468 replies to this topic

[CloaknDagger]

Let's see MWO's.record on ignoring canon so far:

1. Doubling Armor

Effect: Weight class balance is destroyed. Light mechs can easily get in a brawl with mechs 5 times their size and beat them with their lag shields. And combined with...

2. Tripling weapon RoF

Effect: Weapon balance is destroyed. Gauss is the only ballistic worth using, all canon designs are way overheated, Energy boats are forced to boat heat sinks.

3. No guidance on SRMs.

Effect: By treating SRMs like Rocket Launchers, They are useless at anything other than point blank. I mean that literally, I can count on one hand the number of times an SRM boat killed me. Every time was at point blank. They literally have no range.

4. Treating ECM like Stealth Armor, AECM, and a regular ECM all at the same time.

Effect: I think you know just how badly this is screwing up the game. ECM doesn't stop missile locks in canon, or reduce detection range.

5. Treating BAP as... a targeting system?

Effect: BAP is supposed to act as a better sensor system. That it does do. But it is also supposed to be a Counter-ECM. Any ECM field it's near is nullified. In here, it... isn't. That's why nobody uses BAP.

6. Streak SRMs always hit.

Effect: SSRMs are only supposed to be perfectly accurate IF you actually get a hit. That is, it's just as accurate as any other weapon, except more missiles hit, and if you miss, the weapon doesn't fire. Instead, we get a weapon that almost never misses, and does tons of damage for low heat and weight. Also it goes great on ECM mechs.

7. Unjammable U/AC-5s

Effect: U/AC-5's still suck.

8. Machineguns not doing 2 damage.

Effect: MGs are useless.

9. Less than Double Double Heat Sinks.

Effect: EVERYTHING past intro tech was designed with DHS in mind. ERPPCs, ERLLs, MRMs, ect.... Effectively reducing heat sinking across the board just ***** them even more than already. Heat was ALREADY A PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH.

10. No heat scale effects.

Effect: With only "shutdown" and "perfectly fine", there's absolutely no reason not to alpha strike. In TT you would slow down, become less accurate, and maybe blow up with too much heat. NOPE! Not here!


Continue to ignore canon Piranha, I'm sure it will end up just as well as Duke Nukem Forever did.

Edited by CloaknDagger, 09 March 2013 - 11:21 AM.

[Volume]

[Xandralkus]

The game doesn't suck because the devs didn't follow canon.

The game sucks because the devs have not yet figured out how to design a game, and are completely content to crap out new mechs and MC content until the game launches.

Doubling armor was a stupid decision not because it deviates from canon, but because it makes solo and small-group attackers completely useless.

Tripling weapon ROF was a stupid decision because they failed to grasp the concept that WEAPONS GENERATE HEAT. If they reduced heat generation by a factor of three, all would have been well.

Non-homing SRM's might have worked if the spread was tight enough that one could nail an assault's CT from 250 meters with most of the salvo, but they seemed to forget that, and began making ludicrously stupid SRM changes.

The current ECM system is not awful because it deviates from canon, it is awful because it breaks an entire class of weaponry and gives coordinated groups of players a near-insurmountable advantage: surprise.

BAP is not terrible because it deviates from canon, it's terrible because the devs made it do absolutely nothing of value.

Streak mechanics are really screwy even in BT canon. We have a reasonably close replica - a weapon that always hits, unless it won't hit (not locked) and then won't fire. It highlights quite elegantly that what is good game design in TT is horrible game design in a shooter/simulator.

Last I checked, UAC's were jammable. But, if they're not in this patch, then they are going to be an irritating cheesebuild weapon.

