36 replies to this topic

[Destoroyah]

For The LBX I say they mainly need to tighten the spread so it is good at range, maybe increase damage to 1.5 a pellet. If they did do a ammo switch option I think a ammo changer module would be required(works for all weapons that can change ammo and not a specific one) so there is a bit more cost to it compared to the standard AC10. Maybe reduce HP to 8 if it gets ammo change and improved scattershot capabilities.
Another possible solution would be to treat the shot like a solid slug and when it hits it fragments hitting a large area. Like doing 5 damage to the impact point and 1 damage everywhere else in a radius about as big as a atlas chest.

Machine Gun needs major love. The Crit experiment didn't work as far as most are concerned. The weapon needs to do real damage so lighter mechs that can't afford to fit big ballistics got a real weapon option and not a gimmick weapon. In TT before and after infantry was introduces the MG had a base damage of 2 same as a AC2. In MWO a AC2 can fire 4.5 times before a Slas can fire and recharge(2.25secs) for a total of 9 damage. That might be too much to copy so I think a MG should do a equivalent of 4damage in the time it takes a Slas to fire and recharge(2.25secs). A machine gun should theoretically do more damage then a Slas cause your have to keep on target the whole time so your damage is likely to be spread out quite abit and your probably miss with a good number of rounds in the meantime reducing overall damage.

SLas are fine as is.

SPLas just need a Damage increase to 4.

Flamers are hard too figure out as you can't test the heat component in testing grounds but they do absolute rubbish damage much worse then MGs and From what I've heard the heat component doesn't really do squat to enemy mechs. The Crit element is almost non existant. In testing grounds against the back of a atlas it took like 5 mins with 2 flamers to strip the AC20 side RearSide armor and another 6 mins to destroy the AC20 Section and in that whole time I only destroyed the AC20 30secs before the section went.
As for improvements considering the size of the flame it should be a AoE based weapon that deals 0.8-1.0 damage to all effected areas. Maybe increase to maximum range of 90. As for the heat element I think they should add a kind of stacking temporary debuff effect to areas on a mech that are hit. Each stack of the debuff will make all weapons fired from that section generate 10% more heat for each stack to a total of 5 stacks or 50% increased heat cost. Generating stacks requires saturation time and the rate at which stacks can be generated would be effected by ambient temperature(slower on cold maps/ faster on hot maps), multiple flamers improve the rate at which you can apply stacks. This way flamers would be really good against heavy heat weapons like PPCs and LLasers putting the enemy in much greater chance of overheating when they do fire. Another possible option would be to allow Flamers to be able to crit through armor since it's not a solid object or concentrated energy it can theortically get into the cracks and niches and get into the internals though I would expect the chance of criting through armor to be low.

On a Sidenote they aren't ever going to adjust the weight of most equipment because they will have to alter any stock mech that uses those items by default forcing them to alter the mech beyond it's stock stats.

Edited by Destoroyah, 08 April 2013 - 06:01 AM.

[Khanublikhan]

Machine Gun:
Needs a damage buff. It needs to be a viable finisher / weapon of last resort.
- Add a visual effect where if it successfully gains a headshot it puts bullet-marks in the cockpit which impair vision.

LBX-10:
- Add a toggle mode. Close range shotgun wide-scatter. Distance flechette fire.

Flamer:
Needs a small damage buff.
- Needs introduction of heat penalties for a mech above 75% heat. The heat damage from an individual flamer should be low enough for one mech to consider fitting more than one; yet noticeable enough that multiple mechs so equipped should gain a benefit. Additionally, flamers should inflict a recharge penalty for all weapons attached to an associated mech location 'toasted' slowing the rate of fire for that weapon.

Edited by Khanublikhan, 08 April 2013 - 06:08 AM.

