43 replies to this topic

[Hedonism Robot]

The way I see it is tonnage and crit space should by in large be the last thing you change to balance a weapon. The OP makes a good point that these changes have repercussions . The only weapon in the game right now that REALLY needs this is the NARC. No amount of tweaking its ammo quantity or range would make it functional. It could also be fixed by simply being entirely reworked on function, for instance, it keeps the same weight and crit slots but now hits like a direct fire weapon (think AC 10 with low ammo count and slow projectile speed) and leaves a beacon for incoming missiles.

For me what would not be in the spirit of the game would be if they implemented force powers, added giant spider 20k ton boss fights, placed power ups and health packs. Stuff like respawns (eject and join the battlefield in another mech), new weapons (granted they are battletech in theme) and semi-omni slots don't bug me at all.

The people that claim this will become CoD are worrying about the sky falling.

[Roadbeer]

Noobzorz, on 08 April 2013 - 11:14 AM, said:

<snip>

I'm going to apologize too, it was a knee-jerk reaction to the overflow of "I can't wrap my brain around a complex combat system with varying, diverse weapons platforms, I just want to point at something and kill it" QQ posts that litter the board.

I have nothing really to add to the conversation except in when talking about balance, you have to look at the whole system and can't just cherry pick one weapon or another (something that this forum does all too often).

How does changing AC/10 effect the role of LRM 10?, or LLAS? or SRM4? When you look at each weapon group, it more or less has a corresponding 'counter'... well, counter is a bad choice of words, so lets go with 'tier' in each of the other weapon groups.

When even a small change is made in one, it can have a huge effect of changing the meta. So I'm all for long waits when it comes to weapon changes, I'd rather the whole system get adjusted right, than fix a perceived imbalance fast, and if a little cannon needs to be broken along the way... cool, but have it make sense and not to just make one platform a bit more "optimized". Maybe the reason the weapon seems useless now is because something that is being changed later hasn't been implemented yet.

Lost the rest of my thought on that while getting coffee, so I'm just going to leave it there.

[LackofCertainty]

If the AC10 is too weak (and I agree that it is) which do you think causes more work for the dev team?

A. Increase the rate of fire on the AC10, so that it has higher dps.

Or

B. Make the AC10 weigh X tons less, and then go through every single stock design that uses an AC10, tweaking them so that they use those X tons elsewhere.


To me, Option A sounds like a fraction of the work, and fixes the issue just as well as Option B. They have plenty of variables to toy with, without adjusting weight or crit space. Simply put, the reason why the devs won't tweak weight or crit space is because it would be more work.

TL;DR
Stop suggesting weight/crit space tweaks. Rate of Fire, Heat, Damage, Crit Chance and Cooldown are all fair game.

Edited by LackofCertainty, 08 April 2013 - 04:16 PM.

[Metalcell]

Noobzorz, on 08 April 2013 - 10:49 AM, said:

What a lovely and tactful post. If you want to get personal, you work a low skill, low wage job, and I do something that took years of post-secondary education at two top flight universities. I didn't do anything to earn it except that two university professors banged and I was the result, but I expect that in any standard measure of intelligence I'd beat you five shades of purple in the same way your training probably means you would whoop my *** in a fist fight.

Now take a minute, let that rage come down from a frothing boil, and consider what I'm saying. No one wants CoD with mechs. That's not what anyone is saying. But the TT is a badly designed piece of **** from an ineffectual design team that doesn't know what they're doing. Even people who play the balance catastrophe that is 40K laugh at the battletech rules.

When you try to port that already broken *********** over to a realtime mech combat sim, the already tenuous balance really comes apart. Now we have alpha strike warrior, unusable variants, and no obvious method of fixing it. This is because instead of operating within the SPIRIT of the rules, they have constrainted themselves to the LETTER of the rules. This is a complex system in a new environment that is going to take a lot of know-how to balance, and when you come at it from a TT perspective, that's impossible.

[size=4]

You've gone full ****** and you're doing your TDM QQer impression again. No one wants another CoD game. Hell, working with the TT rules, we're actually closer than ever: look at everyone complaining about alpha strike warrior.

If they abandon the ridiculous shackles of weapon X takes Y hardpoints and that's all there is to it, they will be have a lot more options to try and get the game where we want it.

sir I give you my two thumbs up of approval