174 replies to this topic

[Grizley]

Corwin Vickers, on 06 March 2013 - 03:10 PM, said:

People should be moving. I know if someone stops in front of me I aim my weapons at his cockpit. Probably the source of all the "people are hacking because I keep getting headshot" threads.
LRM 15 24 20,582 5,446 26.46% 02:02:03 8,872
26% hit rate
MEDIUM LASER 45 1,737 1,588 91.42% 03:56:09 5,052
91% hit rate
AC/20 1 3 3 100.00% 00:01:57 60
100% hit rate

You keep saying "TT, TT, TT!" but you keep ignoring that direct fire weapons are aim-able and not random in MWO. You can damn well be sure that those 91% hit rate medium lasers were being aimed by me at some low armor or vital location.

So since you are quoting the TT rules shouldn't the hit rate of missiles be the same as direct fire weapons in the same range bracket? Do you really want to up LRM hits to 91%? Sure, you can make it so only 14/20 missiles hit but I'm sure people would complain a lot more.

Laser hit rates are very off. If you did any damage at all it's a hit. Try looking at how much damage per shot you did.

You shot 1735 times for 5055 damage or something like that. You averaged 2.9 damage per medium laser shot out of an ideal of 5. That's above average from what I've seen so far, most people average 2.5 to 2. Light mechs do less, heavy mechs do more, light targets take less, heavy targets take more. For a Cat that 2.9 seems reasonable.

Considering the percentage of damage you actually landed I seriously doubt that what you did land was "all to a critical location". More like, you did about 1.5 damage on average to what you were shooting at and 1.5 to an arm, or side torso or something the beam swept across.

You averaged .43 damage per missile fired. Your hit/miss for missile racks is per missile fired, so fire an LRM 20 once and it will show something like 20 shots, 18 hits etc. TT numbers for LRMs should be about .25-.3 damage per tube launched for LRMs used at long range. So LRMs are doing a little more than they should for you.

[Baltasar]

Corbon Zackery, on 06 March 2013 - 03:18 PM, said:

The Arch of the launch and the new clustering of the missile using Arty is the issue right now people are launching at close to 75 degree angle so there being lobbed over terrain that's over 400m high without line of sight. The other thing is if you do arty a mech you need a computer for each launcher on that mech. There some huge LRM issues that got them nerfed early on when arty first came out that their adding back to the game under the excuse that ECM counter balances it. Yet not every match ELO sets up has ECM.

1. Missiles fired without LOS do not get Artemis bonus. Only bonus that will affect those would be TAG and Narc from a spotter so being able to fire with out seeing the enemy yourself, IE firing over terrain, is one of the perks of LRMs however it relies on your party keeping lock and LOS of an enemy (which in my experience doesn't happen near long enough to not just get LOS myself and guarantee a lock).

2. Each LRM with Artemis take up one extra crit slot and one extra ton so yes, each launcher has their own computer.

[Praehotec8]

Grizley, on 06 March 2013 - 03:02 PM, said:

Not being in cover means all weapons will hit you more often, but there is nothing special about LRMs. cER PPCs and Gauss rifles are by FAR more worrying than LRMs. As it should be, they are heavier systems that generate more heat, why on earth would they not be more dangerous?

They're pretty poor at actually killing things, for the same reason that LBXs are poor at killing things.

In MWO missiles are like streaks with a 1km range, deal extra damage, have extremely tight grouping and make crossing any sort of open ground a very dumb idea.

Increase missile speed, knock damage down to 1/missile, increase spread. I would love to see the lockon system removed too, but the easymode 1km streak fans would cry rivers of tears fit to drown us all.

Why is it that most of the people who argue against LRMs seem to feel they shouldn't be able to kill things? I'll grant that I haven't played TT, but I tried out MW tactics, and LRMs kill things just fine there too.

A PPC/ER PPC is 3 crits, 7 tons, gauss is 7/15, LRM 15 is 3/7. They actually seem fairly balanced. LRMs without artemis do spread quite a bit, PPC is pinpoint but hot, and gauss is cool and pinpoint but heavy and bulky. Don't forget that only LRMs in this group have exploding ammo.

You're complaining about artemis spread. Well, artemis adds one crit and ton per launcher (on an A-1 that's 6 extra tons; 5 on a 5-M). Plus you need direct LOS to fire and time to wait for impact. PPC and gauss are fire-and-forget. Those who seem to do the most damage at extreme ranges are the snipers (who have likely modded their config file to increase LOS - half the time when I'm getting sniped I can't see the mech that shot it due to draw distance).