[Jack Lazarus]

I bought a Commando 3A this weekend and ran it with the stock weapons. The first games didn't go well at all and I while I racked up okay damage with the SRMs, it ran very hot and was very fragile. I was destroyed frequently. After earning the cash to install a more powerful engine and double heat sinks, it became a real champ. I made lots of kills and returned my K/D ratio to positive, and the flamer actually did do a good job. I picked on high energy mechs we were engaged with and did manage to get them to shut down or slow their firing quite noticeably. I also managed to crit ammo in Jagermech legs with the flamer a few times and destroy gauss rifles.

I thought it was a very good fit for this Commando loadout that was always going to be engaging things point-blank in the backside anyways and always working alongside other mechs. While the flamer could stand some improvement, it was a good fit for my support role commando and if it never gets buffed I will still use it on the 3A. In a more one-on-one fighting style such as a COM-2D with SSRMs, I would still of course rather have a medium laser.

[Zen Hachetaki]

Harmin, on 08 April 2013 - 03:31 AM, said:

Those statistics are not suitable to assess the viability of the MG. It is ineffective vs armor and I fully agree with the devs who have interpreted / implemented the MG as such. But against exposed sections it is very effective as I have experienced numerous times myself when on the receiving end of some machine gunning spider.

It is a specialty weapon for speciality situations.

And misrepresented in the statistics, for if you hit for 0.04 and blow up a crit slot you still do 0.04 damage.

I think it's time to Master a 5K myself. Should be fun!

-Armin

Trust me it is not fun. It should be... but it is so frustrating to be so ineffective when you have clear back shots etc. Please let us know your thoughts afterwards.

[Teralitha]

Double Heat Sinks cause the smaller and weaker weapons to be perceived as useless, because they allow the larger more damaging weapons to be boated and fired frequently. Without heat balance, there is no need for smaller, less damage, less heat producing weapons.

Get rid of double heat sinks, balance returned.

Edited by Teralitha, 08 April 2013 - 06:47 AM.

[Royalewithcheese]

Small Lasers are fine. I agree that the LBX needs a significant buff, particularly because would fill that much needed "good ballistic weapon you can fit on a medium" slot.

Edited by Royalewithcheese, 08 April 2013 - 06:47 AM.

[Zen Hachetaki]

Oriius, on 08 April 2013 - 04:09 AM, said:

That is an interesting idea for the flamer, I think it'd need a slight weight increase too for that type of use, and maybe a limit to how many you can actualy use (or equip) to stop abuse.

it should also not be able to "stack" (so no groups of flamer lights locking people down) so only one person should really need to use it, pushing it into a support role rarther than a must have for any close range fighter.

With that said I don't know how well it would "fit" with the games cannon/lore, but it'd be interesting (in my opinion) as a game mechanic. Correct me if i am wrong, but arn't the flamer and MG in the TT anti-infantry weapons? with only limited use outside of that role.

They are not "just" anti infantry weapons - they are mech mounted, mech damaging weapons that receive bonuses on damage to infantry. Some might debate if 2 damage was "mech damaging" or not but in the day, every point counted as it was quite hard to damage a battlemech. Light routinely had them as secondary systems and crit rules were very different - once holes were open it was easy to get multiple crits from even the slightest damage. I always rolled my MGs hits after everything else was determined (so there were more opportunities for "holes" to be made) - blew up a lot of ammo with them.

I liked the flamer idea however - it would act like an inferno SRM round from TT, could also be used to create fire patches on the ground? Be able to make smokescreens perhaps? Burn down trees? Structures?

[Kekkone]

All crit seeking weapons:
Implement actuators as destroyable components, resulting in penalties to aiming, torso twisting, engine power. The problem with this is they would have to implement these penalties to destroyed components as well, so it would result in serious gameplay changes. Requires too much thinking atm

LB10-X:
Tighten spread

MG:
Increase bullet velocity to 500
Increase damage to about 0.08 / shot
Increase max range to 270

SPl / SLas:
Increase range to 135 / 270

[Utilyan]

Harmin, on 08 April 2013 - 03:31 AM, said:

Those statistics are not suitable to assess the viability of the MG. It is ineffective vs armor and I fully agree with the devs who have interpreted / implemented the MG as such. But against exposed sections it is very effective as I have experienced numerous times myself when on the receiving end of some machine gunning spider.

