206 replies to this topic

[jeffsw6]

Reading the latest Ask the Devs statements from Russ, he mentions that over-all damage is too high. I think this is a dangerous way to think, and we must discuss it.

Do mechs die too quickly for the game to be fun? In many situations, yes. If you get hit with 60 LRMs, that is not fun. If you get hit with 6 ERPPCs at 1100m and your CT is orange before you ever see an opponent, that is not fun. If two AC/40 Jagermechs alpha you in the face as you cross over a ridge, that is not fun.

However, a general nerf to damage would also be pretty terrible. It already takes a light or medium mech a long time to kill an assault mech. If damage were reduced, for example, by 50%, it would take a Commando so long to kill an Atlas that it could walk half-way across Alpine first. The SDR-5K would, uh, still get the 0 kills it gets today, but if it could get less than 0 kills per match, that is what would happen.

It's also bad because, as an assault mech being attacked by 1 or 2 lights, you are doing everything you can to take advantage of any mistakes they make. If you can land 1 or 2 good alphas, they will probably be badly wounded or die. But for that to happen, the light mech first has to make an error and end up in your line of fire. If he can do that 4 times before losing a leg, you'll never beat him. He will chase you forever, shooting your back with new, nerfed, 2.5dmg MLs and you will spend forever trying to turn so you can face him.

I do think mechs die too quickly, but not in every situation. What we need is specific nerfs and buffs to fix certain weapons.

If they think "damage is too high," we need instead to suggest increasing internal structure hit-points. This would still cause mechs to get their weapons damaged/destroyed at the same rate, but entire arms, legs, or engines won't blow off as quickly. You can still badly wound your opponent by knocking out his AC/20 but it'll take longer to leg him. Legs, though ... you can't just blindly double structure HP because (see above.)

The entirety of my thoughts on the current weapon-balance is summarized as follows:
Energy Weapons

• Flamer needs damage buff and should generate less (or no) heat when fired, and maybe should be changed from 1 ton to 0.5 tons
  
• Small Laser could have more range but otherwise, seems fine
  
• Small Pulse Laser needs buffed
  
• Medium Laser is fine
  
• Medium Pulse Laser is fine
  
• Large Laser is fine
  
• Large Pulse Laser should be slightly buffed, with either more range or slightly less heat
  
• ER Large Laser is just a dumb weapon right now, but might become more useful if PPC & ERPPC are changed as below
  
• PPC, start reducing damage inside 180m, to zero damage at 90m; raise heat
  
• ERPPC, change damage fall-off to zero by 1200m; raise heat

Ballistics

• Machine Gun, raise damage to 1 to 1.5 DPS; find out what is OP and then nerf it; reduce its ammo/ton
  
• the missing light-weight guns, create some
  
• AC/2, reduce weight slightly; otherwise seems okay but incredibly aggravating and over-powered when someone is mouse-macroing 4 of them; reduce or eliminate its cockpit shake after the first impact per 10s(?)
  
• AC/5 reduce weight slightly; seems okay otherwise
  
• Ultra AC/5 reduce weight slightly; make double-fire somehow optional so players aren't buying a $50 mouse just to avoid the jam, and suddenly taking advantage of a mechanic unavailable to casuals
  
• AC/10 increase ammo/ton and weapon hit-points to make it a viable alternative to the AC/20
  
• AC/20 increase projectile speed
  
• LB 10-X make the spread smaller, or allow a dual-ammo option; raise ammo/ton slightly
  
• Gauss Rifle, reduce ammo/ton to 4

Missiles

• SRM raise damage
  
• Streak make it not always seek the center torso, raise damage
  
• LRM raise damage and projectile speed; increase weight of LRM15 and LRM20 (harder to boat 60 - 80); reduce ammo/ton

That's my thoughts on every weapon in the game. If I was king of the Interwebs, I would implement all those changes immediately, tweak some hit-boxes, make whole-team base-rush on assault impossible until 3 to 5 minutes into the game , make conquest resource capture require more than 750 points on large maps, and release it.



