250 replies to this topic

[Kristov Kerensky]

Gamesguy, look at that Assault video again..yes, the sections of the Atlas on the display flash red to show WHERE the weapons impacted, but they do not EVER change color beyond a quick flash to show impact points, there is 0 loss of armor on the Atlas despite taking 4 PPC blasts from the K2 alone, much less the damage the Hunch does after that. And, FYI, godmode is usually something the devs can enable/disable on the fly, and it's pretty obvious that's being done in that video. Check out the OTHER videos and you can see just how much damage an Atlas actually sustains facing off with another Atlas or a Hunch, it's obvious, and it doesn't hold up with what that Assault showcase video shows.

Melissia, for one, Blue Plate Special is only awarded for killing someone in midair in Tribes: Ascend with a spinfusor, it's not awarded for every direct hit and kill, just the airborn kills...which you can also get by killing them with splash damage, I've gotten a few that way myself. That's the beauty of the spinfusor, it's an AoE weapon, always has been. Yeah, I know, they say it's for direct midair hit/kills, but guess what..the game gives the award for any midair spinfusor kill, regardless of how it was done

And you not LIKING the answer doesn't change anything, it's the answer to the question you asked, you not LIKING that answer has no bearing on anything.

[Volume]

Kristov Kerensky, on 14 May 2012 - 10:04 AM, said:

Gamesguy, look at that Assault video again..yes, the sections of the Atlas on the display flash red to show WHERE the weapons impacted, but they do not EVER change color beyond a quick flash to show impact points, there is 0 loss of armor on the Atlas despite taking 4 PPC blasts from the K2 alone, much less the damage the Hunch does after that. And, FYI, godmode is usually something the devs can enable/disable on the fly, and it's pretty obvious that's being done in that video. Check out the OTHER videos and you can see just how much damage an Atlas actually sustains facing off with another Atlas or a Hunch, it's obvious, and it doesn't hold up with what that Assault showcase video shows.

Melissia, for one, Blue Plate Special is only awarded for killing someone in midair in Tribes: Ascend with a spinfusor, it's not awarded for every direct hit and kill, just the airborn kills...which you can also get by killing them with splash damage, I've gotten a few that way myself. That's the beauty of the spinfusor, it's an AoE weapon, always has been. Yeah, I know, they say it's for direct midair hit/kills, but guess what..the game gives the award for any midair spinfusor kill, regardless of how it was done

And you not LIKING the answer doesn't change anything, it's the answer to the question you asked, you not LIKING that answer has no bearing on anything.

Ironically, due to the nature of fast projectile-based weapons in Tribes:Ascend, it's not even feasible to try for blue-plate specials or air-mail, but better to switch to your Eagle pistol or Assault Rifle. SMGs/ARs/MGs/CGs dominate competitive play.

Also, I think the damage is fine. I don't hate the idea of the insta-gib, but these are walking tanks, and obviously the damage model has been revamped. They were talking about how powerful the AC-20 is and it can and will core a light or medium if you hit the right place at the right time from the right range. And if critical hits are in the game, much lesser weapons can wreck some internal criticals (e.g. gyro, engine, ammo) and the damage that doesn't seem like "much" would be quite significant.

[Aldinvor]

Volume, on 14 May 2012 - 10:37 AM, said:

Ironically, due to the nature of fast projectile-based weapons in Tribes:Ascend, it's not even feasible to try for blue-plate specials or air-mail, but better to switch to your Eagle pistol or Assault Rifle. SMGs/ARs/MGs/CGs dominate competitive play

Could explain how that is ironic, please?

[Volume]

Aldinvor, on 14 May 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

Could explain how that is ironic, please?

Here:

Melissia, on 12 May 2012 - 09:08 PM, said:

But aren't we on topic though? The matter of damage and armor needs to take in to consideration the fact that the average player is a far more competent marksman than mechwarrior pilots in the battletech tabletop game are.

Refer back to the posted video on page 9.

My point is that the skill cap for the game is so high, that despite the fact that someone can regularly nail mid-air hits, it is still "better" once you reach a certain level of play to do something with even faster moving projectiles, which is even more effective and guaranteed consistent damage-per-second wise in most cases.

The irony involved is that, as Melissia is pointing out, it seems to be very (and I mean VERY) easy to land shots in MWO:Mercs. Tribes:Ascend has several weapons, and what I was trying to say that despite how easy that video makes it look, people do something even easier with a higher skill-cap, and effectively I'm just saying it won't be hard to land every single Gauss shot at 800m. It's the problem Mechwarrior has always had, but hopefully MWO makes different. From the videos we've seen, nothing implies to me that it will be remotely difficult to be a sharpshooter. Even MW:LL has higher skill-cap PPCs.