It is a specialty weapon for speciality situations.

And misrepresented in the statistics, for if you hit for 0.04 and blow up a crit slot you still do 0.04 damage.

I think it's time to Master a 5K myself. Should be fun!

-Armin

BT-sarna says Machine guns are effective against battle mechs going so far as to say PERFECTLY CAPAPBLE of stripping a mech of armor.

Although thats how BT wants it I kinda like the idea of it being horrible against armor good against unarmored. That is not what machine guns are.

Machine guns currently are the very worst weapons against unarmored, That means it is the worst weapon against a target that has NO ARMOR.


If the machine gun launched tennis balls.......it would be a better weapon.

If the machine gun shot out paint balls........it would be a better weapon.

If the machine gun launched Ice cream.......it would be a better weapon.

If the machine gun was replaced with half-ton water gun.......it would be a better weapon.

If machine gun was replaced with rocket guided by a blind donkey with a Jello warhead.......it would be a better weapon.

Giving machine gun the most tiniest buff is almost out of the question.



My dog could buff machine guns without a game balance mistake.

You can give machine guns UNLIMITED range right now...... You'll hear complaints that its annoying. With the way the bullets spread maybe you can kill a hurt mech with 2 tons of ammo.

It does .04 damage......so buffing it to .045 is out of the question.


Its suched a horribly nerfed weapon, that the no-brainer of buffing it comes from even a noob when they first touch it.


It would be best if they were to just clearly announce they don't want machine guns to be good at anything. I rather go for looks over power. Like custom tracer rounds, more sparks kinda like welder/torch sparks that fall to the ground.

I rather see more machine gun types that can perform same way, but might have differ sound/looks.

[FireSlade]

The problem with overhauling the lbx is that if it gets a slug ammo then everyone will dump the ac/10 for it since it weighs less and needs 1 less crit spot. While I'd love to have slugs for it they already said that they want the ac weapons to have their uses over taking the uac or lbx versions. The only way that I can see this happening and staying close to the TT that PGI wants is since its a smoothbore barrel the lbx slugs could suffer an accuracy penalty after optimal range, over lets say a rifled barrel of the ac and uac, and maybe 10 shots per ton instead of 15. As for flamers I'm not 100% sure if we actually do get the .4 damage for every .1 seconds that the papers says that we can get, but they were never meant to be a damaging weapon anyways. Their job was to add stress to the enemy pilot and restrict his/her weapon usage by keeping them overheating or close to it. I run one on my Ilya Muromets along with a lbx and I can't tell you how effective it is against atlases/stalkers and just about any heavy energy based mech (they usually can get about 1-2 shots off then shutdown and it leaves them open for a kill). Now adding a napalm like feature to flamers would be interesting to see and they already have plans to do something like that with infernal missiles so it might be doable and something I'd vote for; if they did do that it would need to dump the infinite ammo so that the enemy pilot would have a chance (maybe 30 sec per ton of fuel). And those that hate on the lb 10-x, yes it doesn't work well at range and yes it doesn't do direct damage but it makes up for those short comings with a very high impulse(cockpit shake) (1.4, instead of the ac10's 0.3, over lets say a ac20's 2.0) and it has the same crit seeking mechanic as machine guns all while keeping the same damage, dps, and heat of the ac10. And believe me impulse works, try aiming while being hit by missiles or an ac20/s, plus it scares the new pilots.

P.S. Oh as an after thought on small pulse lasers (kind of sad that they mean so little that we can forget them) they need a big time buff; right now they weight a ton, take up a crit, do 3 heat instead of 2, and do the same damage with the same range as a small laser and they also have the same recycle time; the only difference is for half a ton more they fire for .50 sec instead of the regular 1 sec for the beams. To add insult to injury for the same weight you can put on a medium laser and get higher dps (1.25 vs 1.09) lower hps (1.0 vs 1.09). Because of all this they are a waste of c-bills and are useless.