I would then give every player a free, extra, fully-mastered, cbill-bonused SDR-5K, HBK-4P, CPLT-A1, JM6-DD, HGN-733C, STK-3F, AWS-9M, and AS7-D-DC for a week so a bunch of different chassis get played with these new weapons; and take those free extra mechs back after the week of tweaking. If they want to keep them then they will use the CB they got while playing them to buy it. EDIT: I'd also make players able to purchase those mechs for MC during that week, an (M) variant or something, which stays fully-mastered and has a hero-like CB/XP bonus, even if they do not have any other chassis of that weight-class.

We can pray this is what the test servers will be used for.

Edited by jeffsw6, 27 April 2013 - 03:48 PM.

[Roadbeer]

Just re-read the recent ATD and didn't' see that anywhere. Plus, Russ doesn't do the ATDs so link / quote please or it didn't happen.

[AC]

The thing that frustrates me is that if PGI thinks damage is too high, then they are not paying attention. I have said this numerous time, it is NOT the weapons. It is the mechs. Balance breaks when they release a new mech that can boat weapons. Remember back to closed beta? The only mech that got a lot of attention was the K2 Gausapult. Why? Because PGI has a terrible slot system that lets you put gauss where Machine guns should go. Streaks were broken because of the SplatCat, AC20 is broken because of the Jagger, PPC is broken because of the stalker. It is the mechs themselves that break balance, NOT the weapons. Fix the slot system on the mechs and weapons balance will be simplified and overall game balance will be much better off.

Edited by AC, 27 April 2013 - 03:52 PM.

[Victor Morson]

I don't think it's a dangerous way to think.

If they did a blanket across the board damage reduction, I would be OK with it (aside from the still needed rebuffs); but it's something that isn't that easy to do. A lot of factors that aren't even statted to the public (like discharge times and such) get rapidly impacted by damage, as does ROF and heat; even if it was an even every weapon lowering situation.

If this is done without consideration of those elements, you'll see an entirely different meta rise from the ashes, but who knows if it's be a bad thing or a good one? It's something that they really need to test internally.

[TOGSolid]

Quote

Reading the latest Ask the Devs statements from Russ, he mentions that over-all damage is too high. I think this is a dangerous way to think, and we must discuss it.

[CITATION NEEDED]

This hasn't been said anywhere afaik.

Edited by TOGSolid, 27 April 2013 - 03:56 PM.

[ssm]

It's not ATD, Bryan Ekman said something along those lines on Reddit AMA:

Q: Does PGI ever plan to balance weapons by changing their weight and/or damage? So far only missiles have had their damage changed throughout the beta and everything else except MGs have their TT damage values.
A: Possibly. We're looking at overall DPS right now, which is too high overall with the new HSR fixes. It's super risky, so we're not jumping in head first with any DMG changes yet.

[Roadbeer]

ssm, on 27 April 2013 - 03:56 PM, said:

It's not ATD, Bryan Ekman said something along those lines on Reddit AMA:

Q: Does PGI ever plan to balance weapons by changing their weight and/or damage? So far only missiles have had their damage changed throughout the beta and everything else except MGs have their TT damage values.
A: Possibly. We're looking at overall DPS right now, which is too high overall with the new HSR fixes. It's super risky, so we're not jumping in head first with any DMG changes yet.

Yeah, just looked for that too... talk about putting words into someones mouth and taking away what you want to hear.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

As I just said in one of the other threads here, I've never understood why it is so hard for PGI to tune weapon damage every patch.

The one good thing about the player base, is if we find a weapon is too good, we boat the hell out of it and make a ton of threads.

So when you've hit the point where that's happening, scale the damage back one patch and you are probably good.

Edited by Nicholas Carlyle, 27 April 2013 - 04:15 PM.

[Roadbeer]

The problem with that is your just curing the symptom and not the disease.
Take PPCs right now as an example. Are PPCs so prolific because of the love they got? Or because LRMs have been so dialed back? Did the HSR blow PPCs out of whack? Hard to tell because I'm seeing a lot of gauss and AC around now as well. Will HSR with Missiles bring everything back to level?

Seems to me that the two things happened around the same time, So I'd like to see the changes for missiles implemented before I pass judgement on PPCs. Until you have the whole weapons system in, as you envision it, with damage working as intended and all the back end stuff (HSR, Netcode, etc) pretty much dialed in, you can't look at a single system and see where the problem is.

