1386 replies to this topic

[ICEFANG13]

Falconic, on 12 April 2013 - 05:03 PM, said:

Using a Cicada 3C almost exclusively lately.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...31217e70ee47da9

I found it to be mildly useful because of the ac2s. The machine guns I just hose down mechs with as a "always on" while I aim the ac2s. If I wasn't trying to prove to myself that the machine guns are useless I would've replaced them with more ammo for the ac2s already, but I am hoping something happens from this debate.

I have yet to top 350 damage. Most maps hovering around 160 to 180.

You can actually take the MGs off, and replace them with HS and you'll have higher sustained DPS, you could also put another ton of ammo on it...

[Critical Fumble]

Falconic, on 12 April 2013 - 05:03 PM, said:

Using a Cicada 3C almost exclusively lately.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...31217e70ee47da9

I found it to be mildly useful because of the ac2s. The machine guns I just hose down mechs with as a "always on" while I aim the ac2s. If I wasn't trying to prove to myself that the machine guns are useless I would've replaced them with more ammo for the ac2s already, but I am hoping something happens from this debate.

I have yet to top 350 damage. Most maps hovering around 160 to 180.

This is what I find hilarious about the thought that buffing MGs would result in MG deathboats that ruin the game for everyone (besides that they could tune it down the next day or sooner).

AC/20s have a DPS of 5. Meanwhile, the AC/2 has a DPS of 4, weighs half as much, has greater range and velocity, and has better ammo in terms of damage/ton. Its so OP! Oh, wait, no it isn't. My CDA-2A with 6 MLs averages somewhere in the 300-400 damage a round and hasn't been nerfed yet :-/

Now granted, 4 DPS would be a touch over the top possibly, but 2 wouldn't even be noticed except for filling out some empty hardpoints and seeing a few more ballistic variants around.

In the theme of getting some value out of ballistic points in some variants by adding in some more weapons: They could sneak the Light AC/2 in early by giving it a name indicating its a field modification (I'm thinking Sawn-Off AC/2) but the poor ballistic Spider would still be out in the cold as filling it out with those would take up 16 tons. Its possible, but you don't really have a scout mech anymore. They'd still need something in the 1-2 ton range for the sake of the Spider, and anything else badly strapped for tonnage. Whether 1 or 2 tons would be the best decision mostly hinges on how the ammo efficiency is.

[Tigerwolf]

All I have to say is that with close to 7000 hits with the weapon and only doing 289 damage with a weapon that WAS USED AS AN ANTI MECH WEAPON IN THE TT is pretty ridiculous.

[shintakie]

SweetWarmIce, on 12 April 2013 - 04:14 PM, said:

The 5 x AC/2 Jager has to make serious concessions which is why it's not seen often.

That 2 x AC/2 build you linked would be effective given time and range. But it has an XL engine, still requires leading and is vulnerable to crits. It has weaknesses that stop it from being popular.

The 6 x MG Jager would 86 KPH, max armour, standard engine durability with on-demand, no heat, hit-scan 4.5 DPS. There is lots of ammo to explode but CASE would stop it from killing you.

Which one of the above would appeal to most people? It's not the DPS I'm worried about. What I am worried about is that if machineguns get too good. Then everyone will want to boat them. Maybe I'm just being paranoid but apparently it happened in previous MechWarrior games.

It happened in previous MW games because MG's were broken. In MW3 you could boat as many MG's as you could fit in your mech. In MW4 the hardpoint system mixed with omni mechs meant you could basically do the same.

That kind of stuff is 100% impossible in current MWO and unless they plan to drastically change the hardpoint system, it'll be impossible until the game dies.

Aside from that, an 86 kph mech that can only really do damage from 90m or less is not at all dangerous. Any other Jager build would absolutely stomp on it due to range differences in weapons. Heck, anythin sportin a single medium laser would stomp on it unless it was atrociously slow, at which point they probably have far more than a single medium laser.

[HammerSwarm]

Tigerwolf, on 12 April 2013 - 09:19 PM, said:

All I have to say is that with close to 7000 hits with the weapon and only doing 289 damage with a weapon that WAS USED AS AN ANTI MECH WEAPON IN THE TT is pretty ridiculous.

