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[Baba Yogi]

High alpha builds are big problem in the game atm. It is not fun to turn a corner and be blown up to smithereens in one alpha just because you had the bad luck of walking into one of those builds. Especially after the last patch mech mobility has been nerfed severely therefore indirectly buffing these guys.

Here i suggest a weapon convergence for direct damage based weaponry on alpha damage. I suggest it starts from 20(it is a good value, it would guarantee no mech would be cored/crippled with just one shot) with a counter reset at 0.5 seconds(for chain fire grouping), if your alpha is 20 or lower crosshair works as it does now however if you shoot 3 ppcs and a gauss for example for each extra point of damage in that alpha cone gets bigger and every weapon fired in that turn is fired at a random location within that cone. This will prevent one shot kills unless they are made from very short range. I agree lasers and pulse lasers dont work this way as they spread out their damage so i would suggest a higher limit to them(for example 30). How big that cone needs to be that depends on pgi if they ever implement this since it will dictate the balance as to how effective they want alpha's to be. If any of you are worried about canonical side of things think of it as a weapon kickback, it will be harder for a mech to be steady while firing multiple powerful weapons at the same time.

Now in TT there was always a minimum range penalty for effective long range weaponry in order to balance the weapon. We see some weapons are not implemented with this feature, as it was a buff to them.(gauss was such). At the moment in current game's state, if we combine this convergence idea with minimum range for weapons like gauss (erppc has extra heat to justify removal of min range) and ac2/ac5, it will guarantee noone will get one shotted(even at short range where cone is less effective) while having a system which rewards good aiming(you just have to do it more often).

I added ac2/ac5 to minimum range list because when high alpha's are removed from the game, high dps weapons will be prime weapons and right now ac2 and ac5 has too much benefits such as constant screen shake and very high dps.(ac2 not so much though) This would be a real problem if alpha's are removed. But as of right now alpha>dps.

Edited by Lordhammer, 05 July 2013 - 12:30 PM.