Edited by Roadbeer, 27 April 2013 - 04:21 PM.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

I accidentally clicked to see your post so I'll respond in this instance.

That is a very tangled web to weave, and really shouldn't be happening.

LRM's shouldn't balance PPC's and vice versa. They should both be good on their own accord.

[Roadbeer]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 27 April 2013 - 04:27 PM, said:

I accidentally clicked to see your post so I'll respond in this instance.

That is a very tangled web to weave, and really shouldn't be happening.

LRM's shouldn't balance PPC's and vice versa. They should both be good on their own accord.

That's what I'm saying, the only "meta" should be personal play style. but you can't make adjustments for that to happen until everything is in. Otherwise you just get into a viscous circle of nerf/buff/nerf/buff/nerf/buff where we're at now. Stop the madness and stop tweaking things until you have everything in, THEN figure out what's wrong.

[blinkin]

Roadbeer, on 27 April 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

Yeah, just looked for that too... talk about putting words into someones mouth and taking away what you want to hear.

don't let a silly thing like facts get in the way of a good debate.

[Zyllos]

The reason why stuff is so hard to balance is because weapons have pin-point accuracy.

Would boated PPCs and Gauss Rifles be unbalanced if it took more work to get them to land on a single location?

What about many Large Lasers or Medium Lasers? The Jenner has a 30 point alpha strike that all goes on the same location. Would it be unbalanced/balanced if all those lasers instead did 15 points in two different locations?

Edited by Zyllos, 27 April 2013 - 04:38 PM.

[Purplefluffybunny]

Roadbeer, on 27 April 2013 - 04:31 PM, said:

[...] Otherwise you just get into a viscous circle of nerf/buff/nerf/buff/nerf/buff where we're at now. [...]

Yep. There is nothing new under the sun and all of these issues have been encountered in one form or another, with the previous iterations of the MechWarrior franchise.

[Skyfaller]

The problem is there is no heat penalty to alpha striking.

Alpha strike = firing more than 1 weapon at once.

There should be a linear heat penalty.. for every weapon fired at the same time adds +1 heat to each weapon being fired.

Aka fire a 6PPC stalker.. each PPC gets +6 heat penalty. That same stalker fires 2 PPC's at once then each has +2 heat penalty.

There should be a chain fire bonus. Chain fire should reduce heat cost from weapons fired by -1 .

and there you go. it solves boating, poptart sniping, alpha strike dominance and most problems this game has.

Basically the encouraged fire mode should be chain fire. This would change the nature of mech combat from massive damage to one spot all at once into a more fluid maneuver combat. Brawling and long range engagements become a matter of heat management, armor damage management, aiming and driving skills... not just the ability to rush in and snapshot alpha strikes.

[Zyllos]

Skyfaller, on 27 April 2013 - 04:44 PM, said:

The problem is there is no heat penalty to alpha striking.

Alpha strike = firing more than 1 weapon at once.

There should be a linear heat penalty.. for every weapon fired at the same time adds +1 heat to each weapon being fired.

Aka fire a 6PPC stalker.. each PPC gets +6 heat penalty. That same stalker fires 2 PPC's at once then each has +2 heat penalty.

There should be a chain fire bonus. Chain fire should reduce heat cost from weapons fired by -1 .

and there you go. it solves boating, poptart sniping, alpha strike dominance and most problems this game has.

Basically the encouraged fire mode should be chain fire. This would change the nature of mech combat from massive damage to one spot all at once into a more fluid maneuver combat. Brawling and long range engagements become a matter of heat management, armor damage management, aiming and driving skills... not just the ability to rush in and snapshot alpha strikes.

This is a bad way about balancing group firing against alpha striking because it's placing a superficial system in place to keep you from alpha striking.

But, you are correct in your theory that if chain firing/group firing was better for aiming instead of alpha striking, the game would change a lot.

And there has been a LOT of discussion over balancing between group firing and alpha striking. You can clearly see that alpha striking is not only better for damage, because it all goes on the same location, but it's better for aiming because you only need to be on the target when the trigger is hit. Group firing requires you to aim over the time needed to fire all the weapon groups, which will lead to more spreading of damage.

[Zyllos]

Also, another system that is leading to issues is the Armor Allocation to Random Hit Location brought into a game that has no random hit location.

