187 replies to this topic

[carl kerensky]

Some of the best brawling I've had was playing mech 2. Its a thrilling gameplay and as the OP
states, if MWO begins to evolve into too many quick kills and fights lasting shorter and shorter you lose the essence of fighting in a big mech war machine. By design they are meant to take punishment. Sure you can have those rare on shot kills but if it all generates too far in that directions you lost it. Tension in fights are lost.

[Profiteer]

What about a repair module? One use per match, repair 25% of your armor over 10 seconds or something like that.

We need more good modules, the current crop are... MEH.

Edited by Profiteer, 09 March 2013 - 11:35 AM.

[Moromillas]

OP is actually right. It is getting more 'glass-cannon' like. I don't think MWO was intended to be a fast paced shooter like COD.

I'm not sure how much of an armor increase would make it feel less glass-cannon like, though Increasing the armor (and ammo per tone to match), does seem sensible.

Edited by Moromillas, 09 March 2013 - 12:34 PM.

[Aethon]

Increasing the armor the mechs carry is not the answer.

Battletech was designed from the ground up to work with an extremely flexible customization system. Cheese builds in this system were offset with a chance-to-hit system, as well as a hit location scatter table. The to-hit and scatter tables were the balancing factors that made the whole thing work; they have been removed in MWO, and replaced with doubled armor, which is nowhere near as powerful a balancing factor.

These removed factors were part of the reason Battletech works so well; when you remove them from the equation, things get unbalanced pretty quickly, and the boaty builds rule the battlefield with little contention. Boaty stuff is already powerful in Battletech, but they still have to hope they can focus their damage.


This imbalanced equation affects different weapon systems in different ways.

My first example is that of a Hunchback IIC firing its pair of UAC/20's at a Centurion. You cannot focus all that firepower into the CT and kill the mech in one shot. Assume two shots miss, one autocannon comes up with snake eyes (jam), and the other scatters its shots over the right arm and left leg. Your uber-awesome mech that was designed to kill something in one shot not only failed to insta-kill that Centurion...it also has a jammed autocannon to deal with. Thus, your extreme firepower was balanced by the hit/scatter tables.

Here is another example. Assume, for a moment, that we bring one of the most powerful short-range builds in MWO into tabletop: 6 x SRM6+Artemis IV CPLT-A1. It alpha-strikes, and 5 of those SRM's impact the target, with the other missing completely. For the scatter rolls, out of the remaining 30 missiles, 26 hit, thanks to the benefit of Artemis IV. Without it, the number would have been much lower. Those 26 missiles, dealing 2 points of damage each, are spread out to 26 different hit locations scattered across the target mech. The right arm's armor is eventually penetrated, and the AC/10 is disabled. No other damage.


Now, consider the previous examples in MWO, assuming the UAC/20 was in-game.

That Hunchback IIC unloads both UAC/20's into the CT of that Centurion, dealing 80 damage to one point. That Centurion is now a smoking part of the scenery. The Hunchback IIC is also nearly a ton lighter, for what that is worth.

Meanwhile, the A1 lets rip into its own CN9-A target at close range, delivering 90 damage that, while centered on the CT, also deals limited damage to the left and right torso. The CT is cored and the internal structure is severely damaged, and the side torso sections are either stripped, or now have paper-thin armor.


Things in MWO are far more deadly than they were in tabletop, regardless of the doubled armor that is currently in-game, because one of the main factors in the Battletech equation has been removed entirely. Because players can pile enormous amounts of damage into a single location, increasing the armor has only a limited effect.

Just to be clear, I am not saying I am sure that we need damage spread/scatter; there may be a better solution to balancing the equation. I am simply saying that I believe increasing the armor AGAIN is a really, really bad idea. It did not work well the first time, because it affects different things in different ways; the second time will cause armor to be even more effective against things considered useless, and hardly change anything about the most powerful things in the game.

