10 replies to this topic

[xXBagheeraXx]

Power draw? WHY?

Why do we continue with gimmicky fixes to the heat system/scale when we have...what...FOUR previous games with perfectly good examples of working heat systems? Counting MWLL 5.

We did not, nor never did need ghost heat.

We do not need power draw.

What you need is a simple heat system that rewards balance in builds and punishes bad heat management.

I'm going to use Mechwarrior 3 for an example because it highlights the weapon that brought the current ghost heat into this game, the PPC. IN that game in most mechs if you fired more than two PPCS, you shut down...fired more than 3, your mechs reactor blew...Seems simple right?

Mechwarrior 3 however had 2.0 double heatsinks, so if you invest heavily in double heatsinks, your mech cools down very quickly from that double PPC shot allowing you to quickly fire off another pair, or rapidly chain fire the 4 ppcs the warhawk was known for carrying. This simple system for a relatively ancient game solves 2 problems this game has..

Front loaded damage: you cannot fire 4 and 6 ppc salvoes without destroying yourself. This would have killed the 6 ppc stalker before it even became an issue. The B33f's Direstar would never exist. It is walking 100 ton proof that your heat system needs work. I hear you even mentioned it but dont seem to realise this.

The "laser meta" gets a bit nerfed AND buffed at the same time. You cannot fire large numbers of high end lasers all at once, but you CAN still fire them in separate groups if you give yourself time to cool off. (spreading out your damage spikes, increasing TTK) This way we can curtail the laserspam a bit without nerfing weapons or introducing silly global mechanics instead of fixing the underlying issue. No chassis suffer and become obsolescent, the laser vomit gets nerfed, but people running resonalbe laser boats dont have their favorite rides nerfed to non existence. Everyone wins.

My suggestion is this:

Reduce the heat capacity mechs have. A mastered mech for example when firing a pair of Erppcs should spike up to around 75% heat or so. You still have a hard cap of 2 erppcs and PERHAPS 3 standard ppcs (heat of individual weapons could be messed with a bit as balance sees fit, i see no harm in being able to fire 3 standard is ppcs)

Reduce/eliminate the effect of the environment on heat generated and heat capacity. For example if you fire an alpha in mech A on Tourmaline and it gives you 50% heat, you get 50% heat on Polar...however your mech will cool off from that heat MUCH faster in the cooler environment than it does on Tourmaline. External temperature should only affect heat dissipation, not capacity.

Reduce the effect of number of heatsinks on total heat capacity...This part is up for debate. I dont think having LARGE numbers of heatsinks should increase your capacity all that much.

These fixes along with some tinkering with the base heat on certain weapons can keep a de-facto "ghost heat" system in place (since you cant fire more than 2 erppcs anyway) without the gimmics...Mechs that rely on boating large numbers of smaller weapons do not (and should not) have to worry about the ghost heat/power draw system hurting their builds...I mean who complains about a medium laser boat Hunchback???

Now as far as punishments go, we can again go back to mechwarrior 3, and Mechwarrior 4. In MW3 you could blow your reactor for heat spikes too large to handle, and in Mechwarrior 4, even approaching shutdown heat Caused detrimental effects to your mech. You turned slower, you moved slower, and your hud flickered badly. I KNOW you guys already have code in the game for negative movement speed effects as witnessed by the clan XL nerf, so this movement penalty could easily be added. Heat management is a huge part of this game and should be an important gameplay feature, this would bring about more mixed and balanced builds instead of Lasers or GTFO.

Mechwarrior Living Legends expanded on this, Even keeping your reactor within around80% of shutdown started damaging your mech. You would start blowing heatsinks left and right. Lose too many and well....BOOM....effects like ammo cook offs and gauss crits from keeping your reactor redlined too long would be interesting additions to this game.

[El Bandito]

As much as I appreciate your enthusiasm, PGI is already doing its thing. The higher ups had decided that GH is not to be scrapped but expanded upon, and re-tuned. Guess someone really likes their GH system.

Besides, there is no guarantee that heat limit hard cap will cure the balance issue, as it has some issues of its own. Finally, different heat penalties (such as DHS blowing, HUD flickering, movement slowing down etc) should be in game, GH or not.

Edited by El Bandito, 04 March 2016 - 05:21 PM.

[Surn]

This game has become a complete cluster bomb.

[Intrepid]

Power Draw is lore based. Virtual World's Tesla 3 system was a marvel of in-game enginnering. Bring that level of detail to MWO and it would instantly transform the entire game.

[Chief Tigris]

Well said Bagheera, I agree wholly with most of the bottom half of what you wrote there.

[Jaeger Gonzo]

So where is any info on this power draw? So we know what are you complaining about.