[dal10]

(this may be a bit out of line, but i can only withstand stupidity of certain magnitude. feel free to mod what you guys wish)

you sir, have not the slightest idea what you are talking about.

reasons why you have no idea what you are talking about:

Armor: if armor was not doubled, DO YOU HAVE ANY BLOODY IDEA HOW FAST THINGS WOULD DIE? imagine an atlas with 47 points of armor on its central torso, which is less than a hunchback has now. things that could almost (or fully) strip the torso in 1 salvo

3 srm 6 cent, ac/20 cat splat cat, 9 medium laser 4p, any lrm boat, 4 erppc stalker, 6 large laser stalker, 4 ppc 4 streak 2 stalker any atlas that has more than half a brain, the stock 9M awesome 6 medium pulse laser cicada, the noisy cricket,triple ultra 5 muromets, the stock stalker (just about any variant) 4 medium laser 2 srm 4 jenner, 3 srm 6 commando. do i really need to go on?

armor was doubled to help deal with the fact you can actually aim weapons. this game does not dice roll to decide hits, there would be no purpose in doing a FPS if you had to roll a die to decide if your weapon hit or not(and where it hit while you are at it). h3ll, i would even support the tripling of armor, as the game plays way too fast. mechs aren't supposed to go down in 10 seconds of firing from full armor.

triple weapons ROF. this is a simple one, how many people would play this game if it operated on 10 second turns? can you imagine how bored people would get if they had to wait 10 seconds to turn left or right and/fire weapons. this game would die due to the fact only a few hardcore players would even deign to acknowledge its existence.

dumb-fire srms. actually srms used to be the most accurate weapon in the game. initially they had a massive shotgun spread (quintuple the worst spread you have seen in OB and that would be about right) then pgi implented them as basically one missile. that was when the first boaters (splat cats...) appeared. they were notorious for headshots, as srms were basically missile lasers out to 270. have you ever seen a 90 damage headshot at 260 meters, i suffered one at the hands of a rather good player. yeah... even now srms are decent for killing lights if they don't have artemis, i just use them as an anti-light mech shotgun, a role they excel at.

ECM:

i don't mind this implementation too much anymore, i just wish that the detection range was 300 meters instead of 200 so you could actually target things without already being in the bubble. but i am not beating this dead horse again.

i am pretty sure ECM was the anti-bap not the other way around, though bap would know it was being jammed.

streaks always hit, due to stats, a lot of people have been noticing streaks hit around 75% of the time, but as 3rd guy said, there is no good way to implement them in a game like this.

Edited by dal10, 08 March 2013 - 11:04 PM.

[LegoPirate]

doubleing armor was a good idea. weapon convergence makes it a necessity. otherwise a 6ppc stalker could pretty much oneshot any mech in the game.

UACs suck now? a pair of them is arguably as strong as a gauss rifle with like 4x the RoF, and the ability to doubleshoot when needed. and AC20s are pretty strong as well.

how would srms with targeting be any different from ssrms? the ability to dumbfire? then im not sure why bother with streaks.

also reducing heat by 2/3 would be pretty silly. 6 ppc stalkers would be able to fire 4-5 times before overheating. thats an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.

if you want to play a TT then go play it. Turn based rules dont work in a real time game.

[Royalewithcheese]

CloaknDagger, on 08 March 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

Gauss is the only ballistic worth using

Except for the AC20 and the UAC5, you mean? Gauss is good for some builds ofc, but there are multiple valid big ballistic choices

CloaknDagger, on 08 March 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

Effect: By treating SRMs like Rocket Launchers, They are useless at anything other than point blank. I mean that literally, I can count on one hand the number of times an SRM boat killed me. Every time was at point blank. They literally have no range.

Artemis extends the effective range out to ~200 or so after the patch, and even before that there was a "sweetspot" at about 125m. SRMs if anything are probably a little too powerful ATM.

CloaknDagger, on 08 March 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

7. Unjammable U/AC-5s

Effect: U/AC-5's still suck.

They're actually one of the most powerful weapons in the game if used correctly. A 3xUAC5 Ilya or a 2xUAC5 DDC is scary powerful.

Edited by Royalewithcheese, 08 March 2013 - 11:16 PM.

[Corvus Antaka]

But...its so much more fun than rolling dice!

[Voyager I]

There's no way this can be a serious post about how SRMs aren't good enough.