I appreciate the outrage.

SweetWarmIce, on 12 April 2013 - 04:14 PM, said:

Which one of the above would appeal to most people? It's not the DPS I'm worried about. What I am worried about is that if machineguns get too good. Then everyone will want to boat them. Maybe I'm just being paranoid but apparently it happened in previous MechWarrior games.

And so? If it got good enough that people wanted to use it exclusively then it could be tuned back the other way with a hot fix or a patch. These are currently USELESS. There is an imperative to do something, if too much is done that can be fixed too, but it isn't an excuse to do nothing.

[MustrumRidcully]

Dang, I was just writing a reply to Bagheera in another MG thread regarding the critical hit system:

Bagheera, on 13 April 2013 - 09:25 AM, said:

Agreed. With the current system, you're nearly always better off doing raw damage to an exposed section. I'd like to think there's a way to make it viable, but not really sure what that might be.

If you have an opinion on the current crit system: http://mwomercs.com/...ical-hit-system

I am not sure the current system can be "salvaged" like that. Maybe if they doubled internal armour again?

But I'd like a crit system.

What I can come up with:
0) Ditch individual item hit points.
1) For every 8.33 % of internal structure you lost, there is a 33 % chance to get a single crit, a 11 % hance to get two crits, and a 6 % chance to get three crits. If you lost the damage from a "crit-seeker", the chance for a single crit is increased to 60 %.
2) Crits are determined randomly as now.

And a bunch of optionally ideas.
3) Optionally: Items can have multiple crit states. Undamaged, lightly damaged, severely damaged, destroyed. Most items go directly from undamaged to destroyed, except the engine, which uses all 4 states, and the AC/20 and AC/10, that use Undamaged, Severely Damaged and Destroyed. A "Severely" Damaged weapon has its rate of fire halved. Lightly Damaged Engines lose half their internal heat sinks, and severely damaged engines lose all their interhal heat sinks. (If we want a backdoor single heat sink buffs, they could also use all 4 sates, lightly damaged losing them 0.5 of their heat capacity bonus and severely damaged 0.5 of their heat dissipation bonus.)
4) Optionally: Ammo and Gauss Rifles explode with 90 % chance. Ammo explosion damage equals 20 damage for all ammo, and is scaled down by ammo count. (THis is a severe explosion risk increase for ammo bins, but the damage is in turn severely lowered, making it overall more predictable for the attacker but less devestating for the target.)
5) Optionally: Through Armour Critical Hits occur when armor is reduced to 50 % by an attack.
6) Optionally: Crit Seeker Weapons deal 50 % extra damage against internal structure (regardless of crits.)

[Critical Fumble]

This link will take a person to the start of the thread. Its actually a post link, rather than a topic link, because I can find Hayashi's post ID but not the topic ID.

Machine Gun Balance Thread

You can also make your own by hitting the "special BB code" button, or manually by typing:

(post='#')Link title(/post) Swap "(" for "["

The post ID number is 2210077

Use responsibly, or not. Adding it to your sig is the most effective idea if you're up in arms about it.

[General Taskeen]

shintakie, on 12 April 2013 - 09:58 PM, said:

It happened in previous MW games because MG's were broken. In MW3 you could boat as many MG's as you could fit in your mech. In MW4 the hardpoint system mixed with omni mechs meant you could basically do the same.

MG's were not broken in MW3, they were a straight-up, direct-to-real-time format of the Battle Mech MG.

MW3 had no hardpoint limitations, only crit/weight limitations the way Battle Tech actually is. That was the broken part, especially for an FPS with Multiplayer, which is also something you pointed at. Most weapons could be ideally boated, like using 8 or 10 Medium Lasers. The weapon balance itself, in stock or close to stock format, was very good.

MWO has curved the full-on weight/crit weapon placement to a degree, one of the few things they have done right. There would be nothing scary or over powered by a direct MG translation put into the game, which would essentially be a copy of the MW3 Machine Gun, and I hope the Devs make the necessary changes to do so.