I rarely fire LRMs more than 750m away (and generally fire closer than that) because...they rarely hit at that range. When I get a warning for missles, I find I almost always have time to find cover unless I'm in the middle of a large open field of which 1.) there aren't many in the game, and 2.) one shouldn't linger in for a number of other reasons. You don't really even have to hug cover, just get to it when you get locked. If an LRM boat is firing at medium range...go get it! The AMS you and your team are carrying will soften the impact giving you time to close. Oh, and remember, ECM cancels out artemis (I believe even with TAG).

Bottom line, if I take a 6 ton, 6 crit, 1.5 million CB upgrade on my mech, I darn well expect it to give me a real advantage vs. without.

[Corwin Vickers]

Corbon Zackery, on 06 March 2013 - 03:18 PM, said:

The Arch of the launch and the new clustering of the missile using Arty is the issue right now people are launching at close to 75 degree angle so there being lobbed over terrain that's over 400m high without line of sight. The other thing is if you do arty a mech you need a computer for each launcher on that mech. There some huge LRM issues that got them nerfed early on when arty first came out that their adding back to the game under the excuse that ECM counter balances it. Yet not every match ELO sets up has ECM.

In your opinion what arch should a LRM launch at? 60 degrees? 30 degrees? The 400m high at 75 degrees is not true.

I don't think they come out at more than 45 degrees and not much higher than 50-100m higher than you. I had trouble shooting down at theta on the ice map because they plow straight into the ground.

Artemis does decrease the spread of LRMs making it useful now where before it was useless.

[Grizley]

Corwin Vickers, on 06 March 2013 - 03:26 PM, said:

He means that you can't shoot the other side of a mountain if you cannot see the other side of the mountain while you could in the TT. So you suspect that an enemy is hiding behind a hill, you just saw him go there, you should be able to somehow target the other side of the hill and fire, indirectly and without any kind of tracking. Right now LRMs target where your crosshairs are or through target lock but no untargetted indirect fire.

And you can target people on the other side of a hill now, without the spotter even giving up his firing action or losing accuracy like TT.

In TT firing LRMs indirect without a spotter is not worth it. You're not going to do enough damage to make it worth while if you even do any at all. When people refer to indirect fire in Battletech 99% of the time they're referring to Unit A spots, usually with a TAG, Unit B fires his LRMs and takes a penalty with C3 and TAG reducing those penalties.

Artemis has NO effect on indirectly fired LRMs.

[Baltasar]

Grizley, on 06 March 2013 - 03:39 PM, said:

And you can target people on the other side of a hill now, without the spotter even giving up his firing action or losing accuracy like TT.

In TT firing LRMs indirect without a spotter is not worth it. You're not going to do enough damage to make it worth while if you even do any at all. When people refer to indirect fire in Battletech 99% of the time they're referring to Unit A spots, usually with a TAG, Unit B fires his LRMs and takes a penalty with C3 and TAG reducing those penalties.

Artemis has NO effect on indirectly fired LRMs.

To fire w/o lock indirectly you have to be able to see what you are firing at seeing how missiles land where your cross hairs are. I cannot sit on one side of a building and fire over it with out someone targeting a mech on the other side. My missiles will just go into the air or the building in front of me. (and even then they don't really fire at 75% angle. I wish I could lock on with my torso cross hair and aim up with my arms and change the launch flight of my lrms to get over higher terrain...oh well..guess that's what my JJ are for.)

[Grizley]

Praehotec8, on 06 March 2013 - 03:33 PM, said:

Why is it that most of the people who argue against LRMs seem to feel they shouldn't be able to kill things? I'll grant that I haven't played TT, but I tried out MW tactics, and LRMs kill things just fine there too.

They kill things just fine, but they do it by slowly sanding away the entire mech, not landing 40 double damage LRMs on the CT.

Praehotec8, on 06 March 2013 - 03:33 PM, said:

A PPC/ER PPC is 3 crits, 7 tons, gauss is 7/15, LRM 15 is 3/7. They actually seem fairly balanced. LRMs without artemis do spread quite a bit, PPC is pinpoint but hot, and gauss is cool and pinpoint but heavy and bulky. Don't forget that only LRMs in this group have exploding ammo.

