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Gauss Rifle
The Problem - Weapon had too much power and accuracy for too little payoff.
The Current Fix - Low HP and explodes on crits. This has certainly stopped the gauss being the go to weapon of choice but has also stopped everyone using it which is a shame. Also the idea of a load of electromagnets exploding for no reason is silly.
Alternative Suggestion - Put the HP back to where it was, cut the exploding but introduce a firing delay on the grounds of charging. This introduces a solid element of skill to using the weapon and gives it greatly different characteristics to the AC20. Two seconds delay would be interesting, you'd have to work pleasantly hard to match moving targets yet you'd still be able to punish static campers quite easily.
Machine Guns
The Problem - No power, no range no point.
The Current Fix - God only knows. Something about crits which doesn't work and still sees MG's scrapped from every mech.
Alternative Suggestion - bring back some decent impact effect but with a punishing downward trajectory. Increase effective range to 300m with a level firing angle putting bullets in the ground at 200m. This still means the machine guns are very low damage, but gives a decent player a hose to disrupt brawling opponents whilst waiting for meatier weapons to recharge. The punishing downward trajectory means that you have to elevate your aim when bursting with the MG's to land accurately then return your aim to a level position to use direct/lock weapons.
AMS
The Problem - The effect of AMS is so light and the effectiveness of ECM so massive that many people aren't bothering to equip AMS at all. The list of changes to missiles and artemis is getting silly at this point and seemingly all because missiles were doing too much damage. This seems to be as much because AMS isn't fit for purpose as anything else.
The Current Fix - There isn't one. AMS has been untouched. The only reason I can think of for this is to make LAMS worth spending MC on when it drops.
Alternative Suggestion - rework AMS to produce a more pronounced result against missile volleys and force a manual activation that scans and fires for a fixed time before then requiring cooldown. This can be made to feel canonical with some radarish noises on activation and further involves the pilot in the running of the mech. To elaborate, I feel AMS should be capable of completely destroying 10 missiles in a volley. LRM5 and 10 should be countered entirely. LRM15 should be weakened to 33%, LRM20 to 50% effectiveness. The active time for AMS should be around 10 seconds with a cooldown twice that (hard to intuit those). I feel an ammo/ton reduction is probably necessary to balance this. As a pilot I really want the option to decide if I deploy my ammo and cooldown on a given volley or if I can easily avoid it. As a team it would be possible to take turns in AMS activation thus adding more depth to the team game. Active AMS could be indicated on friendly icons in much the same way as incoming missiles/ecm leading to some quite organic, silently communicated pug team usage of AMS.
Bit of a wall - but I'm really keen to see more detailed control over systems, and the sort of weapon characteristics over the weapons that an FPS environment can deliver that TT can't - all without changing the core TT values.
Edited by Inertiamon, 27 March 2013 - 05:31 AM.
