7 replies to this topic

[Burktross]

Hello. I know you all are thinking. This is going to be another,
"lrms op remov game or charge mc 1000 pr ton pls stahp or else i boyct"

But it isn't, I promise.
LRMs are not exactly OP. But in some areas I think all of us may agree changes are warranted. I myself would like to talk about the indirect fire missile arc, the one area I think ought to be tweaked.

As it is, I feel the indirect fire arcs (notice I'm talking about the current arcing, not indirect fire as a whole) provide unfair advantages in the form of not only being able to shoot out of high cover, but fire into others' high cover as well (high being little more taller than the mech taking cover). This current arc system effectively negates the victim's cover in most circumstances, due to the fact that most completely viable cover is packed with a large chunk of your team, and smaller, personal cover, when it is semi-rarely found, is often too short to circumvent the arc (mech sized obstacles or steep hills). Instead of punishing people who use cover, we should punish people that run in the open. Our current system basically pins and damages you, cover or not, which is a bit unfair and downright annoying and generally not fun to play against. In an effort to find compromise, I suggest several alternatives to the large up and down vertical nature of indirect fire arcing, whilst still retaining sufficient indirect fire ability and lending no quarter to exposed mechs (out of cover).

A) Indirect fire arcs only when in non-armed range (My prefered idea)
Essentially, as seen in my non-scaled drawing above, the LRMs travel straight in whatever direction aimed until 180m, at which point they semi-quickly curve at the target.

This system...
...allows firers to shoot over their own cover
...non-constant arc allows cover to be viable in most cases where appropriate, instead of it mostly being for naught.
...adds purpose to arm missiles, as indirect fire would only be possible when being able to aim the LRMs upwards. (Catapult has an advantage in lrming as it should)


B ) Same as above, except arcing is automatic regardless of arm-mounted missiles or not
(Takes emphasis off CPLT advantages)

C) Initial fire keeps the same arc (allowing it to sufficiently surpass the firer's own cover), but after said cover is surmounted and the LRMs head for their target, decrease the arc slightly to give it less vertical gain, thus making cover more viable and still punishing those in the open

Closing remarks:
I myself do not use LRM's devotedly, but they are a supplement to my main build. As a hunchback, I feel my LRMs are almost too effective myself, though this is purely subjective of course.

If you have trouble understanding any of these suggestions let me know, and I'll devote more time to a better diagram.

Feel free to counter argue or suggest other options, but remain civil, please.

If you have any other concerns about LRMs, we should talk about it here. Again: civilly.
Thanks.

(TL;DR: Indirect LRM arcs are a bit excessive, I propose a compromise.)

Prepares for metaphorical LRM storm of resistance.

Edited by Burktross, 15 October 2014 - 05:46 PM.

[zortesh]

The thing is you can take cover against lrms with a building just barely taller then your mech, aslong as the lrms are on the opposite side of the building, the arc isn't very steep, most people just don't truly pay attention to where the lrms are coming from, or don't hug the cover close enough and get knicked with 2-3 missiles out of every volley and think there getting the full damage.


I like how steep the up arc is in your example, but if the down arc were any shallower ingame it'd be pretty much useless on every map but cuastic, lrms are already not used in higher teirs because lrms are so easy to avoid.

[DevDeathRay]

I go back and forth on this quite a bit, and I'm never really sure where I stand at any given point. One thing I do know for sure though, is that it's exceptionally annoying when your team gets LRM barraged and huddles around the few pieces of sufficient terrain like scared cattle. What I would like more than anything is to have access to PUG match statistics so we could see exactly how often superior LRM numbers equal a win.

[Burktross]

zortesh, on 15 October 2014 - 06:11 PM, said:

The thing is you can take cover against lrms with a building just barely taller then your mech, aslong as the lrms are on the opposite side of the building, the arc isn't very steep, most people just don't truly pay attention to where the lrms are coming from, or don't hug the cover close enough and get knicked with 2-3 missiles out of every volley and think there getting the full damage.


I like how steep the up arc is in your example, but if the down arc were any shallower ingame it'd be pretty much useless on every map but cuastic, lrms are already not used in higher teirs because lrms are so easy to avoid.

I beg to differ. Many a time have I manned the opposite side of a building from LRMs, only to be slowly hit.
As for the Arc, I'm fairly certain this larger arc is a relatively recent implementation.

I also must point out that my diagram isn't entirely accurate. LRM's would still arc after 180m, but at the direct fire degree.

[zortesh]

Burktross, on 15 October 2014 - 06:24 PM, said:

I beg to differ. Many a time have I manned the opposite side of a building from LRMs, only to be slowly hit.
As for the Arc, I'm fairly certain this larger arc is a relatively recent implementation.

I also must point out that my diagram isn't entirely accurate. LRM's would still arc after 180m, but at the direct fire degree.

So your saying you know exactly what angle every swarm was coming in on and were in the correct place to have cover from all of them?

Good lrm boats, particularly those in mediums will move off to differing angles to negate cover as much as they can.
You probably have something like 93% cover, lrms come in as a wall, or a pane of glass if you will, sometimes the lrms at the top leading edge will still hit you, particularly if your not quite close enough to the cover, or the cover is not quite high enough, normally if your mech is big.