I had several discussions regarding this. Two things I think that would help this game a lot is a restructuring of the Armor Allocation for a game where you can aim, and then making weapons lose convergence, individually, but allow arms to "converge" their pointing.

http://mwomercs.com/...game-imbalance/

That is a pretty good discussion over what I was suggesting. If we made Arms allow to converge weaponry but Torsos fire straight from their physical locations, this would lead to more spread when alpha striking without any "random" mechanics.

One piece of the puzzle, for me, was that this really doesn't cure the problem with mechs like the Jagermech and Stalker. Their weapon systems are stored in the arms, which allows them to pin-point their damage.

But, this discussion lead me to link the idea that maybe the Internal Structure for arms need to be reduced and rebalanced into the Torsos. What this does is still allows mechs to equip many weapons in arms and have them converge but they are extremely vulnerable due to lower damage. And, it will take longer to get through the torso sections due to higher Internal Structure (which also increases the maximum amount of armor).

Edited by Zyllos, 27 April 2013 - 05:19 PM.

[Rhakhas]

I think the only thing that needs to happen (outside of the missile fixes), is that Center Torso armor ought to be increased. With the exception of lights and fast mediums, right now there's essentially no reason to aim for anything but the CT. An across the board damage reduction wouldn't change this. If it were more difficult to punch through the CT, this would lead to players having to decide whether to try to take down a mech as fast as possible, or to take out it's weapon systems first. (This is an option now, but currently it's almost always more efficient just to core the enemy).

[Sprouticus]

Personally I think DPS is too high as well, but opinions vary on that.

OP- They cant change the weight of any system, it breaks stock mechs and a bunch of other issues.

As for a alpha heat penalty, that would hurt smaller weapons (ml, mpl, AC5, UAC5 over larger ones, and beam weapons over ballistics.

The fix IMO is twofold

1) Lower the speed of the PPC and gauss to 1200/900 m/s respectively.

2) raise the heat of the PPC/ERPPC by a VERY small amount...like 0.5 or 1 tops.

3) lower the damage of gauss and PPC/ERPPC by a VERY small ammount. 0.5-1 tops. Maybe even 0.25

This will make extreme range shots more difficult, and also make light mechs viable again (if you stay at max range and dont get super close).


Last thing, form another post in the AMA, it looks like PGI is counting on the public test server to be an ACTUAL test server, and that while they still call this beta, they are treating production as released in all but name. I think most of us knew that, but this is confirmation. The good news is they can make changes to public test MUCH more quickly than once every 2 weeks without upsetting anyone.

Rhakhas, on 27 April 2013 - 06:44 PM, said:

I think the only thing that needs to happen (outside of the missile fixes), is that Center Torso armor ought to be increased. With the exception of lights and fast mediums, right now there's essentially no reason to aim for anything but the CT. An across the board damage reduction wouldn't change this. If it were more difficult to punch through the CT, this would lead to players having to decide whether to try to take down a mech as fast as possible, or to take out it's weapon systems first. (This is an option now, but currently it's almost always more efficient just to core the enemy).

The problem is not CT armor, it is that it is too easy to HIT CT armor. This game should be harder to have great aim. IMO, an average player should be able to HIT an enemy at 800m going fairly slowly, but not be able to pick the panel they will hit. Right now it is far too easy to hit where you want to, and that makes a LOT of the game less fun.

[SuomiWarder]

There is a fundamental pair of design dynamics at war with no easy answer.

On one hand you want players to feel powerful and that they can affect the battle by scoring kills by themselves. The player is the "Player Character Hero" of the story with a powerful ability to affect the game dynamic. One presumes that rewarding actual game skill is desired as part of this equation as well.

On the other hand is trying to keep players from getting scrapped right away before doing much. Players that die quickly get bored and stop playing so custimer retention because a factor.

The only real partial answer is something most people don't want - to ditch the pin point accuracy ability to damage one body part. And there is no way I can think of to protect a player from the "Called Target" tactic commonly used by grouped lances. (In which one enemy is designated on comms to be destroyed and all members fire on that guy then move to the next. This is the way league matches have been since the MW4 days).

So I guess that slowing the weapon fire rates is about the only thing left.