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Clan Gauss Recoil
This is pure new player unfriendly. It lowers the floor significantly for anyone who is firing Gauss "intuitively." It does not accomplish the goal of getting rid of Gauss vomit anymore than the HGR recoil does. Most people on test, being experienced, just fire it like they fire HGR. After the beams or solo when needing to cool off.
It's kind of a cool effect and lets you know you did indeed fire the Gauss while in the middle of a blinding beam trade or taking AC fire to the face.
ERML
The damage/heat should be swapped or Damage 6/Heat 5.5 or something. Right now it feels like a bad weapon to use instead of what is supposed to be the baseline of the Clan arsenal. Nerfing the DPH as much as this build does is way too far.
ERSL/MPL
There's no reason to nerf these to match the ERML. They aren't being used in alpha builds anyway because they require getting way too close for something that is designed to trade hard and run hot. If you feel the ERSL is in competition with the ERML, you've nerfed the latter way too hard. Ditto MPL which can't be used as an easy substitute due to both short range and significant weight bloat. This just hurts MPL skirmisher boats, which again aren't supposed to be the problem.
Large Laser Ghost Heat Changes!
On test this is the main outcome of the proposed patch. Raising the GH cap to 3 on ERLL and LPL changes a lot of how Clans play. The new Clan laser vomit on <90 ton (seen on Hellbringer as an example) is 3xERLL and 2-4 ERML. This both has a nasty 30 point sniper shot and deals 40-50 damage in an alpha strike that can be repeated twice, three times if its for a kill shot.
The bigger issue is with the assaults where bundles of 3 ERLL/LPL are commonplace and some are even using 4xERLL (Supernova, Dire) groups for sniper shots. The WUB WUB Dire Whale seen here fires quite smoothly with 3+3. This changes the feel of Clan assaults significantly and makes them more powerful. The assault Gauss vomit of taking 2xGauss and adding them to the above Clan Heavy Laser vomit is also at least as potent as anything people run in practice.
The alpha nerf to these weapons is immaterial because being able to link 3 of them puts significantly more damage on target anyway.
Recommendation
Scrap this approach and consider other forms of balance. Right now it's just an ERML/HML nerf (don't see many people using HML but it is a 20% damage cut to that thing). As-is it does not disrupt the Clan alpha builds that are actually used (HML is not normally used with Assault Gauss builds because of the huge range difference) and creates new problems with how the large laser "compensation" (really, enormous buff) is being handled.
Edited by SmokedJag, 14 July 2018 - 05:25 AM.
