105 replies to this topic

[El Bandito]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 06 May 2013 - 10:14 PM, said:

A bug fix should also make it in tomorrow giving the NARC the power it should have had since it's conception. It will overpower ECM. -If a target is NARCed it will now show up for all NARC team allies for 15 sec. -ECM will NOT protect the NARCed target from showing up for allies. -If a mech takes 40 points of damage the NARC will 'fall off'.

Finally. See how you can actually make progress when you ignore TT rules? Please apply to other things as well.

[Asmudius Heng]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 06 May 2013 - 10:14 PM, said:

A bug fix should also make it in tomorrow giving the NARC the power it should have had since it's conception. It will overpower ECM.

-If a target is NARCed it will now show up for all NARC team allies for 15 sec.
-ECM will NOT protect the NARCed target from showing up for allies.
-If a mech takes 40 points of damage the NARC will 'fall off'.

Thank you for communicating with the community with some hard data and decisions.

[DocBach]

El Bandito, on 06 May 2013 - 10:26 PM, said:

Finally. See how you can actually make progress when you ignore TT rules? Please apply to other things as well.

So like, everything ECM existed to block in TT rules it is now countered by. MWO is bizarro battletech

Edited by DocBach, 06 May 2013 - 10:53 PM.

[Der Hesse]

I like the Changes.
If LRMs will make it back into the Game with a bit of Damageboost we will have some nice tactical fighting Scenarios.
The Scouts will have a Job again other then capping and flanking.
They will sneak to the enemy and Counter ecm for the lrm carriers like they did before with tag and their own ecm. But noe wvery Light can do that. Not only ecm ones.

[Deathlike]

So.. everything we knew about ECM... is now not ECM.

I'm actually OK with the NARC buff, but relative to the BAP buff.. this is small potatoes compared to BAP+Streaks.

[El Bandito]

DocBach, on 06 May 2013 - 10:52 PM, said:

So like, everything ECM existed to block in TT rules it is now countered by. MWO is bizarro battletech

I was referring to the Narc situation in particular. BAP is another argument entirely.

[Stargoat]

Ah, I remember Jenners when they were king of the lights... I suppose the X5 will also fall under this category,

Guess it will be yet another test aimed at those still running Spider 5Ds and Commando 2Ds - currently, those mechs have a slight edge over the jenners in one resepct (ECM capability aside) - their more articulate arms, but with Streaking Jenners in the mix, they'll probably be pushed out. I guess they won't be any more difficult to fight than Raven 3Ls, though.

Maybe in a few months, Streaks will be addressed directly, rather than dancing around the issue with changes to the pieces of equipment that indirectly affect their operation.

Edited by Stargoat, 07 May 2013 - 01:58 AM.

[AnarchyBurger]

Seanamal, on 06 May 2013 - 03:39 PM, said:

Yes and No. AMS was supposed to reduce missile damage not disrupt it's use. And frankly even if your entire team had AMS and stayed tightly grouped, enough LRM boats on the other team would still decimate you.

I've seen it many times, and your wrong. Besides the obvious point that teams that run full AMS are usually not complete tools and actually know how to take cover anyways. AMS teams can essentially negate a LRM teams onslaught (with using basic tactics) and close range to decimate. In fact it was fairly common pre-patch (last LRM nerf patch).

[Khobai]

Not a big fan of the decision to make BAP completely hard counter ECM. Why couldnt it have just been a soft counter? hard counters are really undynamic and boring... rock paper scissors isnt fun for a reason.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

So now how many ECM counters do we have? NARC, BAP, PPC, Adv. Sensors, UAV; I'm sure I'm missing one other.

Can we just make ECM do what it was originally intended so we can stop this dance?

Also to make NARC viable, make it weigh 1 ton less, and up the ammo per ton. Also make it 30 seconds instead of 15 and up the damage to 60.

Appreciate the communication by the way Thomas, keep it up.

[Dirus Nigh]

El Bandito, on 06 May 2013 - 10:26 PM, said:

Finally. See how you can actually make progress when you ignore TT rules? Please apply to other things as well.

Ignoring the TT source material is what made ECM over powered to begin with.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

Dirus Nigh, on 07 May 2013 - 05:52 AM, said:

Ignoring the TT source material is what made ECM over powered to begin with.

Yeah this would be a complete non-issue if we had TT ECM, TT BAP, TT AMS, TT NARC, etc.

But no, we HAD to put E(SUPER)CM into the game.