[Nightshade24]

xXBagheeraXx, on 02 March 2016 - 07:51 PM, said:

Power draw? WHY?

Why do we continue with gimmicky fixes to the heat system/scale when we have...what...FOUR previous games with perfectly good examples of working heat systems? Counting MWLL 5.

We did not, nor never did need ghost heat.

We do not need power draw.

What you need is a simple heat system that rewards balance in builds and punishes bad heat management.

I'm going to use Mechwarrior 3 for an example because it highlights the weapon that brought the current ghost heat into this game, the PPC. IN that game in most mechs if you fired more than two PPCS, you shut down...fired more than 3, your mechs reactor blew...Seems simple right?

Mechwarrior 3 however had 2.0 double heatsinks, so if you invest heavily in double heatsinks, your mech cools down very quickly from that double PPC shot allowing you to quickly fire off another pair, or rapidly chain fire the 4 ppcs the warhawk was known for carrying. This simple system for a relatively ancient game solves 2 problems this game has..

Front loaded damage: you cannot fire 4 and 6 ppc salvoes without destroying yourself. This would have killed the 6 ppc stalker before it even became an issue. The B33f's Direstar would never exist. It is walking 100 ton proof that your heat system needs work. I hear you even mentioned it but dont seem to realise this.

The "laser meta" gets a bit nerfed AND buffed at the same time. You cannot fire large numbers of high end lasers all at once, but you CAN still fire them in separate groups if you give yourself time to cool off. (spreading out your damage spikes, increasing TTK) This way we can curtail the laserspam a bit without nerfing weapons or introducing silly global mechanics instead of fixing the underlying issue. No chassis suffer and become obsolescent, the laser vomit gets nerfed, but people running resonalbe laser boats dont have their favorite rides nerfed to non existence. Everyone wins.

My suggestion is this:

Reduce the heat capacity mechs have. A mastered mech for example when firing a pair of Erppcs should spike up to around 75% heat or so. You still have a hard cap of 2 erppcs and PERHAPS 3 standard ppcs (heat of individual weapons could be messed with a bit as balance sees fit, i see no harm in being able to fire 3 standard is ppcs)

Reduce/eliminate the effect of the environment on heat generated and heat capacity. For example if you fire an alpha in mech A on Tourmaline and it gives you 50% heat, you get 50% heat on Polar...however your mech will cool off from that heat MUCH faster in the cooler environment than it does on Tourmaline. External temperature should only affect heat dissipation, not capacity.

Reduce the effect of number of heatsinks on total heat capacity...This part is up for debate. I dont think having LARGE numbers of heatsinks should increase your capacity all that much.

These fixes along with some tinkering with the base heat on certain weapons can keep a de-facto "ghost heat" system in place (since you cant fire more than 2 erppcs anyway) without the gimmics...Mechs that rely on boating large numbers of smaller weapons do not (and should not) have to worry about the ghost heat/power draw system hurting their builds...I mean who complains about a medium laser boat Hunchback???

Now as far as punishments go, we can again go back to mechwarrior 3, and Mechwarrior 4. In MW3 you could blow your reactor for heat spikes too large to handle, and in Mechwarrior 4, even approaching shutdown heat Caused detrimental effects to your mech. You turned slower, you moved slower, and your hud flickered badly. I KNOW you guys already have code in the game for negative movement speed effects as witnessed by the clan XL nerf, so this movement penalty could easily be added. Heat management is a huge part of this game and should be an important gameplay feature, this would bring about more mixed and balanced builds instead of Lasers or GTFO.

Mechwarrior Living Legends expanded on this, Even keeping your reactor within around80% of shutdown started damaging your mech. You would start blowing heatsinks left and right. Lose too many and well....BOOM....effects like ammo cook offs and gauss crits from keeping your reactor redlined too long would be interesting additions to this game.

"Power draw? WHY?"
Because so far it's public number 1 idea on the best ways to ballance MW: O's firepower potential and alpha strike situation.
It was the most suggested idea and it was finally put under consideration and is being adapted.

