60 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

Not sure if this is even a real balance topic or more a general gameplay effect.

But the way I see it - as long as we have significantly high heat capacity, launching a big alpha strike is not pretty punishing. You don't generate any less heat overall than by chain-firing, it will take just as long to dissipate all that heat. But you also get the full benefits of weapon convergence.

If, on the other hand, the heat capacity was lower but dissipation higher, you might actually find yourself unable to fire all your guns even though your dissipation will rapidly sink away that heat. So now, alpha strikes have a drawback - they are risky and likely to overheat your mech - and an advantage - you gain full convergence benefits and so your attack will likely hit one spot.

So now there is a more meaningful choice between chain-firing and alpha-striking.

Agree/Disagree?

Where would you go from there?

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 20 March 2013 - 10:27 AM.

[rgreat]

Add a poll.

And YES.

[Comassion]

I really like this. One of the main issues I have with the current heat system is that they have heat sinks increase your heat dissipation AND your heat capacity.

I'd prefer to see all 'mechs have a universal heat capacity, and have heat sinks only affect heat dissipation. That way the huge boats wouldn't be able to perform the huge alphas, but they could still fire off their weapons in succession.

Or, possibly even better, have SHS give a heat capacity buff, whereas DHS have better heat dissipation but poorer heat capacity. The DHS build will have better heat management over time, but the SHS build would let people pull off a big Alpha without shutting down.

Edited by Comassion, 20 March 2013 - 10:20 AM.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

MustrumRidcully, on 20 March 2013 - 10:14 AM, said:

Not sure if this is even a real balance topic or more a general gameplay effect.

But the way I see it - as long as we have significantly high heat capacity, launching a big alpha strike is not pretty punishing. You don't generate any less heat overall than by chain-firing, it will take just as long to dissipate all that heat. But you also get the full benefits of weapon convergence.

If, on the other hand, the heat capacity was lower but dissipation higher, you might actually find yourself unable to fire all your guns even though your dissipation will rapidly sink away that heat. So now, alpha strikes have a drawback - they are risky and likely to overheat your mech - and an advantage - you gain full convergence benefits and so your attack will likely hit one spot.

So now there is a more meaningful choice between chain-firing and alpha-striking.

Agree/Disagree?

Where would you go from there?

Good post. Might want to throw a link in the suggestion forum.

[Zyllos]

MustrumRidcully, on 20 March 2013 - 10:14 AM, said:

Not sure if this is even a real balance topic or more a general gameplay effect.

But the way I see it - as long as we have significantly high heat capacity, launching a big alpha strike is not pretty punishing. You don't generate any less heat overall than by chain-firing, it will take just as long to dissipate all that heat. But you also get the full benefits of weapon convergence.

If, on the other hand, the heat capacity was lower but dissipation higher, you might actually find yourself unable to fire all your guns even though your dissipation will rapidly sink away that heat. So now, alpha strikes have a drawback - they are risky and likely to overheat your mech - and an advantage - you gain full convergence benefits and so your attack will likely hit one spot.

So now there is a more meaningful choice between chain-firing and alpha-striking.

Agree/Disagree?

Where would you go from there?

While that is a good suggestion, what happens in situations where you can't alpha strike 4 PPCs, so instead you chain fire those 4 PPCs. Even chain firing the 4 PPCs will over heat you if fired in rapid succession therefore you fire your 4 PPCs slower than their own cooldown.

This basically removes any ability to do high alpha strikes while also kills the use of multiple weapons to chain fire because the RoF is so high on weapons.

Take the PPC for example, in a quad setup, they will produce 32 heat, or a shutdown if following TT designs. So, you can choose to chain fire them, the minimum amount of time between each shot must be 0.75s each. Thus, to chain fire the whole group (and actually utilize all 4 PPCs), the heat production will be 32 heat over 3 seconds. Thus, if you was running with approximately 3.1 dissipation (~15 DHS on a 300 rating engine), your total heat would be 22.7. That is enough heat to only fire one more time before overheating, and in doing this to gain that extra one shot, your spreading damage unless your an excellent shot.

What this will force on the community is that it's just better to drop another weapon to have more heatsinks to alpha strike onto a single location. And if we keep lowering the heat capacity, players will continue to reduce their large weapons down to an array of smaller weapons so that they can continue to alpha strike onto a single point.

The path of least resistance here is that all weapons converge onto a single point. As long as that path exists, no matter how you modify heat, RoF, or other statistics of weaponry, players will always try to find ways to link only 1 or 2 weapon groups to converge all weaponry on.