They might throw 200 lrms at you and maybe 5-10 get through, you can generally just torso twist the tiny amount of damage getting through over your mech till the narc runs out, sometimes its way safer then attempting to run to different cover.

Key rule, if you don't know the position of the lrmboat(all the lrmboats), you probably don't know where to take cover, thankfully as they send up walls of fireworks is easy to track em.

To demonstrate, lrms come down in squares of missiles more or less, so the angle incoming makes a big difference.

This is the typical not quite enough cover scenario, a tiny amount of the strait on lrm swarm makes it over, but the other mech even thou only off to the side a bit gets a decent amount of missiles through, since the walls coming in side of and a whole corner of it gets through.


This is generally the situation I see when people complain there being hit while in cover, but really there only in cover vs one of the lrm boats.

Edited by zortesh, 15 October 2014 - 07:20 PM.

[Burktross]

Be that as it may with buildings-- not every map has them or an abundant amount of them, with most cover either being impractical map boundaries (entire mountains on Alpine), Hills (Caustic), or Medium mech sized rocks (Canyon Network). And even these are placed sparsely (when placed at all) for 8 man matches, let alone 12.
Only map I havent experienced LRM overload on is HPB Manifold and Mining Collective

[zortesh]

Any wall or high thing with a flat top edge is lrm cover.
Hells the walls of the canyons can be partial lrm cover if there coming form the right angles, and theres an abundance of rocks, and its very easy to maintain concealment on that map, plus blasting lights cresting over the top of the canyons is pretty easy.

Hpg manifold and mining collective have excessive lrm cover, thou a sufficiently mobile lrm force can still get the angles with enough effort, atleast on mining collective, weirdly hpg is harder for lrms.

Heres some tips.
Alertness: be aware of where the swarms are luanching from, keep a eye on the sky to know there locations even if you arent the one being lrmed at the time, knowing where the lrm boats are parked will save you time, also lookout for any movement of lights off on the side or heading out behind you, a ecm raven in the backfield can ruin your day.

Be ready: to nuke lights, you see someone launching narc beacons blast em every time they pop out, i wont count tagger as if someones tagging you and you don't just flatout blast them into oblivion your a bad player.

Concealment: every map has this, break line of sight, change your line of movement to avoid the incoming lrms and your safe, this is why you can pop and shoot vs lrmboats, you just need to step back out of sight and change the angle of your movement a bit to avoid any damage, having radar deprivation helps with this to a insane degree.

Stick with the team: this gives you ecm/ams cover, but it also makes popping out to narc you way more hazardous to the light.

Keep moving: Even if you arent going anywhere rock back and forwards, narc beacons are very slow(they make ppcs seem uber fast) and take alot of leading, standing still will make you a easy target, this tip applies even more importantly when you face dual guass spam and any time you stand still might result in instadeath from headshot.

Keep im mind you have no cover/charge the bloody enemy: On cuastic you will see lrmteams win over and over, while the direfire team sits one map grid away, often just over a hill, or around a corner from the lrmboats, the team charges en-masse and forces a no cover direfire brawl, those lrmboats will melt like butter before a blow torch.(I've seen it happen enough times, sadly pugs and charging don't seem to want to mix) But at the very least your situation is no worse, and the enemys now taking alot of return fire.

Attack: Lrm boats are good at blasting stationary forces into oblivion, they aren't going to run into your guns, battles of attrition are there strongpoint, don't play there game, force a decisive battle or a brawl, long drawn out actions favor lrmboats.

You may think you can hide in cover till they run out of ammo, but that will just let them pick off team members 1 by 1, to result in a few of your guys or alot of damaged mechs facing a bunch of lrmboats with no ammo, but full armour, lasers, and nolonger suffering from there biggest weakness of being entirely packed full of explosives.


For alpine specifically.

Range: lrms are medium range weapons on alpine, narc beacons which have a range of 450-600 are extremely short range, don't sit within 600 meters of where the narc mech is narcing from, sit back further, they will have to fully abandon cover to narc you, which means you get a easy kill

[terrycloth]

Maybe have LRMs aimed high try to fly higher over cover if you're close to the target, since they have enough fuel to go 1000m? If someone's 200m away but behind a tall building, you could fire them 400m up and drop them right on their head. If they're 900m away, they have to use a much lower arc.

But in an alternate mode (assuming you want to make torso LRMs viable compared to arm LRMs) they'd head straight for the target and hit faster. This would be very nice for dumbfire LRMs, which are currently almost unusable (your enemy has to be really stupid and you need to be able to click at the ground behind them).

Making target lock stick even if your aim was vertically above the target would let you do this routinely. (right now you can do it but it's clumsy and sometimes requires you to re-acquire a lock before the missiles hit)

You'd also want the actual arc (for locked missiles) to be 30 degrees or so above the aiming point so that a naïve use of LRMs wouldn't be totally useless. To fire straight at a target you'd aim at the ground.

Edited by terrycloth, 16 October 2014 - 02:25 PM.