The ER PPC has 20% less range, generates 11 heat as compared to 5. Now TT differences, in TT the ER PPC has more range, and has 2.0 double heat sinks, not 1.4. The PPC also deals 10 damage compared to the LRM15s 27. Off from the TT LRM damage of 5-15 with the average being 9. Gauss weighs twice as much, has just over half the range, much fewer shots per ton or damage per ton than the LRM. Oh, and the Gauss explodes.

Now throw in that both the ballistic weapons require the pilot to actually hit, the LRMs automatically hit unless the target moves behind cover.

Also throw in AMS is nerfed in MWO. In TT it reduces the number of missiles that hit from what you actually take. So if an enemy hits with LRMs and gets 9 missiles that hit and you reduce that by 2 you cut his damage by over 20%. In MWO if they fire a LRM 15 at you and you shoot down 2 you still get hit with 13 missiles, not nearly as significant of a reduction.

In short, LRMs in MWO do not in any way resemble the same weapon system as TT. Their role and usage is different, as is the counter play.

[Corwin Vickers]

Grizley, on 06 March 2013 - 03:29 PM, said:

Laser hit rates are very off. If you did any damage at all it's a hit. Try looking at how much damage per shot you did.

You shot 1735 times for 5055 damage or something like that. You averaged 2.9 damage per medium laser shot out of an ideal of 5. That's above average from what I've seen so far, most people average 2.5 to 2. Light mechs do less, heavy mechs do more, light targets take less, heavy targets take more. For a Cat that 2.9 seems reasonable.

Considering the percentage of damage you actually landed I seriously doubt that what you did land was "all to a critical location". More like, you did about 1.5 damage on average to what you were shooting at and 1.5 to an arm, or side torso or something the beam swept across.

You averaged .43 damage per missile fired. Your hit/miss for missile racks is per missile fired, so fire an LRM 20 once and it will show something like 20 shots, 18 hits etc. TT numbers for LRMs should be about .25-.3 damage per tube launched for LRMs used at long range. So LRMs are doing a little more than they should for you.

Is that taking into account Artemis and Tag?

I was running a Jenner, a Stalker, and 1 run with an Atlas (AC20) yesterday.

I do bow to your interpretation of the numbers though.

[Grizley]

Baltasar, on 06 March 2013 - 03:46 PM, said:

To fire w/o lock indirectly you have to be able to see what you are firing at seeing how missiles land where your cross hairs are. I cannot sit on one side of a building and fire over it with out someone targeting a mech on the other side. My missiles will just go into the air or the building in front of me. (and even then they don't really fire at 75% angle. I wish I could lock on with my torso cross hair and aim up with my arms and change the launch flight of my lrms to get over higher terrain...oh well..guess that's what my JJ are for.)

Well, you can't building hump and fire directly over.

I wouldn't really mind LRMs getting the ability to hold lock for .25 or .5 seconds or whatever to be able to change the arc to a more upward arc. Doing that should always count as indirect fire though even if you have LOS. The indirect fire spreads also need to be wider, that's not a pure nerf since firing indirect you're more likely to get some damage as opposed to pummeling the mess out of the ground.

[SPencil]

LRMs are fine.

Nerf lasers.

[Grizley]

Corwin Vickers, on 06 March 2013 - 03:52 PM, said:

Is that taking into account Artemis and Tag?

I was running a Jenner, a Stalker, and 1 run with an Atlas (AC20) yesterday.

I do bow to your interpretation of the numbers though.

No, I didn't figure in Artemis or Tag, I wasn't aware of what gear you were running. That will slightly bump the numbers up obviously.

In the absence of an AMS on the defender, then it would bump the expected missile hits up to 12 per hit. That's a fairly substantial boost in expected damage, but it still falls far far short of the MWO expected damage/shot or damage/ton.

I guess one of the things I don't like about LRMs in MWO is that with everyone hiding in cover and playing scared of them they still exceed their TT effectiveness. If we played like we play TT, cover only when convenient, all weapons equally bad to be targeted by, speed is life etc then LRMs would be the only weapons worth using over 180m range. So it changes the nature of fights, and still doesn't lose any effectiveness, or it doesn't change the nature of fights and freaking murders people.

[Praehotec8]

Grizley, on 06 March 2013 - 03:50 PM, said:

They kill things just fine, but they do it by slowly sanding away the entire mech, not landing 40 double damage LRMs on the CT.

Now throw in that both the ballistic weapons require the pilot to actually hit, the LRMs automatically hit unless the target moves behind cover.