There are many various problems that are leading to the overall issues with this game. High heat capacity, RoF, weapon convergence, and some specific mechanics of weapons (mainly missiles but a few weapons are at issues right now). Weapon convergence is exasperating the other problems.

So, while I partially agree, I am not in agreeance enough to vote "Agree". Thus, I will abstain/undecided.

Edited by Zyllos, 20 March 2013 - 11:40 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

The current heat dissipation is not "high", it's at best moderate. That is of course why just nerfing heat capacity is not going to achieve enough.
On a minimum level, this is about the +1 to capacity, +0.2 dissipation approach to all DHS. LEss capacity, but more dissipation then now (for some mechs at least).

But it can be much, much more. It can also be about heat sinks being changed to twice their current dissipation and DHS to quadruple - but heat capacity being lowered to a 1/2 or even 1/4th of the current value, or being even forever static (making it impossible to generate more than 30 heat per shot, but with high dissipation quite possible to chain-fire 3 PPCs forever...) ANd eventually actually "fixing" stock configurations. Because those stock configurations do come from a game system where the heat dissipation to heat generation rate was different, comparable to know heat sinks were basically twice as strong (in terms of dissipation).

[Deathlike]

Increasing dissipation to .2 is too high. In fact, PGI's # of .14 is "almost right". I would prefer .15, but whatever.

Lowering the heat capacity makes a whole lot more sense. It's way too high.

[Roland]

I don't think the suggestion would actually accomplish anything meaningful.

As it stands, there really aren't any builds which are limited by their actual heat capacity... that is, nothing just overheats after a SINGLE alpha strike.

If you reduce the overall heat cap, they'd be able to fire less often before hitting it... but if you increase their dissipation, then this would make it such that their heat would have dropped sooner, so they'd be back to being able to fire more anyway.

Unless you drop the heat capacity down so low that it's below a SINGLE high alpha strikes (like, below 30 heat, for instance), then I don't think it's actually gonna achieve any change at all.

[MustrumRidcully]

Roland, on 20 March 2013 - 12:20 PM, said:

I don't think the suggestion would actually accomplish anything meaningful.

As it stands, there really aren't any builds which are limited by their actual heat capacity... that is, nothing just overheats after a SINGLE alpha strike.

If you reduce the overall heat cap, they'd be able to fire less often before hitting it... but if you increase their dissipation, then this would make it such that their heat would have dropped sooner, so they'd be back to being able to fire more anyway.

Unless you drop the heat capacity down so low that it's below a SINGLE high alpha strikes (like, below 30 heat, for instance), then I don't think it's actually gonna achieve any change at all.

Remember, for alpha strikes, all the dissipation of the world doesn't help you, because the heat happens now.

Imagine something radical like a heat capacity of 18 and a mech with a heat dissipation of 6 per second.
THis mech could fire 6 medium lasers continuously. But he could never fire all 6 together, because 6 lasers produce 24 heat per shot. He needs to chain fire - but if he does, he will never overheat.
This is obviously the extreme end - here, alpha striking is never a viable option, you'd overheat all the time. IF you go somewhere in between now and this, you will have situations and builds where alpha strikes are vialbe and some where they aren't.

You could also have a real heat scale with penatlies if you wanted to. Maybe heat level 18 for the aforementioned scenario is just the level where a mech starts to lose speed and suffers torso and arm movement penalties, so you can actually alpha,but take some penalties for doing so.

[Ralgas]

We could do with heat containment be removed, and cool run being tweaked. (-20% cap and increase dis from the current 15 to 20 or 25% with full boosts)

Edit: that would be enough to knock the 2nd/3rd alpha off any build that doesn't feature gauss in the game right now permanently

Edited by Ralgas, 20 March 2013 - 12:42 PM.

[Sable Dove]

I'd say cut heat capacity to about one-third to one-half of its current, and double or triple heat dissipation.

Would fix so many cheese builds.

[Ralgas]

Sable Dove, on 20 March 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

I'd say cut heat capacity to about one-third to one-half of its current, and double or triple heat dissipation.

Would fix so many cheese builds.

And we'd just see a shift to ballistics mounting multiple gauss, mainly the k2, any phract or the jaggers.

[Deathlike]

Sable Dove, on 20 March 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

I'd say cut heat capacity to about one-third to one-half of its current, and double or triple heat dissipation.

Would fix so many cheese builds.

1/3 is too much. 1/2 sounds about right.

I know that 4 PPC builds for Assaults is commonplace for the MW games... with the current PPC, it would require 32 pts of heat.