Edited by General Taskeen, 13 April 2013 - 10:03 AM.

[Amsro]

SweetWarmIce, on 12 April 2013 - 04:14 PM, said:

The 5 x AC/2 Jager has to make serious concessions which is why it's not seen often.

That 2 x AC/2 build you linked would be effective given time and range. But it has an XL engine, still requires leading and is vulnerable to crits. It has weaknesses that stop it from being popular.

The 6 x MG Jager would 86 KPH, max armour, standard engine durability with on-demand, no heat, hit-scan 4.5 DPS. There is lots of ammo to explode but CASE would stop it from killing you.

Which one of the above would appeal to most people? It's not the DPS I'm worried about. What I am worried about is that if machineguns get too good. Then everyone will want to boat them. Maybe I'm just being paranoid but apparently it happened in previous MechWarrior games.

If a larger slow mech like the jaggermech wants to become a 90m close range brawler he may find himself toasted. It would require great piloting skills to be effective.

On the flip side light mechs have no real alternative to machine guns. I would love to see a 4x AC/2 spider, good luck installing an engine to go with it.

Let machine guns be a little more effective.

Edited by Amsro, 13 April 2013 - 09:59 AM.

[Loler skates]

Mgs clearly working as intended Bryan said so!

This is what he actually meant Fyi...



edit: you can tell this section of the forum never gets visited this image got nuked in GD for the swear word in five minutes. here it's lasted a good two days so far.

Edited by Loler skates, 14 April 2013 - 11:04 AM.

[Conraire]

I wish I could find my mechwarrior 3 disc. Found MW2, Mercs (gold activision beta cd), MW3 is missing, Mw4 Vengeance and Mercs I found again.

I know what you mean on the Jager Amsro. My main JM6-S load out is 2x AC10, 4x M Laser, 280 engine, and ammo and DHS's. My alternate loadout is 4x MG's and 4x Large Lasers. Even then I have to strip a persons armor off, before the MG's become remotely useful. I couldn't stand the DD because there was no use for the other ballistic points if you fit AC's. Though ideally if they worked like they should, I'd fit 2x LBX10s and 4MG's. And shore up the Energy points with whatever I could manage for a back up weapon.

Something like this. JM6-DD Gat

Unfortunately, with MG's in their current state, that setup, isn't very useful.

The concern I see above about people boating them, is kind of taken care of by the fitting system the game uses. Only ones remotely capable of boating them would be the JM6-DD, JM6-S, CTF-4X, SDR-5K, CDA-3C, and thats only because they were specifically designed to boat that weapon system. There are a lot of mechs with 2 or 3 Ballistic points that never get used. HBK-4G is a prime example, with 3 ballistic points in the torso, 2 of which almost never get used.. Dragon 1N and 5N are other examples, since most people aren't going to use dual AC2 in the arm due to weight. That usually means you either put 1 AC5 or AC10, and the extra 1 or 2 slots go unused due to weight, or uselessness of the alternative backup weapon.

The truth is, the MG should be a scan fire weapon, similar to how lasers work. Just instead of being a constant beam, it's an x round burst of MG bullets. They boosted the amount of ammo per ton by 10x from 200 per ton to 2000. So, that would mean to match canon stats the MG would fire a 10 round burst that did a total of 2dmg at 90m. Any bullets that didn't hit or went to other sections of the mech would do dmg in .2dmg increments to the section they hit.. Then have say a .5-1sec cool down, same as the AC2. It'd balance out the weight difference due to the AC2 having almost 9 times the max possible effective range that the MG has. Not to mention almost 20x the travel speed, which is kinda wrong since the 20mm rounds fired out of the m61a1/GAU-4(what BT MG's are based on) in reality travel at a little over 1000m/s.

[General Taskeen]

Conraire, on 13 April 2013 - 12:57 PM, said:

Something like this. JM6-DD Gat

Not only that, but if LB-X worked as they were originally intended, you would be able to damage enemies at longer range and that entire build would be 'legit' if all the weapons worked, and not just the MLs, meaning 75% of the weapons on it are not working as intended.

