Aesthir, on 09 April 2013 - 02:42 PM, said:
This answer doesn't make a lot of sense.
Take 4 MGs. Go into testing grounds. Find an Atlas. Tear off its right torso armor. Spray into the right torso with MGs only for 3 seconds. See AC-20 destroyed. Tear off any other weapon-containing limb. Spray MG. Watch weapons be destroyed without having to go all the way through the body part.
Think about the future use of this.
Ideally, you'd use this mechanic to destroy things like actuators (prevents their arms from twisting), damage gyros (makes the mech easier to knock over), destroy the engine (it only has 3 health), quickly destroy gauss rifles (it has 1 health, MGs firing will destroy it in no more than 2 seconds in the worst case scenario). The current purpose of the MG is to blow up the ammo on LRM, SRM, and Ballistic boats. Tearing off the armor of a leg and blasting into it should just about guarantee a kill if the ammo explodes as all the damage goes to center torso. But now we have a problem.
Bryan Ekman just explained that ammo has a 10% chance of exploding when destroyed. That isn't so bad but that makes the MG's job harder. Worse... 1 ton of ammo has 10 health. In comparison a cockpit without armor has 9 health. Volatile ammunition has more health than a cockpit? Isn't ammo more likely to explode? I mean I realize there's a concern with the fleshy pilot, but still. I would think ammo is a bit less stable than that. Or maybe that missiles would be more likely to explode? I don't know.
But back to the point. MGs do up to 0.12 damage on internal components with dice roll chances of 0.04, 0.08, and 0.12 per bullet. Note you pump out about 10 bullets per second according to smurfy. At 50 bullets or "5 seconds with one MG" according to Smurfy which takes its data from the game... You'd deal between 2 and 6 damage to internal components. At 8 seconds for one gun or 80 bullets you'd deal between 3.2 and 9.6 damage. So that's 8 seconds that you have to concentrate your fire to destroy an unarmored cockpit. But you'd have to go to 90 bullets to destroy 1 ton of ammo. Problem is even if you could hold your fire on target, that damage gets spread among the heatsinks, the weapons, the "padding" of useless gauss ammo to protect their important stuff, so it takes even longer!
Meanwhile the engine which won't have much to 'pad' and protect them would only take a minimum of 25 MG bullets and a maximum of 75 MG bullets to destroy it. This will create a huge balance concern and lots of outcries with the current "WEAK" MGs being "Overpowered" once engine crits come online. We need the ammo health taken down a few notches.
Gauss has 1 health.
AC-20 has a maximum possibility of 3.6 health (assuming every single bullet triple crits from our tests, which we know they don't).
Engine which is the Most important piece of a mech has 3 health but is not enabled to be destroyed by crits just yet.
Heatsinks have 1 to 3 health.
Gyros and actuators have ? health.
But all ammo has 10 health?
That's why MGs feel useless with Bryan's plan for them. The main goal for getting damage is to hammer in and blow up ammo. But it's health is so strong we might as well use MGs to try and tear through armor instead.
I'm the Jagermech. 4 flamers, 2 MGs, 2 AC-10s to strip armor.
Honestly my quest to blow up ammo has been less than efficient, so I've found other uses for the MGs until they enable engine crits. Once they do I'll put them in something smaller than a medium (like my Trollbuchet.) Til then, you'll mainly see MGs in my Atlas and my Jager.
This Atlas is covered in white yogurt. Damage markers not properly loading. And here, he's died. His triple SRM-6 and AC-20 with Large Lasers didn't save him. Strangely though he never got to fire his missiles since they were so rapidly destroyed after the armor was stripped off. Hm... Surely it had nothing to do with the MGs.
-----------------
Me and Fudop had a long debate about MGs earlier. We both had our solutions.
- His/hers would make it useful all the time against armor and structure with a higher damage rating but make it useless against destroying internals (by removing the critical space damaging setup).
- Mine would keep the Dev's system, but fix what makes it feel weak, as well as simultaneously fixing flamers and LB-10s as well. While it'd still be weak to useless against armor, once you go through the armor your damage would increase exponentially especially against LRM boats and other ballistic nuts like AC-20 nutbags.
The debate started around this point of the thread (
Click here) if you'd care to read. But please, either like or move on to the next response. I'm not debating the same point over again. I'd like to play the game some more. Don't quote. Not looking to be drawn back here for that debate.
-----------------
Speaking of yogurt from the screenshots. Lordred took this shot of me when the yogurt actually loaded as damage decals.
Personally I think PGI is doing good so far, but we need to fix these bugs. I always see yogurt. I want to see damage!
Edited by Koniving, 09 April 2013 - 03:58 PM.