Also throw in AMS is nerfed in MWO. In TT it reduces the number of missiles that hit from what you actually take. So if an enemy hits with LRMs and gets 9 missiles that hit and you reduce that by 2 you cut his damage by over 20%. In MWO if they fire a LRM 15 at you and you shoot down 2 you still get hit with 13 missiles, not nearly as significant of a reduction.

In short, LRMs in MWO do not in any way resemble the same weapon system as TT. Their role and usage is different, as is the counter play.

I haven't played TT so you are probably right in regards to all of that but...is it so awful that LRMs are different here? Honestly, I'd be okay with removing built-in C3 indirect fire and moving it to modules or something (someone needs master for your slave for you to take their target), but it would need to be across the board for all targetting.

Sure, you have to aim with ballistics, but it's not like that's hard to do, and once done you can move on. I find ballistics actually fairly simple to use as you aim, fire, and move on. Sometimes with LRMs you come under fire and you have to choose: do you evade or return fire on your attacker and lose the LRMs you just fired, or do you guide them to their target taking while being unable to dodge until they land? Plus, if you aim and fire with ballistics, mechs have no time to find cover vs.. potentially many seconds.

Lastly, some of the confusion I have noticed is that I can't tell if people are miffed about LRMs or artemis. It seems like all the rage is being vented because of large mechs primarily taking central damage from LRMs which only happens with direct LOS fired LRMs with artemis. Indirect LOS LRMs are not doing anything close and seem (to me) to be functioning as you suggest they should. Artemis, which is heavy and requires direct LOS, and can be countered by ECM, is concentrating damage. Which again, to me, seems appropriate. If my 65 ton A-1 is using 6 tons and crits to add artemis. it feels justified to be a dangerous weapon when fired direct LOS.

The biggest issue I see is large assault mechs standing still despite repeated LRM volleys being fired at them. They don't move after the 1st, 2nd, or even third warning, they just stand and suck it up while continuing what they were doing. Not only did I fire from 400-600m away, they let themselves get hit at least 2-3 times before deciding they should come down off the hill they were perching on. At that point, it's not the weapon balancing or lack thereof that is killing them. And I see this ALL THE TIME in PUG games.

[Corwin Vickers]

Grizley, on 06 March 2013 - 03:50 PM, said:

The ER PPC has 20% less range, generates 11 heat as compared to 5. Now TT differences, in TT the ER PPC has more range, and has 2.0 double heat sinks, not 1.4. The PPC also deals 10 damage compared to the LRM15s 27. Off from the TT LRM damage of 5-15 with the average being 9. Gauss weighs twice as much, has just over half the range, much fewer shots per ton or damage per ton than the LRM. Oh, and the Gauss explodes.

Now throw in that both the ballistic weapons require the pilot to actually hit, the LRMs automatically hit unless the target moves behind cover.

Also throw in AMS is nerfed in MWO. In TT it reduces the number of missiles that hit from what you actually take. So if an enemy hits with LRMs and gets 9 missiles that hit and you reduce that by 2 you cut his damage by over 20%. In MWO if they fire a LRM 15 at you and you shoot down 2 you still get hit with 13 missiles, not nearly as significant of a reduction.

In short, LRMs in MWO do not in any way resemble the same weapon system as TT. Their role and usage is different, as is the counter play.

You mentioned heat but you didn't count ammo. I run about 2.5 tons of ammo per launcher. LRMs are also hot.

You aren't counting maximum range. ERPPCs have a 1620m max range. LRMs have a 1000m max range. Gauss has a 1980m max range.

HS are 2.4 in the engine and 1.4 outside right?

LRM ammo explodes too.

The hit rate on moving targets with LRMs is very low. The people getting nailed with lots of LRMs are the ones walking down the middle of the river in their 40kph Atlas.

And again, AMS rocks. I do use it. I had one on the Jenner I was running last night and 2 on the Stalker. If you aren't the guy walking down the middle of the river in the Atlas with the AMS thinking you are invulnerable and that the AMS should blow all the LRMs up for you then you're not worrying about LRMs with AMS.

[Grizley]

Engine DHS are 2.0 inside the engine 1.4 outside.

It's technically possible to hit outside of max range with ER PPCs and Gauss, but the damage is not good, it's certainly not worth the ammo for the Gauss and the ER PPC heat is situational. Not to mention, even with 2000 m/s speed on an ER PPC hitting at 1620m is not easy, that's 810 MS between fire and arrival, even a relatively slow mech covers a good bit of ground in that time. Plus even with max zoom they are a tiny target. The Gauss is looking at over a second and a half of flight time.