Alas, I wasn't going to contribute to a 13 page long thinly disguised "tabletop vs fps" thread, but I feel that I should at least try to explain myself.

I mean no harm, but it's like Halo 1. If everyone can maintain like 80%-90% accuracy all the time, where does the "skilled pilot" thing come in? Positioning before the shot? Teamwork? Information warfare? It's most certainly not like Painkiller, where if you could hit 30% of your stake-gun shots, you could be in the pro-circuit, or Quake 3 Arena, where hitting 40-45% railgun and 60% lightning gun was considered excellent. In MW:O, I see no reason to miss more than 5-15% of your Gauss shots unless your view is constantly shaking due to the mech rocking back and forth (say, due to SRMs or AC fire or something.)

tl;dr: it's too easy to hit stuff in MWO, the example used was the "harder to hit stuff in Tribes" but there's actually an even more effective weapon that has a lower skill-cap (albeit less stylish), implying that people will go for whatever is lowest risk, highest reward, and in MWO, it seems nearly EVERY weapon is low-risk high-reward. It's not a problem in my eyes, because I even played WoT for a couple thousand battles, and aside from aiming for little specific chinks in the armor, and waiting for convergence (my favorite), most of the damage was distributed randomly.

Point is people will hit every PPC shot.

Edited by Volume, 14 May 2012 - 11:21 AM.

[Christopher Dayson]

*sigh* People here just don't get it.

You can make all the analogy's from any other game you want and they do not apply. Why? Because they aren't this game.

MWLL is not this game.

Tribes is not this game.

If lights are getting picked, or any aiming is going on to easy the answer is simple: Slow down targeting reticles. That's something they can and will likely adjust as then there is another element of skill involved. How to lead your target, how to compensate for possible shifts in speed etc.

The problem is that in the video's so far Targeting has been TO SMOOTH.

Their response was 'Double the armor on all mechs'.

That's the /WRONG/ thing to do. It makes ballistic weapons just that much more crazy to take cuz it reduces an AC20 to meaningless damage. It reduces Gauss to meaningless damage. It encourages boating just to have an /effect/ on the enemy.

All this talk of one shot kills is dumb, we already know (Through interview IGN) that losing a leg just slows you down, a lot, it doesn't destroy you utterly. So there won't be max range shots to the leg. Regardless of the fact that the Awesome, with it's 3 ppc's only has 1 arm mounted ppc and thus isn't a light hunter to begin with.

I responded seriously before, and I am responding seriously now. This isn't a case of 'I want light mechs to die in one hit' it's a case of: Increasing armor/reducing damage is NOT the proper way to go.

Slow down the aiming on the bigger mechs, make them as much skill based as a light mech. An Atlas shouldn't move it's arms as easily as a Commando to begin with.

This whole conversation, circular or not, is just arguing the wrong thing. What needs to be changed is targeting speed.

[Lycan]

Melissia, on 12 May 2012 - 09:07 PM, said:

Neither is Mechwarrior Online.

Except that it is.

If it wasn't, then the Devs wouldn't be trying to follow the TT (IE: the Battletech) rules as closely as possible.

Arbhall Sommers, on 12 May 2012 - 09:09 PM, said:

I think its kinda awesome they have included Blue shield. Keeps players from losing out to the PPC headshot.

As I pointed out, most mechs can't lose their head to a single PPC hit. As long as you fully armor the head, you're golden.

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I have no idea how many times I have lost excellent pilots to a PPC headshot.

Again, unless you're playing TT or in a Mechwarrior game that uses crits, the only way to lose your mech to a PPC hit is for the shot to score a critical hit (which, in TT isn't a guarantee) and then subsequently roll the "Cockpit" location.

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The Gauss one is just as nasty but it feels natural and you want to thank the person who pulled it off.

A Gauss Rifle hit, on the other hand, just completely blows the head off. (Well, again, not really, you'd still have to roll the chance for crit and then get the "limb blown off" result. However, since all the armor AND all the internal structure are either gone or just mangled pieces of wreckage, we call it "blown off". )

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But anyway, my query about that would be: Would you have to load it onto specific locations and pay 2 tons each like in the TT?
And if it does work like that, would a trio on the torsos cover the front and rear equally? or would you have to equip 6 to fully cover the torso?

And if they do add it (whenever it would've theoretically became available) then it should have all the same stats as it did in the TT game. There's no reason to reduce the critical slots or the tonnage of the device (or any of the equipment for that matter) for inclusion in the game.

[Kommunisator]

If you want aiming to be more difficult I recommend that using a Logitech Wingman Force (the first iteration of this stick: ) should be mandatory.

