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[Eggs Mayhem]

Hello All, prepare for wall of text/spreadsheet warrior.

I've been playing MWO since closed beta, and I've seen weapon/equipment balance swing all over the place but it has never truly felt fully balanced. So I've compiled here a list of things wrong with the current state of balance and how I would go about fixing them. Keep in mind, the values/mechanics I've written up would be intended for a PTS run, as there would of course be a fair number of tweaks to get things to 'feel' right. Also, this is all with the assumption that the Great Requirkening is complete, in that pretty much all weapon-specific quirks are gone.

1. IS vs Clans
You would think this is an obvious one, but it's not in the way that you'd probably think. In-game, laser vomit and high alphas dominate the meta, and it's mostly because Clan mech weapons are lighter, hit harder, and reach farther than IS weapons, so Clan mechs are more capable of carrying high-alpha builds. Objectively looking the numbers, Clan weapons are as efficient if not less efficient than IS weapons so they are, in fact, fairly balanced (they could use tweaking, which is later in this WOT).
This leads to the second point being the core issue here:

2. High Alphas
This is the number one gripe I see on here and it's for a good reason, all meta-builds are centered doing as much damage in the shortest time possible at a single optimum range. We have no real mechanic for limiting this outside of ghost heat, which does not do the job for a number of reasons:

• Ghost heat does not prevent high alphas, it only punishes. For many builds, this is only a little slap on the wrist.
  
• Ghost heat does not take into account combinations of weapons that behave similarly that can circumvent the mechanic. First build that comes to mind is the TBRs 2xLPL 4xERML build, or even the DWFs 2xERPPC 2xGR.
  
• Ghost heat has no effect on Gauss Rifles.

And so I propose a new mechanic: Energy. This has been brought up and suggested for years, and I really think it is the only way to control these high alpha builds without completely breaking them.

But it would operate like this:

• Every mech, regardless of weight, has the same maximum energy value (I've chosen 20 from here on out, no more than 20 damage should be leaving the barrels of a single mech at any point in time, save LRMs).
  
• Every mech has a tonnage-dependent Energy recharge speed. Through numerous theory-tests I've determined this reacharge speed to be:
  
  • 5 + 5*(tonnage/100).
• The installment of Single Heat Sinks would further increase this Energy Recharge Speed by 40%. At the highest, a SHS 100t mech would have a recharge speed of 14, but still have the maximum capacity at 20.
  
• Each weapon has an Energy value, this value is dependent on the Damage, Range, and Spread of a weapon. The value is then globally multiplied so that the highest Energy weapon (in my findings, the Gauss Rifle) can still be fired at just under 20 Energy.
  
• If you attempt to fire a weapon group that, as a whole, requires more energy than is currently charged, the weapons will not fire.

3. TTK Is Too Low
We're all aware of this I'm sure, any positioning mistakes in-game are punished super hard regardless of how much armor you have or how fast you are. Although removing high alphas in point 2 will increase TTK, I feel that a little more needs to be done. In announcing the PTS, Paul mentioned that each mech is being rated in four categories: Firepower, Protection, Mobility, and Infotech. Currently as it stands, Firepower is worth much more than the sum of the other 3 parts of what makes a mech. A global reduction in DPS would help bring firepower down to at least be less than the sum of the other 3 parts.
Here's where it gets fun, over the past few years I've been trying on and off to develop a cost function for weapons in MWO, one that can take in all manner of values and variables that define a weapon and spit out a value that can be used to compare two entirely different weapon systems and determine which one is better and which one is worse. The first iteration of this function was in the form of the DPSPT metric (Damage Per Second Per Ton), me and a couple other guys here independently came up with that metric years ago and was great for determining the efficiency of similar weapons, but did not take into account several other very important variables.
Here is its current iteration:

Variables:

• G - Grand Unified Value, metric by which I'm comparing weapons
  
• R - Range (meters)
  
• v - Velocity (meters / second)
  
• U - Duration (second)
  
• D - Damage
  
• Ms- Spread Modifier
  
• Mc- Critical Hit Modifier
  
• H - Heat
  
• A - Ammunition per ton

Some of the equation is arbitrary, most of it is not. The first term is the range multiplier, flamers get a score of 1 at 90m, where LRMs get a score of 2 at 1000m. Everything between is related linearly. The second term is the velocity multiplier, and is a relation to how fast a shot makes use of its range. Because velocity only matters a little, its multiplier is not as large. There is a bit of manual data entry when it comes to the third term, Ms, and Mc. The third term is essentially a FaceTime multiplier: how long do you have to look at a target to maximize your DPS, where never having to look at your target is 2 and having to look constantly at your target is 1. LRMs by their nature require that you stare at the target throughout the duration of flight, so they've recieved a score of 1. Machine Guns and Flamers have a cooldown of <1s, so they also receive a score of 1. As I have no actual numbers in my hands for how wide weapons spread, these are somewhat arbitrarily chosen for Ms. Mc is calculated situationally and represents the average amount of extra damage done by critical hits as a percentage + 100%. The fifth term is the damage impulse of that weapon. If two weapons have the same DPS, weight, HPS, and range, but one has a higher cooldown with higher damage, which one is better? Objectively, the one the higher cooldown is better because it places all of its DPS in one spot, and sooner. This term reflects that. The last term is the fabled DPSPT.



