jeffsw6, on 09 April 2013 - 10:52 AM, said:
Is your goal to nerf the 6 second alpha-strike battles?
If everyone had twice as much heat dissipation then wouldn't that effectively buff all mechs with a lot of energy hard-points? Would it not also cause people to equip ERPPCs or a bunch of MLs where many use more heat-efficient weapons right now? AC2 would certainly be more viable as a primary weapon.
I don't really understand how you think the game should change if your idea was implemented. I can imagine those mechs that boat 8 or 9 MLs becoming very, very deadly. Not sure I like that idea.
The problem wth the current heat capacityis - you get things like 6 PPC mechs because you can deal 120 damage in less than 5 seconds. That's good damage, especially if you can aim well and/or have a team mate that does the same. It doesn'T matter that this mech is shutdown half the match, if every 10 second another mech dies from it, it's doing a good job. You can obviously not rely on this in a PUG, but it is a concern.
The other problem is that MW:O is set in a table top time period where tech wasn't even supposed to be balanced. It's not just that FASA failed with the 3025 Level 1 Tech (AC/2 and AC/5 were too weak, for example, MLs probably too good). It's that they introduced Level 2 Tech to be intentionally more powerful than Level 1 Tech.
Under Level 1 Tech, single heat sinks would basically allow a reasonable balance between all the weapons, with the occassional outlier as mentioned before.
If you just add Double Heat Sinks to Level 1 Tech, you instantly obsolete the Auto-Cannons, because their weight is composed of the higher weapon weight and a lower number of heat sinks for similar damage potential as the energy weapons (or energy weapons would have within the range brackets the auto-cannons operate in, if there were such weapons).
The Ultra AC/5 and the LB10-X AC are Level 2 Auto-CAnnons that, coupled with DHS, attempt to make AUto-Cannons balnaced against Level 2 Double Heat Sinks + energy weapons.
So yes, my system would probably nerf the Auto-Cannons (and missiles, by the way) once you get Double Heat Sinks.
Basically, to compensate for this, one would either try to:
- Rebalance Level 1 and Level 2 Tech. This will be impossible if you also want to keep stock mechs viable, though. Either you will make Level 1 Mechs undergunned (but hey, that's still better than they are now, where they are overgunned and scaring away players), or make Level 2 Mechs overgunned (so like all stocks are now.)
- Introduce the Level 2 versions of all AUto-Cannons (screw the timeline option) now. If you want, you can also create "era" play modes or adjust the match-maker to ensure that Level 1 tech based mechs are not meched with Level 2 tech based mechs.
There is however no way to do this without some major tweak.
Either stock mechs of all kinds are borked because mechs produce vastly more heat then they were designed to handle.
Or you rebalance items so that Level 1 or Level 2 mechs are underpowered.
Or you break the timeline a bit to give us all variations of LBX and UAs for the Inner Sphere.
Or you live with LBX, Gauss Rifle and UAC5 being the only auto-cannon in time people with LEvel 2 Tech access use.
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The question might be: Why do I prefer a low heat capacity, and high heat dissipation?
Because it gets us away from these alpha strike focus the game currently enjoys. An important factor to the alpha strike move is there because you can deal, in a short time, enough damage to take out or cripple a mech. f you can do this, you don't need to fear the shutdown. The Shutdown is a concern if you haven't done your job yet and the enemy can react to you and if he made a better build then you, shoot you dead while you're mech is cooling off.
A lower heat capacity will make many high alpha builds (but not all - A Gauss Rifle will never be limited by this, and this is also something you need to keep in mind) less practical and useful. Indirectly, it can also make boating less "necessary" - if you have to stagger your shots to avoid spiking the heat capacity, but cna still maintain your full DPS this way, it might not be such a big issue to have two different weapon properties to account for when aiming. Basically, we move from firing 6 PPCs at once, we move from 3 PPCs at once, followed 1 second later by another 3 PPCs, and fire the second cycle 2 seconds afterwards, it's not a big deal changing this to 2 PPCs at once and, say, 4 LRMs 1 second later.