Edited by FireSlade, 08 April 2013 - 07:59 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

I have been using the LB10X on my Raven 4X, and I am still on the fence about it. It holds 1 more ton of ammo than the AC10, and with the spread, it works well with such a fast mech (I tend to miss more with ballistics when running in a light). I agree though that it just doesn't hurt like I would hope an AC10 based weapon would.

I may go to an AC5 or Ultra AC5, but I will keep trying the LBX a bit longer.

[Roland]

Increase the LBX-10's damage to 1.4 per pellet.
This is what hte LBX10's damage was in MW4, and it was a reasonably useful weapon.

[FupDup]

Something we need to keep in mind when playing with the SPL is that it has the direct competitor of the Medium Laser because both are one-ton. I'd suggest the popular idea of upping the damage to 4, as well as my own idea for reducing the duration to 0.25s.

Small Lasers (and maybe even SPL) could really just use a range extension up to 180-min and 270-max. A beam duration reduction to 0.5 would be nice as well.


For MGs, it has to be no lower than 0.16 damage per bullet to be useful. Also, the projectile velocity is currently tied with LRMs for the slowest in the game, and that is just wrong. It needs to be at least 500m/s (current is 100m/s). This would also improve their accuracy greatly (and therefore damage). A little range boost might be nice.


For LBX-10, adding Slug rounds would just make Cluster rounds obsolete as well as the AC/10. To make Cluster rounds stop sucking, they need around ~1.3 damage per pellet and a dramatically tighter spread. To keep the AC/10 from sucking after LBX gets slugs, a simple reload time reduction to 2.0 or something might do the trick (and maybe a little more ammo per ton).


I dunno what to do about the Flamer. I'll leave that to you guys.



Narc Beacon:
-Remains attached until the body section is destroyed
-Can penetrate ECM (yes I know ECM is supposed to be hardcore power creep in TT and make Narc utter garbage, but this ain't TT), although the lock-on speed bonus will be diminished greatly (a bit slower than trying to lock on to a non-ECM unit) and you can see them on the battlegrid
-Allies can instantly see target info for whoever it is stuck to
-Reduce weight to 1.5 tons (Clan Narc would be 0.75 tons, accordingly)
-Double ammo per ton

BAP:
-Allows the user to detect ECM mechs from ~325m (yes I know ECM is supposed to be hardcore power creep in TT and make BAP utter garbage, but this ain't TT)
-Increases missile lock-on speed of the user by ~25% (against ECM, the user's penalty to this is only -25% instead of -50%)

Roland, on 08 April 2013 - 07:55 AM, said:

Increase the LBX-10's damage to 1.4 per pellet.
This is what hte LBX10's damage was in MW4, and it was a reasonably useful weapon.

I thought that in MW4 they were just a single slug that did more damage as range decreased?

Edited by FupDup, 08 April 2013 - 08:06 AM.

[brock0]

Can't wait for Armin's MG results

[Sug]

LBX

Increase the pellet damage from 1 to 1.7

The pellets are currently useless because of how crits work.

Edited by Sug, 08 April 2013 - 09:06 AM.

[Teralitha]

Roland, on 08 April 2013 - 07:55 AM, said:

Increase the LBX-10's damage to 1.4 per pellet.
This is what hte LBX10's damage was in MW4, and it was a reasonably useful weapon.

The LBX10 in MW4 didnt have a huge spread like it does here....

[Tennex]

it wont hurt to buff small arms.

you won't break anything. the light mechs' ballistic slots are useless at this point. MG and Flamers are all they have

we all know missile (3l) and laser (jenner) light mechs are a threat
but ever seen a viable light ballistic mech?

Edited by Tennex, 08 April 2013 - 09:18 AM.