Missiles Missiles Everywhere!


As you may have noticed, and if you haven't then hoooboy, the LRM/SRM flightpaths have been rewritten.

By default, there are a number of points along a flight path that tell the missiles when to change direction in their arc to target.



As you can see this is a standard arc flight path. This is not an issue at the moment.

There IS however an issue with in-direct fire. When you have a spotter spotting you and the LRM carrier does NOT have line-of-sight, we move the "dive now" point closer to the target to help hit people hiding behind minimal cover. The problem is, we've pushed this dive point too far out and have missiles dropping too steeply.



One other thing (and this was sorta mentioned in Ask the Devs 38), is that we missed the patch window by a day and were not able to get a splash damage reduction into the build for this patch. The splash damage is pushing a lot of damage to CT at the moment.

These issues will be fixed very soon. (Hopefully before the first June patch. If not, then it WILL be the first June patch)

Feedback can go here: http://mwomercs.com/...dback-21052013/

The State of Guardian ECM:

As I stated earlier, that I couldn't comment on the state of ECM in the game until I had 2 additional counter measures implemented into the game. This was to avoid frustration in the community without having all features in place before I discussed the situation.

What is the official stance on the Guardian ECM?

Guardian ECM, like all features in the game, is very close to where we want it to be.

ECM brought a whole new level of strategy and skill to the battlefield and is something that we've been striving to achieve instead of flat plane, long range combat. It brought the need to be aware of your surroundings and assist team mates in a way that previous MechWarrior titles didn't have. Teams will now have to work together to counter the effects of ECM and as of February 15th, the new counters allow for multiple attack vectors against the system.

With the increase of projectile speeds and reduction in hit-detection issues, you will notice that a lot more ballistic/laser shots are on target. There are even more and bigger improvments coming down the pipe very soon in terms of hit-detection. These aspects combined with the actual ECM counters (PPC/Advanced Sensor Range) implemented put ECM VERY close to where we want it to be; a very frightful piece of equipment that is powerful and versitle while at the same time has its weaknesses (3 health and soon to be hardpoint limited, see below).


Why was it implemented without the current counter measures?

The Guardian ECM was released at the same time as the Raven Light Mech. The Raven 3L required the ECM/BAP systems as they were the main functionality of the variant. As mentioned above, the ECM really only affects 2 weapon systems. We measured the gameplay consequences against the gameplay benefits and it became clear to us that the benefits that it brought to the table would help stagger the ranges in which combat takes place. It was at this time that we decided to go ahead with the Raven/ECM launch. During this time through Beta, we knew that this would become a hot topic, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure players got used to and adapted to ECM being used in the game.


Are there any plans in the near future to nerf ECM?

Before I go into any planned changes, I’d like to state two things:

First, hit detection on all Mechs was off quite a bit. This was exasperated by high speed Mechs with ping related issues causing the visual targeting and hit results to be highly inconsistent. This has been reduced significantly and with an upcoming patch, you will notice an even more drastic fix to the problem (state rewinding as addressed by Bryan and Matt C. in another Command Chair post). What does this have to do with ECM? With state rewind going into the game, it is VERY possible to take down any high-speed Mech as long as you have the aim because where you aim is going to be where you hit. ECM or not, high-speed Mechs are in for a world of hurt that they are currently not used to.

Second, ECM counters were needed to bring it in line with where we wanted it to be. It took us some time to get these systems online because 1) We had some higher priority pressure items to deal with first and 2) we needed to make sure that all counters (especially modules) work correctly across the network. Now that they are in, you will notice that ECM is not as big of an issue as it was before. Putting a PPC shot on an ECM equipped Mech makes them very vulnerable for 4 seconds... but not only that, you have also put a lot of damage into that Mech. The “Advanced Sensor Range” module allows you to get a lock on an ECM Mech at a longer distance and S-SRMs/LRMs can be fired in a larger window than before.

That said, there are two things suggested by the community that struck a chord and we will be looking into implementing soon:

• ECM should have a dedicated hardpoint (tonnage/space does not change). That way ECM will always be in a known location on a Mech and can be directly targeted by attackers.
  
• ECM should not cut out friendly signatures on the battlefield. Friendly Mechs should always be identifiable and not obscure team play.

The Hotfix

What it addresses:
The insane amount of damage missiles started doing including splash damage and something weird that caused said splash damage to spike through the roof.

How it used to work:

(Note: I'm going to use the term 'secondary component' below but you can read it as 'a component that did not get hit directly but is taking splash damage')

All missiles used to have a 4.0m splash damage radius that took into account the percentage of the volume of secondary components engulfed in the radius.

With the advent of smaller/tighter component groupings on the smaller Mechs, an issue arose where too much splash damage was being spread across those Mechs. Basically it turned into a hot mess.

What does the hotfix do?
A number of things. First off, it reduces the splash damage radius from 4.0m (for both LRM/SRM) to 1.8m (LRM) and 1.3m (SRM/SSRM). This obviously reduces the amount of splash damage caused to secondary components.

Any location directly hit by a missile takes the full damage. Any secondary component hit by the splash damage radius takes splash damage based on how far the location is from the center of the explosion.

We also added a scaling factor of 0.4 to the amount of damage done to secondary components. From the impact point to the outer radius of splash damage, this factor of 0.4 drops linearly to 0.0. This means that if somehow magically the point of impact is so close to the secondary component, the maximum damage it would take from splash is WEAPON DAMAGE * 0.4 (that is 40% of weapon damage).

But Paul, you said you'd REMOVE splash damage!!!!
I know I did, but here's the kicker and yet another part of the mystery of missile damage. We tried removing splash damage and it did exactly what you think it was going to do. Pinpoint on target damage. Cool right? Yes... but...

Doing this exposed a problem with the grouping/clustering of missiles. We now have a high percentage of any incoming missile targeting the CT. This is BAD.

Now our primary concern as to what is happening on the live servers is to curtail the incredibly high damage levels of missiles/explosions. To make the missile explosions/damage feel like they should and to keep the damage spread across a Mech, we kept the above mentioned splash damage work along with the following damage changes to missiles:

LRMs drop from 1.8 damage per missile to 0.7 damage per missile.
SRMs drop from 2.5 damage per missile to 1.5 damage per missile.

DO NOT HIT REPLY TO FREAKOUT YET!

It is at these levels that missile combat falls back to a level that we AND the community felt was right for a long period of time before the badness appeared. I'm going to ask you to help us test these values by FEEL. Not by playing SpreadsheetWarrior.


Missiles are STILL a very big threat to the target but just aren't doing these chart topping damage numbers.

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS MESSAGE:
This is a TEMPORARY fix to quell the damage done by missiles at this time. We are fully investigating the damage model AND focusing on the grouping of missiles and will update as soon as we can on how any changes will be managed/implemented.


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