Of course there are multiple trends that need to exist when relating multiple weapons to eachother. For example, looking at the SL, ML, and LL.

• SL:
  
  • Lowest Damage
    
  • Lowest DPS
    
  • Lowest Heat
    
  • Shortest Range
    
  • Highest Efficiency
• ML:
  
  • Medium everything
• LL:
  
  • Highest Damage
    
  • Highest DPS
    
  • Highest Heat
    
  • Longest Range
    
  • Lowest Efficiency

I feel that my numbers maintain the trends that were present in TT, in order to keep their flavor consistent. Why not just use TT values? Because aiming. In TT, weapons that did a lot of damage in one location are incredibly inefficient when compared to their smaller version, because it needed to outweigh the benefit of putting as much damage as it does in one spot. But now in MWO we ultimately dictate where every shot goes, so that benefit is lost. The only reasons weapons get less efficient with size is really its range, you gotta pay extra heat to throw your damage further.



So here are the stats I've chosen for all the weapons

4. Ammo Per ton too low
Easy fix, just increase it all except SRMS and SSRMS (which honestly feel just right). Stock mechs should be viable right?

5. Ultra Autocannons
UACs for both Clan and IS are busted in their favor. Outside of spite, there's almost no reason not to take the Ultra variant of an AC over the vanilla one, especially for clanners. In my spreadsheet, there are two entries for UACs, one normal and one in ultra mode. The mechanics for UACs should remain as they are, but with one key difference: upon firing the ultra shot (which can be fired after the weapons has endured half of its cooldown) an additional cooldown time is added. This extra time can be derived from the spreadsheet as such:

• CooldownAdded = 2x UltraModeCooldown - NormalModeCooldown

6. LRMs
These are tricky, and I'm still not certain that what I've done to help them will work without playtesting. All the changes I've made can be observed in the spreadsheet, but here's why I made them. LRMs tend to swing the hardest when it comes to balance. The tiniest decimal change to their damage can mean the difference between never seeing LRMs and ONLY seeing LRMs, and the reasons for this is the inconsistency when trying to connect with them, and the sheer amount of potential damage: when only a few connect, you may as well have never bothered to bring them. When they all connect, you can melt mechs in seconds. So the overall changes I've made (on top of the lowering of DPS in point 3) are:

• Velocity increase: Make it easier to hit with LRMs by going from 160 m/s to 400 m/s (ignoring the arc, it hits max range at 2.5 seconds).
  
• Damage increase: For IS only, make sure that a 10 ton weapon hits like one.
  
• Cooldown increase: Decrease DPS for the weapon and remove the constant barraging that causes LRMs to seemingly multiply.

7. SRMs
Similarly to LRMs, they've received a Damage increase and DPS/Cooldown decrease. This should retain their sort of 'striker' feel.

8. MGs
I didn't touch these too much when doing the overall balance, though in order to keep them in line they now draw a little heat and energy. Mostly to prevent future boating from being an issue when we get mechs like the Piranha (12 MGs).

9. Flamers
These poor things. They've been useless since closed beta, but I think I've found a way for them to shine without being OP. With the introduction of the Energy mechanic, we have a way of limiting DPS. Leveraging it we can have the flamer significantly increase the heat of the target it hits, but it eats up energy more aggressively than any other weapon. And because your Energy is tied directly to how long you can hold the trigger, you can only raise a mechs heat so high. In the 'Equipment' tab in my spreadsheet at the bottom, you will see what sort of heat damage should be dealt by a flamer. If you were to carry nothing but flamers on, say, a HBK-P (9 of em) you'd still be doing the exact same heat damage per second to your target, but you'd be able to do it in much shorter spikes of heat instead of a long slow blast of flame. The numbers are tailored so that it is not possible for two mechs to completely stunlock another mech, but 3 will. The way I see it, if you've already got 3 mechs on you, you're already dead.

10. Single Heat Sinks
Tired of the DHS tax? I am. I wanted to make sure that SHSs had a role that did not usurp the DHS but the role simply wasn't being a stepping stone on to DHS. The changes are thusly:

• No more base heat. Start at 0.
  
• No more TrueDubs. All DHSs are treated the same
  
• SHSs add 2.1 heat capacity.
  
• DHSs add 1.5 heat capacity.
  
• SHSs remove 0.1 heat per second.
  
• DHSs remove 0.14 heat per second.
  
• When SHSs are equipped, Energy recharge rate is increased by 40%.

This then provides two distinct flavors of builds. SHS builds will be more about dealing a lot of damage quickly, then slinking off to cool down. DHS builds will be more about staying power, and maximizing your sustained DPS.



11. InfoTech
I was really inspired by the direction the PTS was going specifically with infotech, and I get the feeling that the way I went with modifying all infotech equipment is similar to how PGI will do it for the Great Rebalance. All infotech changes can be found in the Equipment tab in the spreadsheet, assume all previous functionality is gone. As for command console, I'm really stumped on how to make that 3 tons useful. I think what I've done will help, but I don't think it's quite enough. Playtests would help, but that doesn't help me here.

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So that's what I'd like to see done to MWO. The overall theme being that we need this game to stop being so twitchy and fast, it does not feel like a true Mechwarrior right now (though I'm still playing it and don't want to stop). And again, this would be a starting point to begin balancing everything. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list every little thing I'd want to see different.

Is there anything here that you disagree with? Please discuss why.


TLDR: Overhaul everything.