You can literally do 45 damage for 6 tons and fire on cooldown with just the heatsinks in your engine.

[Xandralkus]

Yeah, SRM's should be almost as heat-intensive as lasers.

On the topic of double-armor...I really don't see the issue with rolling back to half armor if the devs both figure out how to normalize alpha-per-ton across weapons so that we don't end up with alphastrike warrior online, and figure out how to scale alpha per ton against DPS per ton, damage per heat, DPS per heat stable tonnage, and similar derived statistics.

...Did I mention that the current weapon values (and TT ones) are kind of...crap? A Dragon with an AC-10, a handful of lasers, and a few missiles should be just as dangerous as a Gausscat (in fact, a dragon build like that should technically OWN a gausscat at shorter ranges), and be just as dangerous and imminent a threat as a splatcat.

But no, weapons aren't balanced. Overpowered weapons were only slightly less grossly exploitable in TT than they are here (medium laser).

I'd really like to see safety in numbers go away by undoing double armor. Screw up your approach and get flanked by ONE assault or heavy, and you should be missing weapons and into structure in a matter of seconds. Double armor makes shooting things useless. Ever tried shooting stuff in the practice range? The food processor in my kitchen has a more satisfying punch than my battlemech's 7-ton PPC.

[Zyllos]

The reason why a lot of this is coming about is because it is easier to take out a mech with just boating a lot of weapons that converge onto a single point and hit for the torso section (this does not mean boating of the same weapons, I mean boating weapons that allow you to hit hard into a single point).

And each passing week, it is getting worse and worse.

Arm lock toggle is going to make extremely prevalent. It makes alpha striking all those weapons into a single point SO much easier. While arm lock will be a disadvantage at close distances because torsos are much slower in moving than the arms, but what this will do is allow players to concentrate on just getting the torso crosshair on the target. And if they do, it automatically get the arms to hit, which is just going to make alpha strike builds that much better.

Weapon convergence has always been the enemy of the MechWarrior franchise. And we are going deeper and deeper down this hole.

Edited by Zyllos, 09 March 2013 - 06:55 AM.

[Deathlike]

Believe it or not, SRMs have actually very predictable trajectory (having experimented in the A1 splatcat), so it's actually very useful in its current state, EVEN vs faster mechs. You actually don't need much of a guidance system to make them useful... and by far are more useful than LBX10s. There is actually some skill into using them, but on the other hand, the splatcat is insanely powerful when they do get into weapons range..

I believe this is the only game where SRMs are actually usable compared to MW2/MW3/MW4 where Streaks are the common weapon of choice for short range missiles.

Edited by Deathlike, 09 March 2013 - 09:04 AM.

[Gandalfrockman]

CloaknDagger, on 08 March 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

Let's see MWO's.record on ignoring canon so far:

1. Doubling Armor

Effect: Weight class balance is destroyed. Light mechs can easily get in a brawl with mechs 5 times their size and beat them with their lag shields. And combined with...

2. Tripling weapon RoF

Effect: Weapon balance is destroyed. Gauss is the only ballistic worth using, all canon designs are way overheated, Energy boats are forced to boat heat sinks.

3. No guidance on SRMs.

Effect: By treating SRMs like Rocket Launchers, They are useless at anything other than point blank. I mean that literally, I can count on one hand the number of times an SRM boat killed me. Every time was at point blank. They literally have no range.

4. Treating ECM like Stealth Armor, AECM, and a regular ECM all at the same time.

Effect: I think you know just how badly this is screwing up the game. ECM doesn't stop missile locks in canon, or reduce detection range.

5. Treating BAP as... a targeting system?

Effect: BAP is supposed to act as a better sensor system. That it does do. But it is also supposed to be a Counter-ECM. Any ECM field it's near is nullified. In here, it... isn't. That's why nobody uses BAP.

6. Streak SRMs always hit.

Effect: SSRMs are only supposed to be perfectly accurate IF you actually get a hit. That is, it's just as accurate as any other weapon, except more missiles hit, and if you miss, the weapon doesn't fire. Instead, we get a weapon that almost never misses, and does tons of damage for low heat and weight. Also it goes great on ECM mechs.