Yes, ammo weapons have the liability of explosion, Gauss and traditional both. The tradeoff is much lower heat/damage compared to energy weapons of comparable range and grouping.

Hit rates on moving targets in the open are pretty good, not 100% if you're targeting a Jenner going 140kph, but you're doing more damage vs that Jenner with LRMs than you are PPCs or Gauss.

[Corwin Vickers]

In 1992 I played the Btech 3056 MUSE. It was an almost direct implementation of the TT rules to a real time X,Y,Z to 3 decimal point system. That meant that when walking down a crooked street on your hex map you had to take inertia and turning speed into account or you were bouncing off buildings.

It was very much about cover and movement speed. Standing in the open pounding it out with a bunch of mechs was a good way to die. Things you would do in real time that you don't do in the board game is take your shot standing still and immediately get moving to make their return shot harder. I used to like to jump out of trees over a lake, fire all 12 ERMeds in a nova-P and inevitably get shutdown just as I went over a lake thus cushioning my fall and helping me cool down faster. Standing just inside a stand of trees, taking one step outside, shooting, and then moving back in was another that you wouldn't see in the board game.

This was with the TT timescale and damage still unchanged. The only difference was the ability to move in real time and real space (you're not in the center of the hex). Dice rolls and all.

Seems like it's the real time that is making the most difference between the TT and MWO/Btech MUSE.

Besides ECM I'm happy with the way PGI has done things. The AC10/LB10x is a little weak atm too.

[Grizley]

I'm not saying cover is useless in TT. It's either a +1 or +2 to opponents target number to hit. That has the biggest impact when combined with movement though, I think the movement modifier is movement/2 round down.

So an assault mech at a walk of 3 is +1 to target, a light moving 8 at a walk is +4, an average Clan mech walking at 5 is +2 etc.

So a 5/8 mech charging across open ground is +4 to hit, or twice as hard to hit as an assault mech bunkered down in cover (+2). So the faster mechs tended to just grab cover if it didn't slow them up too badly and heavier mechs tended to either camp in cover or grab cover if it didn't take them too far out of their way as they advanced.

In MWO everyone hides behind hills until someone gets into line of sight. Cover is everything and speed is almost nothing against LRMs. Barring using that speed to get behind cover that is.

[Corwin Vickers]

After the netcode changes and the laser change I'm not having much problem with lights anymore. I get 1 shots with my 6ppc stalker fairly frequently.

You're not hitting 150kph lights with LRMs unless they stop moving or are running straight at you.

With the missile warning and terrain and long travel time you're not hitting many mediums on up and definatley not with full volleys.

The bread and butter of LRMs is the assault or heavy mech that is walking in the open or backed up against a building trying to turn on some light mechs that are harrassing it. That is when you see full volley damage.

As I said, I have 1 mech with LRMs out of 15 and I only played it as much as I did yesterday because I was testing artemis, also I don't have it mastered yet so two birds.

[Warge]

I'd like to see LRM's speed increased...

[Blandtastic]

Well, before you say that LRMs are OP...http://en.wikipedia....FGM-148_Javelin has a 2000 meter range, is fire and forget and has two fire modes: top-down and arc firing. One of these will do a tank easily. I think of LRMs as the MWO version of this. If anything, the real world version is more deadly. However, they are MUCH more expensive than MWO reloads. Maybe have one reload that arcs into where it was last aimed and another, more expensive, reload that actively tracks the target. You know, MRMs, vs. LRMs.

Edited by Blandtastic, 06 March 2013 - 05:55 PM.

[Suki]

Livewyr, on 06 March 2013 - 01:24 PM, said:

Under normal circumstances.. yes. Give it 35% accuracy from Artemis usage (LOS) Give it 35% accuracy from NARC Give it 25%-35% accuracy from TAG (Where TAG and Artemis stack, but not Art and NARC, or TAG and NARC.) They weren't supposed to be the Apex predator they are now.. they should soften things up (unless you boost them.. then they can be the predator.)

Why do LRM need accuracy? Except caching small ones LRM hits or misses when target is undercover. Increasing its accuracy will not help at all vs covered targets. The accuracy of todays LRM boat is 20-30%, most of the misses are vs targets under cover. So how increasing accuracy will help LRM?