[General Taskeen]

I wouldn't say they ignored the original ECM. They had to have known from the get go what it did, and I'm sure they knew how the MW:LL devs did it as well, as well as past games. There had to have been some Devs or even Internal Testers objecting to the final ECM design decision. But when lead designers give the final say, everyone agrees or rubs elbows. My guess they thought it should be OP, so people would want to use it, but also as an easy solution to curb the way they have missiles programmed.

However, that design decision did not take time to flesh out 'real' and better 'information' warfare items by using the simple paper-rock-scissor TT functionality between ECM, C3, BAP, Artemis (Accuracy), and NARC. What was created started an arms race in the beta and subsequent changes causing the big-fish, or bigger fly-eats-fly mentality of balancing. And all they would to do was make the 'information' part better, and remove the ECM super-features, then there would have been no need for hard-counter balancing.

Edited by General Taskeen, 07 May 2013 - 06:18 AM.

[Dirus Nigh]

MWLL had ECM work just fine. It worked with in their active/passive radar system. It did shorten the detection range of radiar but it was by 10% at best. While BAP increase detection range. The two together almost canceled each other out.

The way MWO is doing things is clunky at best and completely twisted and will cause big imbalances in another direction.

The devs are making large changes to the functionality of now four items in the game because of how ECM works.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

I still think in the end, weapons should not be balanced against hard counters. Which is what they did with ECM and are now paying for.

[Vassago Rain]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 07 May 2013 - 04:59 AM, said:

So now how many ECM counters do we have? NARC, BAP, PPC, Adv. Sensors, UAV; I'm sure I'm missing one other.

Can we just make ECM do what it was originally intended so we can stop this dance?

Also to make NARC viable, make it weigh 1 ton less, and up the ammo per ton. Also make it 30 seconds instead of 15 and up the damage to 60.

Appreciate the communication by the way Thomas, keep it up.

TAG, BAP, NARC, other ECMs, advanced sensors, the UAVs, PPC, ER PPC, seismic module... ECM might as well not have been included to begin with.

Edited by Vassago Rain, 07 May 2013 - 06:53 AM.

[MaddMaxx]

Asmudius Heng, on 06 May 2013 - 10:30 PM, said:

Thank you for communicating with the community with some hard data and decisions.

LOL! This has been known to be coming for quite some time. Way to be paying attention good sir.

Players would rather ***** about some "perceived" lack of Communications than look up the absolute myriad of upcoming game data available.

perhaps they should just nerf Players and be done with it. LOL

[MaddMaxx]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 07 May 2013 - 06:00 AM, said:

Yeah this would be a complete non-issue if we had TT ECM, TT BAP, TT AMS, TT NARC, etc.

But no, we HAD to put E(SUPER)CM into the game.

How is MWO's AMS so different from TT's version? They both shoots down missiles right?

[MaddMaxx]

Vassago Rain, on 07 May 2013 - 06:51 AM, said:

TAG, BAP, NARC, other ECMs, advanced sensors, the UAVs, PPC, ER PPC, seismic module... ECM might as well not have been included to begin with.

Everyone seems to have totally missed the point. Without ECM as it is/was, the other "List" would have no place or valid use at all.

Everyone always gripes about the need for in game choice. Well, here is a perfect example of having ample choices to counter ECM and yet, Nooooo! It is bad to have choice. Folks need to make up their minds ffs and give up this constant whining about "everything".

[Zyllos]

So we have now went the complete opposite direction of TT in regards to ECM, BAP, NARC, and TAG. I just don't understand...

NARC is still going to be useless due to the 15s/40 damage timer. You could modify NARC to make LRMs auto home without a lockon, through ECM, and without LOS and it still wouldn't be widely used due to the 15s/40 damage timer. And the whole reason why those limits on in there is because NARC cuts through ECM.

NARC should last at least 30s with no damage threshold but is countered by ECM.

BAP should do everything it normally does now but no cutting through ECM.

TAG should be reduced back to 450m but ECM can not counter it at all. It will cut through ECM if you hit the target.

ECM should only hide the target equipped with ECM. All mechs within 180m should just have the lockon time increased by 100%. ECM still reduces lockon to the ECM equipped mech by 80% but BAP/Advanced Sensor module will increase that value. It is still affected by double lockon time.

SSRMs should have it's DPS decreased by 50% (increase cooldown by 50%) but is not countered by ECM.

Either way, thanks for the update Thomas...