20 replies to this topic

[Monky]

I am overall glad to see the changes. PPC's felt 'too fast' as there was little consequence to spamming and risking a miss. Flamers need utility, although 90% might be a bit toasty. 75% seems better - it allows them to fight back so long as they do so very carefully. If you have the wrong weapons loaded, even single firing a PPC might cause an overheat which is in effect a 100% disarm against certain mech/builds so long as you can keep the flamers on them (aka, flame jenners keeping ERPPC Spiders/other ghettopanthers locked down).

I do not want to see weapons produce a heat penalty when fired in groups, if it is, it needs to be SLIGHT. Just barely enough to discourage using the alpha all the time, or only applicable after a certain number of weapons are fired of a certain type (for instance small/medium lasers might be fine with 9 being fired at a time, but more than 4 PPCs or 2 AC20's and we're starting to get extra heat at levels that matter).

I think a better balancing metric for large alphas is to limit how much can be fired at once without consequence - the key way to do this is to remove heat capacity being added by heatsinks. This bring DPS weapons into the front by making them more rewarding, while allowing Alpha weapons to still be good when used wisely and in mixed configurations.