4 previous games did it perfectly? HAHAHHAAHAHAAHA... ha...
MW2 = medium pulse laser boat. You are immune to all incoming damage and can do alphas to 1 shot kill 100 ton mechs, buildings, fortresses, dropships, etc... for an abuse that basically comes at a low cost of 0 heat.
If you had a mad dog running around killing atlases in 1 alpha and able to kill 12 mechs in only a few seconds I doubt you call this perfect ballance... (note: MW2 had varying different versions... pentium, valina, etc had different stats for some reason. Apparently the earlier versions had medium pulse lasers with heat)
I can't speak much about MW3 as I haven't played it but in MW4 the multiplayer was abused to hell wit hthe fact the ER large laser is so OP, the meta was having an assault mech with 0.5 tons of armour or less, jumpjets, ecm, and as many ER large lasers and gauss rifles you can fit or ER PPC's able to give 2 shot kills to enemy mechs (as MW4 prevented an alpha strike 1 shot killing- it leaves you with like 1 point of health after such attack)... Ghost heat is the most needed here- as another troll build example is a longbow with 4 SRM 6, 6 SRM 4, and 2 er medium lasers which had so much firepower even 100 ton mechs fall over and if they survive the first shot- the second kills you. Saying MW4 had it's heat and 'alpha strike' ballance is FAR from perfect. even when Mektek fixed the OP gripe of the ER large lasers and such the boating didn't end...

Saying MW4 had no problems with it is like saying the Titanic was unsinkable

We really needed ghost heat... the main mech that pushed the scale or was a catalyst to this ballance change was the Stalker with 6 PPC's = long range 60 damage alpha strike. Pretty powerful however this affected all mechs ranging from 6 AC 2 jagermechs to mechs running around with dual AC 20's...
Power draw however is an extremely better version of the ghost heat scale which is not biased... It makes stuff like 2 large pulse lasers + 4 er mediums for clans not be a loop hole anymore as it affects all weapons. No more ghost heat min-maxing and such and this system rewards ballanced builds and not alpha striking non stop without baning it.

MW2, MW4, also had DHS and PPC's... I should mention MW3 made PPC's behave similar to PPC's now... aka ghost heat.
Fire to many at the same time = shut down. Chain fire = all good... very poor example used here...

Also the B33fs direstar would actually exist... and may be considered a legit mech and not a troll mech if we used MW3 logic... for eg: (note: is not the b33f)





Most of your suggestions I feel ruin the concept/ idea of even the bare concept of Heatsinks (ie the fact an adder can run twin PPC's just as effectively as a direwolf?)
However bare minimal heatscale is something I like the idea off, going slower the hotter you are and such... 90-100% should have random chance of ammo explosion and/or shutdown. But other than that...

[VinJade]

Power draw one of the dumbest things anyone could want and anyone who wanted it are just fools.

remove quirks as they are now & power draw.

replace quirks with something that belongs just to some mechs like LRM cycle time is lessened for true Missile Support mechs, faster targeting for the Crab(it in lore had some of the most advanced systems in the inner sphere) and so on.

but do away with everything else.

[Nightshade24]

VinJade, on 05 March 2016 - 09:54 AM, said:

Power draw one of the dumbest things anyone could want and anyone who wanted it are just fools.

remove quirks as they are now & power draw.

replace quirks with something that belongs just to some mechs like LRM cycle time is lessened for true Missile Support mechs, faster targeting for the Crab(it in lore had some of the most advanced systems in the inner sphere) and so on.

but do away with everything else.

That fixes none of the problems we are working towards to iron out and recreates problems we didn't have for years

[VinJade]

The problem I am hearing is we have those that like to create the 'perfect' build whatever that might be for them, and I do understand things like the MWO Pls/ER L/Lasers, PPCs, GRs, ECMs, and so on.

They need to find a way to fix DHS as they deal with twice as much heat dissipation(or they are not worth their size), and because of the Quirks we see mechs getting ether unfair Dis/advantages that shouldn't have them or favoring one tech over another.

good example is the TW or just clan mechs in general which ether have no quirks or if they do its negative while the IS has almost nothing but good quirks and if they have some gbad quirks it is to try and balance out mistakes they themselves made.

The only reason they have std PPC quirks is because none will use them because of how badly they f***ed them up, otherwise we would see nothing but ER LLs.

While giving some mechs quirks and others none at all. after all giving weapons like ER LLs range quirks or heat dissipation(both go for all weapons) that are already OP in their own right.

Cycle time for Missile weapons just mean how fast the racks can reload and launch them, however seeing as it takes longer to target lock the enemy mechs that would balance that out.

ether that or just get rid of all quirks and actually balance the weapon systems out like they should have done a long time ago. now the mods you buy with C-bills I can let that slide as it is personal upgrade a warrior can do with their own machines but outside of that no Quirks should be on their mechs outside of XP/C-bill quirks on RL Cash mechs..

Edited by VinJade, 05 March 2016 - 11:53 PM.

[2fast2stompy]

xXBagheeraXx, on 02 March 2016 - 07:51 PM, said:

Power draw? WHY?

Why do we continue with gimmicky fixes to the heat system/scale when we have...what...FOUR previous games with perfectly good examples of working heat systems? Counting MWLL 5.

MW2 did have power draw, iirc. There were two bars.