That kind of build in MW3, would mean all your weapons work at damaging an enemy within the respected ranges of the weapons.

LB 10-X - 18.67 Damage every 2 Seconds at 520M
MG's - .8 Damage every .625 Seconds at 120M
ML - 5 Damage every 3.5 Seconds at 360M

But alas, we're not allowed to have nice things.

[Atheus]

Machine guns defy math!

[Xelah]

4mg + 1LL spider
compare to
6ML jenner

comparable weight, the spider is lighter, but can mount more jump jets

Lets say they buff the MG's to 1dps. The spider can mount four of them, which would give the mech a sustained DPS of 6.12 for as long as the ammo held out. Dubsinks on an XL255 could keep the laser running forever. Let's assume the spider pilot is good enough to get within 90m to alpha (and assume no cone...) That's 13 damage into a spot, repeated as often as the spider could stay alive.

The jenner has an alpha of 30 but can only fire twice before needing to cool off, giving him a potential break from enemy fire if he hides.

The spider can remain to fight far longer than the standard Jenner-F loadout potentially inflicting more damage, but the tradoff again would be spending lots of quality time with the mech shooting back. Even with this pause for thought, I still don't see where PGI comes to the conclusion that this would be OP without letting it go through testing with the players. Even with the 6.12 dps until I ran out of ammo, I think I would still prefer to fight larger mechs in the jenner because the engagement times would be shorter and I would take less damage... at least until a Streakecm-3L showed up.

[Tigerwolf]

Update
9375 HITS 383 damage

[General Taskeen]

The...



is so OP

Edited by General Taskeen, 14 April 2013 - 05:50 AM.

[Krzysztof z Bagien]

Atheus, on 13 April 2013 - 09:27 PM, said:

Machine guns defy math!

So OP!

[Pinselborste]

Xelah, on 13 April 2013 - 10:18 PM, said:

4mg + 1LL spider
compare to
6ML jenner

comparable weight, the spider is lighter, but can mount more jump jets

Lets say they buff the MG's to 1dps. The spider can mount four of them, which would give the mech a sustained DPS of 6.12 for as long as the ammo held out. Dubsinks on an XL255 could keep the laser running forever. Let's assume the spider pilot is good enough to get within 90m to alpha (and assume no cone...) That's 13 damage into a spot, repeated as often as the spider could stay alive.

The jenner has an alpha of 30 but can only fire twice before needing to cool off, giving him a potential break from enemy fire if he hides.

The spider can remain to fight far longer than the standard Jenner-F loadout potentially inflicting more damage, but the tradoff again would be spending lots of quality time with the mech shooting back. Even with this pause for thought, I still don't see where PGI comes to the conclusion that this would be OP without letting it go through testing with the players. Even with the 6.12 dps until I ran out of ammo, I think I would still prefer to fight larger mechs in the jenner because the engagement times would be shorter and I would take less damage... at least until a Streakecm-3L showed up.

sad thing is that the damage of the mg need to be increased by 400% to make it as damaging as the small laser cause it spreads so much and gets slower case of ping.

[HammerSwarm]

Quick Update because I am using these weapons:

A/C2 = 15669 dmg on 7823 hits or 15669/7823*2 = 4.01 DPS (I don't have fast fire on my Jagers yet.) Working as intended
MG = 105 dmg on 3028 hits or 105/3028*10 = .346 DPS (Not even the .4 DPS as promised, no additional component damage)

Fix these now.......

[HammerSwarm]

Xelah, on 13 April 2013 - 10:18 PM, said:

The spider can remain to fight far longer than the standard Jenner-F loadout potentially inflicting more damage, but the tradoff again would be spending lots of quality time with the mech shooting back. Even with this pause for thought, I still don't see where PGI comes to the conclusion that this would be OP without letting it go through testing with the players. Even with the 6.12 dps until I ran out of ammo, I think I would still prefer to fight larger mechs in the jenner because the engagement times would be shorter and I would take less damage... at least until a Streakecm-3L showed up.

The Spider also has to keep the weapon on the target, it's continuous fire, so it should be better than an alpha weapon.