 of them on a 65 ton Jagermech or 70 ton Cataphract.
So, as we have seem, only the two bigger clan mechs can rely on ballistic weapons as their main armament. That FORCES the clan player to use energy weapons and missiles. Now, it would be fine if energy weapons were good and effective, but in MWO lasers have never been very effective. PPC were before the speed nerf, but not anymore. After the huge heat nerf (the range nerf was granted), mechs that were already running very hot need to put even less of the few weight available to weapons.
I support the proposal for enabling endo/ff in mech clans. The only advantage they have now is the slightly better chance of survival with the XL engine, and the low weight missiles. Lasers are less heat efficient than IS, Autocannons are worse and you can't use more than 1 big or 2 small ones, and PPCs are so slow that it's very hard to hit a long range target. On top of that, IS mechs can have up to twice the weight in weapons than Clan mechs.
However, I think it should be very restricted. First, as per the Omnimech construction rules, if you modify the mech, it's no longer an Omnimech. Once you activate once of the modifications, than mech may never change Omnipods again. A big warning should appear when you try to do this modification. But, in order to avoid mixmaxing, taking the best omnipod hardpoints a mech has, it should ONLY be applied to one of the variants with the standard omnipods.
That will give to option to clan players to get some of the benefits of endo/ff and reduce the weight difference with the IS mechs at the expense of making the mech a normal mech with suboptimal hardpoint configuration.
Edited by valrond, 23 September 2014 - 01:20 AM.