Right now, we have heat containment that is at least double that amount (not quite triple, but more like 2.5). It's clearly too high.

I think the TT #s might actually make sense here... having it back at the original base of 15? (instead of 30). That would help immensely.

The "quicker" fix IMO is changing heat containment for SHS to 2 and DHS to 1.0 for the engine (essentially swapping those values). This would at least make the default DHS containment value for a 250 engine (with only the engine HS) @ 48 pts (after the 20% heat containment efficiency bonus). This happens to be the exact value for the 6-PPC stalker heat generation.

Edited by Deathlike, 20 March 2013 - 12:51 PM.

[HammerSwarm]

I too support tuning heat.

IMHO I would like heat capacity to heat sinks in the engine Up to the 16 you can get in an XL400. Then have additional heatsinks only add dissipation.

This does 2 things. It rewards choosing a larger engine (more tonage limits weapons load outs), and it makes where you put your heat sinks matter a little bit more when using an XL engine. You could put it in your side torso to perhaps take a critical shot from something or put that same heat sink in your engine to raise your heat cap.

I like the idea of limiting alpha striking because the pinpoint alpha that hits my side torso with 4 ppcs and drops my dragon in a single shot makes me a sad man.

Think about it PGI.

[focuspark]

IMO...

Mech tonnage should dictate heat capacity (Heat Capacity = 15 + tons / 5)
Engine heat sinks should always dissipate 0.15 heat per second
SHS should dissipate 0.10 heat per second
DHS should dissipate 0.20 heat per second
SHS and DHS should mixable in the same build
Reaching 30% heat capacity should slow your mech
Reaching 50% heat capacity should shake your reticle a little
Reaching 75% hear capacity should really slow and shake your mech
Reaching 100% heat capacity should force a shutdown until you cool to 25% capacity
Override should have a 25% of destroying the engine and "killing you"

Heat scale penalties will make people think twice about that massive PPC alpha. Engine heat sinks not being impacted by DHS means DHS can be a trade off and not a straight upgrade AND make SHS a viable component.

[Zyllos]

DHS at 0.2 dissipation each, with the current RoF and weapon damage, is a bad idea.

I personally think changing DHS to 0.17 across all locations is much more balanced.

Capacity of 1.0 for all heatsinks is valid.

[FiveDigits]

Deathlike, on 20 March 2013 - 12:05 PM, said:

Increasing dissipation to .2 is too high. In fact, PGI's # of .14 is "almost right". I would prefer .15, but whatever. [...]

Zyllos, on 20 March 2013 - 01:42 PM, said:

DHS at 0.2 dissipation each, with the current RoF and weapon damage, is a bad idea. [...]

You guys make me cringe. We have explained, we have mathed it out, we made you graphs.
Double dissipation is not "OP" or "game breaking".
Still people come into every heat discussion and drop their "0.2 is OP" one liner because "PGI said so". Stop guys, please stop.

[focuspark]

FiveDigits, on 20 March 2013 - 02:59 PM, said:

You guys make me cringe. We have explained, we have mathed it out, we made you graphs.
Double dissipation is not "OP" or "game breaking".
Still people come into every heat discussion and drop their "0.2 is OP" one liner because "PGI said so". Stop guys, please stop.

I think the issue is that energy weapons are already borderline better than ballistic weapons and the only reason they're not massively better is that 'mechs over heat too fast with energy weapons. 0.20 DHS would just go towards making energy weapons additionally better with very little gain for ballistic weapons.

[Deathlike]

FiveDigits, on 20 March 2013 - 02:59 PM, said:

You guys make me cringe. We have explained, we have mathed it out, we made you graphs.
Double dissipation is not "OP" or "game breaking".
Still people come into every heat discussion and drop their "0.2 is OP" one liner because "PGI said so". Stop guys, please stop.

I already did some #s and I've already come to the conclusion that something is inherently wrong. At the very minimum, the heat capacity must be reduced.

Heat dissipation as idealized @ .2 doesn't work with the current weapons data. Lots of things would have to be readjusted to fit the optimal number that we'd like. That is the inherent problem.

[FiveDigits]

focuspark, on 20 March 2013 - 03:17 PM, said:

I think the issue is that energy weapons are already borderline better than ballistic weapons [...]

That's because of the "balancing" of energy weapons PGI did based on their current borked heat model.

Deathlike, on 20 March 2013 - 03:19 PM, said:

I already did some #s and I've already come to the conclusion that something is inherently wrong.[...]

Yup yup. Remember, nobody seriously suggests just going true double in the current environment. I just wanted to make clear that double dissipation is no threat to balance.