Also, I think the game plays nicely right now, overall. There are some things that need to be adjusted, but I hardly think something as drastic as quadruple armor is warranted.

Profiteer, on 09 March 2013 - 11:34 AM, said:

What about a repair module? One use per match, repair 25% of your armor over 10 seconds or something like that.

We need more good modules, the current crop are... MEH.

It took over an hour to make even temporary patch-job armor repairs to battlemechs near the field; doing this in 10 seconds would cheapen the game immeasurably.

[Bloody Moon]

While i feel the current armor values are fine, i'd definitively like to try out the 4 times TT armor suggested in this thread for a week. This game is still Beta after all, this is the time for testing.

[mariomanz28]

I was watching the NGNG twitch stream last night and they had Paul Inouye on there and he said fights are too short for what they want and are devising something to make fights last longer. What he did not say however.

[Pater Mors]

Please god no.
I spent an entire match recently pummelling a stalker that I had isolated and it was still standing at the end. I am not a bad shot with my ML's and we were both pretty messed up by the end of the match, but man DOUBLING his armour? No. Fracking. Way.

[Centagon]

No. This would make brawlers all you'd ever need. SRMs are strong, and while I dont think they're OP, what you're doing would definitely increase the whine about them already.

[Terror Teddy]

good god no, there are already people literally pummeling each other to scrap for a MINUTE with only one secondary weapon working.

If anything make heat more punishing to slow down extreme alpha strikes.

[Royalewithcheese]

mariomanz28, on 09 March 2013 - 12:08 PM, said:

I was watching the NGNG twitch stream last night and they had Paul Inouye on there and he said fights are too short for what they want and are devising something to make fights last longer. What he did not say however.

Much as I generally like the way PGI handles stuff, sometimes it's hilarious.

*makes mostly urban maps*
*nerfs sensor range*
"hey, why are fights over so fast?"

[SuomiWarder]

As an early psoter here poinetd out, it is not armor or damage that is the culprit. It is the ability to reliable place all your damage in a single body panel.

I do not have a good suggestion on fixing this. I don't want to take away the players ability to use good gunnery skill, but the result of all 4 PPCs or whatever landing together in one body panel is that high alphas drop mechs quickly. And like in MW4 you end up with jump sniping heavies mounting PPCs all over creation.

Longer weapon recycle times wound mitigate things a little. A team called target will go down just as fast as multiple mechs are hitting it. But in a 1 v 1 the fight will last longer. Of course people can Alpha more often perhaps as their heat levels will have tim eto catch up to the firing rate.

[KingCobra]

Terror Teddy, on 09 March 2013 - 12:26 PM, said:

good god no, there are already people literally pummeling each other to scrap for a MINUTE with only one secondary weapon working.

If anything make heat more punishing to slow down extreme alpha strikes.

I agree a alpha shot should 4x your heat scale over what it is now. first lets just double the head and back armor they seam to be a very weak spot or the hitboxes are to big second a 10 second delay on all large weapons would work well third spread out the damage make it only say a 10% chance you could get a pinpoint shot to one spot 90% its spread dammage.One other thing i noticed is MWO has this weard slow right to left movement and also super slow acceleration forward and reverse up to say 20 meters.In past Mechwarrior titles the mechs short range acceleration was x6 so you could actully get behind cover in MWO once to the top of the ridge your dead you cant get back down out of firing range which means more DPS on your mech.

Edited by KingCobra, 09 March 2013 - 01:12 PM.

[Stimraug]

Broceratops, on 09 March 2013 - 07:52 AM, said:

I don't mind the pace now but it's faster than what I'd expect out based on the IP. Here is a passage from an old BT novel.

Good point and I wouldn't mind it actually, although I do enjoy the intense pace we have now. Do understand me, I mostly played MW4 where people could die from 1 alpha. (Daishi to the CT)

Edited by Stimraug, 09 March 2013 - 02:36 PM.