7. Unjammable U/AC-5s

Effect: U/AC-5's still suck.


Continue to ignore canon Piranha, I'm sure it will end up just as well as Duke Nukem Forever did.

Have you actually Played the game?
1.Doubling armor was a very GOOD thing, I played before they doubled armor. Everything died instantly, Without random die rolls to determine hit/miss/distribution, even the heaviest mechs went down in one salvo.

2.Tripling rate of fire was a good thing, A real time game shouldn't be built around 10 second rounds, this also helps to accomodate change #1, yes there are some heat issues, but they primarily effect stock loadouts. No Idea what your talking about on the ballistics The only ballistic that this may have dust binned is the AC10 and people WILL argue with you about that one.

3.The SRM changes are a good thing. They are useful, but not without downsides, They are certainly usable within 100 meters, if they had locks they would have too much in common with streaks.

4 & 5, yes its a trainwreck, but Sticking to TT rules would not fix it, they need a signifgant overhaul to be useful in a real time game.

6. streaks have actually been mostly fine for a while now, they need to fix a bug with each streak hitting multiple parts of a mech for full damage due to splash, but other wise they are fine, they randomly hit a torso segment, and you can still twist to protect a specific segment. EDit: This bug only seems to affect Small mechs, commandos, ravens, jenners, cicadas, etc.

7.UAC's Jam , infact they jam more than normal due to a bug right now.

Edited by Gandalfrockman, 09 March 2013 - 08:36 AM.

[CloaknDagger]

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

doubleing armor was a good idea. weapon convergence makes it a necessity. otherwise a 6ppc stalker could pretty much oneshot any mech in the game.

If it hits the CT of a light. It wouldn't take out an assault.

What it does do is overheat because IS designs can't handle 60 heat.

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

UACs suck now? a pair of them is arguably as strong as a gauss rifle with like 4x the RoF, and the ability to doubleshoot when needed. and AC20s are pretty strong as well.

A pair of them is 18 tons and way more crits, plus they chew up tons of ammo.

AC20 has bad range and heat.

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

how would srms with targeting be any different from ssrms? the ability to dumbfire? then im not sure why bother with streaks.

SRMs with targeting would be like short range LRMs. Streaks would just have really good speed and accuracy when they do fire.

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

also reducing heat by 2/3 would be pretty silly. 6 ppc stalkers would be able to fire 4-5 times before overheating. thats an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.

???

Don't know what you mean. Didn't say anything about reducing heat.

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

if you want to play a TT then go play it. Turn based rules dont work in a real time game.

Pirhanna's rules don't seem to work either, so I'd rather just go with TT values to be safe.

Voyager I, on 09 March 2013 - 12:45 AM, said:

There's no way this can be a serious post about how SRMs aren't good enough.

You can literally do 45 damage for 6 tons and fire on cooldown with just the heatsinks in your engine.

Yes, if all the missiles hit. In TT, that doesn't happen unless you get god given rolls.

Royalewithcheese, on 08 March 2013 - 11:14 PM, said:

Artemis extends the effective range out to ~200 or so after the patch, and even before that there was a "sweetspot" at about 125m. SRMs if anything are probably a little too powerful ATM.

A weapon upgrade upgrades the weapon?

Say it ain't so!

Royalewithcheese, on 08 March 2013 - 11:14 PM, said:

They're actually one of the most powerful weapons in the game if used correctly. A 3xUAC5 Ilya or a 2xUAC5 DDC is scary powerful.

Until it jams.

Meanwhile I'm rolling Gauss + PPC + Some medium lasers.

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 08 March 2013 - 11:43 PM, said:

But...its so much more fun than rolling dice!

MegaMek has no dice.

Also it's free and you can DL it now.