Why? Because this beast is SO strong, when I tried to play MW4 with it I could't hit **** even up close, since every step my Mech made would rattle the stick and throw off my aim be several metres. I was able to hit a building from about 50m, being farther away resulted in my lasers spraying all over the place ^^

Seriously, the game will go through a lot of iterations in damage-finetuning and balancing. And after all is said and done we might actually have a game that feels like Battletech, yet is still fun to play for most people (not for everyone, since it caters to a very specific fanbase which comes more from the simulation field than from action games and fast FPS)

[wanderer]

Grokmoo, on 11 May 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

I have to disagree a bit with you here. If a single alpha strike from an Awesome can take out a light mech, it will seriously undermine the effectiveness of those mechs.

Although there will be some skill involved, if you've played Mechwarrior 4 or Living Legends online, you know that many players will have sufficient skill to land an alpha strike on a mech regardless of that mech's maneuverability. Playing a Jenner, Raven, Cicada, or Commando would be pretty useless if a good shot on the enemy team can immediately take you out in a few seconds.

Also, you can multiply the above several times, since MWO will be heavily favoring team oriented play. If the enemy team has a few heavies in their ranks, then the scout mech will not even be able to get close or be instantly taken out.

Part of why an Awesome is more dangerous than in TT is because of point-and-shoot. Weapons should have greater drift-from-pointer when the shot is at medium or long ranges- meaning that a triple-bolt from an Awesome will have a more random chance of coring the light and some chance of even missing at longer ranges, and will likely drift a bit at medium. Combined with arm mounts having different aiming than torso ones, this helps every fight NOT degenerate into alpha-striking limbs and coring CT's with happy abandon. In theory, a Commando can survive 3 PPC hits- just not all to the same location, and since damage transfer doesn't apply, if weapon drift happens at longer ranges, the first salvo is unlikely to gank a light.

(Why yes, I do believe in cone-of-fire too.)

[OcO]

Just to put an end on the back and forth as to if armor values have been changed or not. This is a post from Bryan Ekman found in this thread... http://mwomercs.com/...g/page__st__280 on page 15.



"While I appreciate the passion here, the intensity needs to be turned down a bit.

From Day 1 our goal was to take the TT rules and create a game that reflects the spirit of those rules. Since so many of the TT rules are designed to work around simulating skill and randomness we end up with a situation where there is no 1:1 mapping of damage/hit points from TT to live simulation.

Using the TT 100% does not make for a fun or balanced live simulation game.

The final numbers are not in yet on damage or hit points (armor/internal structure). We're still balancing everything. Right now we are running 2X Internal Structure and Armor.

Here's my person OP on the state of the game.

The game feels good and mostly balanced. Mechs die fast or slow, depending on the number of players, and the skill present on the battlefield. I've seen 5 second engagements, and 2 minute engagements. Some lucky shots, a LOT of skilled shots. Missiles need some love, mostly in the accuracy department. All beam/projectile weapons just received a nerf via adoption of true TT ranges. This has a major impact on the small laser boats that are floating around FNF Beta."


So yes as per a dev the armor values are NOT currently TT.

[wanderer]

Melissia, on 11 May 2012 - 01:01 PM, said:

Ergo, the light 'mech needs to be survivable enough to actually be able to fulfill its role even against skilled marksmen.

I'd actually prefer the light to have superior sensor capacity, the better to spot at ranges that don't get it sniped.

Oddly enough, it actually follows canon- people seriously thinking that the role of the light 'Mech was over because it was far, far too easy to kill one on the battlefield. In a sense, it does. No light 'Mech should be engaging without friends or significant cover. Ever. What they need to do is actually make target speed increase weapons drift- yes, this means that a fast target could end up a near-miss rather than a hit for some weaponry, or that you're going to spread your salvo across the target rather than neatly lining up your custom laser boat and coring that Commando from 400 meters away.

[wanderer]

gamesguy, on 13 May 2012 - 10:01 AM, said:

AFAIK radar is line of sight in this game, which means in order to spot an assault mech, the light must also come within sight and therefore gun range, which means it gets one shotted.

Line of sight doesn't = gun range however. This could quite reasonably lead to light 'Mechs getting out ahead, spotting, and giving the guys behind them a view of the incoming opposition- even while remaining out of effective hit range. What's amusing is that although canon versions of the 'Mechs we're given as lights are equipped for short range fighting, it is incredibly easy to refit them. Commandos can swap LRM racks for SRM ones, giving them modest extreme-range firepower backed up by their medium laser. Jenners actually pack enough tonnage and hardpoint room to replace it's guns with a large laser (and two tons for better armor besides!), or again can replace it's SRM rack with an LRM rack as well.

Canonically, they're fitted with plentiful short-range weaponry because they're expected to be hit-and-run designs- but they also have, thanks to the MechLab system the ability to be at least partially reconfigured to the roles we desire. I'm reserving my opinion on really being able to focused-alpha a light to death in one shot until I actually get to see beta video from testers who know their stuff, pushing the envelope and trying it.