[HRR Insanity]

The reason fights end 'too fast' is because of grouped weapon damage/pinpoint convergence.

There is a simple fix for this.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Ive probably said this 100 times now. Heat. You don't need to adjust heat on the weapons, or recycle time, or mess with the armor. TT had a set heat thresh hold that was the same across the board for all mechs. Adding heat sinks did not increase the heat threshold, it simply dissipated heat faster. Which is how a Jenner with only 4 ML/SRM4 with 14 SHS was balanced against an Awesome with 3 PPC/SL that had 28 SHS.

The threshold was low enough that even a 4 PPC stalker would instantly overheat and shut down. But it would cool off quickly.

Heat is THE balancing factor in this IP.

As far as the length of battles, a TT match was still only around 2 to 3 minutes of combat. So MWO is pretty much right on the money. It has about 2 minutes of manuever, 3-4 minutes of brawl, and 1-2 minutes of mop up.

[Angus McBeef]

Considering the addition of a more FPS-style throttle control setting on the 19th, the devs seem to want a more twitch-like, FPS-player-friendly experience.

[KingCobra]

Here is what i think is going on the return of the Xbox360-720 Mechwarrior games published by Microshaft.->

[Grits N Gravy]

If you want more 8 to 0 games, keep adding armor/reducing damage. The fact of the matter is, that for all but a few wild builds the time to kill is so high, that it makes it very difficult to overcome numerical superiority. The predominance of blob charging and focused fire is directly related to the time it take kill a mech. The more you extend this time, the more important those tactics become.

In shorter kill time games, maneuver and position is more important. Controlling avenues of approach and fields of fire are of first priority because first strike and initiative are the most decisive factors in short and brutal combat. Contrasting the two strageies, It's Shock and Awe Vs Linear warfare. Adding more damage or more armor, moves the game close to the two contrasting styles of warfare.

The reason why linear type warfare is more satisfying in MWO has more to do with map design than any single factor. Simply put, the maps are small and there are few controllable avenues of approach. The ones that do exist are so obvious and give such advantage to the defenders that they render initiative virtually worth less, ie the crash sight in frozen city. There is no way to threaten the crash sight via maneuver in such a way as to make that position untenable. A tunnel rush doesn't directly threaten the mechs camping the crash site, it avoids them. Map design is largely responsible for which type strategy, IE shock and awe, or linear warfare, will feel the most satisfying. Though I prefer shock and awe type game play I'm not sure how tenable it would be on the maps that we have.

Whether you prefer either style of warfare simulation or is a matter of preference. One of the reasons I gave up world of tanks was it felt more like world of bush camp, a form of linear warfare in a machine designed for the exact opposite type of warfare. I'm beginning to feel the same way about this game too, only that MWO has much more poorly designed maps for the type of warfare it's mechs are conducive to.

Edited by Grits N Gravy, 10 March 2013 - 10:10 AM.

[Belorion]

Doubling armor again (which would be 4x the amount of TT armor values) would render missle and balistics non-viable alternatives to energy weapons.

Unless they increase Ammo/Ton which is something I think they need to do anyway.

I think armor is good where it is though. The amount of damage a mech can take feels like battletech to me.

[Vapor Trail]

KingCobra, on 10 March 2013 - 08:38 AM, said:

Here is what i think is going on the return of the Xbox360-720 Mechwarrior games published by Microshaft.-> [snip]

Video was posted Feb. 2012.

Wikipedia:
"On January 29, 2013 it was announced that Wargaming.net, publisher behind World of Tanks acquired Day 1 Studios for $20 million."

Day1Studios.com:

"Day 1 Studios and Wargaming have joined forces to create Wargaming West"

WargamingWest.com:
"Following the acquisition, the newly formed studio will focus exclusively on the development of an unannounced console title."

Somehow I don't think this is going to be 'Mech based, or if it is mech based (meaning "Giant Stompy Robots") it's not going to be BattleTech.