Gandalfrockman, on 09 March 2013 - 08:35 AM, said:

2.Tripling rate of fire was a good thing, A real time game shouldn't be built around 10 second rounds, this also helps to accomodate change #1, yes there are some heat issues, but they primarily effect stock loadouts. No Idea what your talking about on the ballistics The only ballistic that this may have dust binned is the AC10 and people WILL argue with you about that one.

Tripling the rate of fire =/= Tripling the effective rate of fire.

They could have made a PPC shoot 3 times in 10 seconds, doing 3 and 1/3 damage and heat every shot.

Instead they shoot every 3 seconds and do 10 damage and heat every shot.

I think you can see there's a sizable difference.

Edited by CloaknDagger, 09 March 2013 - 11:13 AM.

[Royalewithcheese]

CloaknDagger, on 09 March 2013 - 11:12 AM, said:

A pair of [UACS] is 18 tons and way more crits, plus they chew up tons of ammo.

Sure, but they do twice to four times the damage of a gauss rifle and aren't made of glass and explosions. They're very effective on builds that have the space for them. Of the top builds right now, there are some that use gauss and some that use UAC/5.

CloaknDagger, on 09 March 2013 - 11:12 AM, said:

AC20 has bad range and heat.

Depending on the build, that may or may not matter. An AC/20 is actually a pretty effective midrange weapon - it does better damage than a gauss rifle out to ~400m at which point the gauss rifle starts to pull ahead. Some of the top builds run either, depending on the role.

CloaknDagger, on 09 March 2013 - 11:12 AM, said:

Until it jams.

Meanwhile I'm rolling Gauss + PPC + Some medium lasers.

If your UAC/5 jams, you were either taking a calculated risk or doing it wrong. Also, fun fact: a pair of UAC/5s has roughly the same DPS of that entire loadout with much less heat if you don't double-tap them. There's a reason they're a staple on Marmosets and DDCs

[MustrumRidcully]

LegoPirate, on 08 March 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

doubleing armor was a good idea. weapon convergence makes it a necessity. otherwise a 6ppc stalker could pretty much oneshot any mech in the game.

No. Weapon Convergence and MOuse Aiming means that people hit where they want to hit. To compensate, you need to alter the armour ratios between hit locations, so that there is a point to aim for anything else but the head or center torso. The famous example is the Splatapult: If you go for the arms instead of the center torso, the Cat will only deal 20 % damage less than when you go for the CT. Considering that the arms are easier to manoeuver than the center torso, and that teams would need to agree beforehand which arm to shoot first, the difference is marginal!
To deal with this, they should have altered armour distribution so that the center torso has much more armour compared to the table top and other "shoot-worthy" locations.

Also, if you double the armour value, why do you triple the damage output of every mech by raising their rate of fire and not adjusting damage (and heat) per shot?

[Sturmforge]

Doubling Armor was pointless. All they had to do was up the rate of fire then divide the damage and heat by the number of times the weapon fired in 10 seconds. For things like SRMs and LRMs I would have went with a ripple launch effect. take the SRMs as an example. The SRM-2 could fire once every 5 seconds firing one missile. the SRM-4 one missile every 2.5 seconds and so on. LRM-5 would be one missile every 2 seconds with the LRM-10 firing every second.

Another thing I think they should have implemented was Era play. That way they do not have to try to balance things like SHS with DHS. Say when you start the game you are put into the 3025 era. After building enough money or whatever you can choose to 3050 then get your DHS and upgraded equipment or stay in 3025.

Edited by Sturmforge, 10 March 2013 - 09:43 AM.

[Tarl Cabot]

Sturmforge, on 10 March 2013 - 09:30 AM, said:

Doubling Armor was pointless. All they had to do was up the rate of fire then divide the damage and heat by the number of times the weapon fired in 10 seconds.

Doubling the armor/ton was needed due to the damage multiplier of having 16 mechs on the field instead of 8, as well as the ability to customize mechs and their loadout. Add on top of that the maps. For being in a hostile environment, how many commanders would actually pitch camp where the bases are currently located, never mind the limited field of fire for many of them.

