Star Lancer, on 22 March 2013 - 11:20 AM, said:
What they need to do is look back at older Mechwarrior games. The damage ranges for all of the current weapons (minus the missile systems) are exactly the same as titles like Mechwarrior 2: Mercs and MW3. The missile damage in those were 1/missile for LRMs and 2/missile for SRMs. With the correct splash effects, those damage settings would put them just about right with the other weapon systems in the game. That's my 2 cents at any rate.
Yes, but the LRMs also worked in MW2 thru MW4 and they don't in MWO. MWO's are flawed in concept and will always be too powerful or too weak. If they are too powerful you get something like the recent bug, if they are too weak you get the laser and AC brawler game like MWO suffers from normally. As opposed to a tactically diverse game that working LRMs bring to MechWarrior.
I will explain.
The problem with MWO LRMs, when they are, "working as planned", is they have to be boated to be worth taking and this is wrong. The reason they need to be boated is because they do primarily area effect damage. Area effect damage would be okay for LRMs, but it will never be balancable in an interactive multiplayer game because you will always get the LRMs before the last hot-fix or after it and neither of those are balanced.
It's like this, guided area effect damage is going to hit, so the only thing left to be adjusted is how much damage they do. That amount is either mechs-go-boom damage or mechs-take-no-real-damage. Neither one is balanced for fair gameplay. Either you are hosing the LRM pilot or the pilot being LRMed.
So to have LRMs worth taking they have to work well and do point damage when using line-of-sight flight paths and do area effect damage with no line of sight. This puts the tactical burden evenly on both pilots and is not unfair to either. It gives LRMs a place to be tactically good, just like an AC20 is tactically good in close range combat. In this way the amount of damage can be balanced with the amount of difficulty, or skill, to use LRMs well.
Before the last LRM Bug, I had reached the point where I refused to use LRMs at all. MWO's LRMs are normally wasted loadout space and useless if you have even a medium skill level at aiming direct fire weapons. The LRM Bug made LRMs overpowered on AoE damage, but they were working about right if that were construed as the Line-of Sight tracking advantage and they were dealing point damage that was balanced, not AoE damage that destroyed everything.
Anyway, during the Bug, I finally saw MWO become a MechWarrior styled tactical combat game instead of Laser-Brawl, even if the bug was terrible. I just took 2 LRM15 and imagined how great MWO could be.
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