But on everything said, the stats themselves were based, be it the TT or Solaris game, around all of the other facets of the game. 1st one is regardless of number of heatsinks a mech had, it did not increase that mech's heat threshold, and then more importantly there were more negative effects other than ammo explosion when running closer to the heat threshold.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 10 March 2013 - 09:56 AM.

[Xandralkus]

dal10, on 08 March 2013 - 11:03 PM, said:

Armor: if armor was not doubled, DO YOU HAVE ANY BLOODY IDEA HOW FAST THINGS WOULD DIE? imagine an atlas with 47 points of armor on its central torso, which is less than a hunchback has now. things that could almost (or fully) strip the torso in 1 salvo

Please listen closely, because this is how math works:

If you half the amount of armor that mechs have, then you ONLY double the speed at which they die. In order to get instant-kill, you need to at least triple or quadruple the speed that mechs die. Only then does instant-alpha become a problem.

Furthermore, double armor does not slow down the rate that one dies in any tangible way. The metagame has simply evolved to undo it. The only way to destroy a mech in just a few seconds is to get multiple people shooting it at the same time. Have you actually NEVER seen an Atlas go from 100% to cored in <2 seconds? It still happens. Double armor doesn't stop it.

Undo half armor, and one or two heavies or assaults can flank enemy targets WITHOUT needing to be backed up by a sizable chunk of the team. Safety in numbers goes away completely. With decent weapon balance, a Dragon with an AC-2 and some lasers can shred an Atlas as easily as a Splatcat (and with half-armor, the Atlas has five, maybe six seconds to respond until internals start taking damage.

Have you actually used any weapons on the training grounds? I think not. They don't DO anything...

dal10, on 08 March 2013 - 11:03 PM, said:

3 srm 6 cent, ac/20 cat splat cat, 9 medium laser 4p, any lrm boat, 4 erppc stalker, 6 large laser stalker, 4 ppc 4 streak 2 stalker any atlas that has more than half a brain, the stock 9M awesome 6 medium pulse laser cicada, the noisy cricket,triple ultra 5 muromets, the stock stalker (just about any variant) 4 medium laser 2 srm 4 jenner, 3 srm 6 commando. do i really need to go on?

That is, unless you exploit broken weapon mechanics. Fix the weapon balance, remove narrowly constrained roles, half the armor, and ANY mech will be able to shred a Splatcat, or a laser/PPC stalkerboat, or a UAC Muromets, or any other 'boat'.

In fact, we would see a shift away from boating - because in this evolving metagame of half-armor, mechs engage at the range they appear at. If you run into someone with a generalist build, and you are running a long-range sniper boat, then any medium or light will SHRED you once they know you exist - because they will flank you. If you run a short-range boat, any generalist build with a long-range weapon will also SHRED you unless you break off and retreat. Get ready to get flanked. Additionally, scouting would actually be useful again, even to non-missile boats. Knowing where the targets actually ARE would be a significant advantage.

[Sturmforge]

Tarl Cabot, on 10 March 2013 - 09:43 AM, said:

Doubling the armor/ton was needed due to the damage multiplier of having 16 mechs on the field instead of 8, as well as the ability to customize mechs and their loadout. Add on top of that the maps. For being in a hostile environment, how many commanders would actually pitch camp where the bases are currently located, never mind the limited field of fire for many of them.

But on everything said, the stats themselves were based, be it the TT or Solaris game, around all of the other facets of the game. 1st one is regardless of number of heatsinks a mech had, it did not increase that mech's heat threshold, and then more importantly there were more negative effects other than ammo explosion when running closer to the heat threshold.

Actually not if you divide the amount of damage that the weapons do in that amount of time instead of just increasing RoF like they did. As for Solaris rules those were horribly broken to begin with.

[Khobai]

Quote

Doubling Armor was pointless. All they had to do was up the rate of fire then divide the damage and heat by the number of times the weapon fired in 10 seconds.

It wasnt pointless. Doubling armor was necessary because of pinpoint aiming.