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Terror Teddy, on 20 May 2013 - 10:26 AM, said:
1. Go back to basic armour
2. Split weapon damage into 10 second DPS
3. Chop up the 10 seconds into different chunks of cycle time for each weapon.
AC/20 could do 5 damage each 2,5 seconds and while that wont SOUND like much it would be felt a lot more if your armour is half of what it is and it is.
LRM20 could do 2 damage per second as it spawns LRM's towards an enemy.
Hell, we might even have had an option to select what type of gun we want, like an actual AC20 that DOES fire once every 10 seconds but unloads those 20 damage at once and instakills a light enemy since we would have the actual TT ratings of armour.
ALPHA damage would also be more interesting since an alpha strike was usually delivered during ten seconds and not ONE like we have in MWO.
I'm telling you, it would work.
Additional guideline I suggest - no weapon can deal more damage per shot than the number of crit slot it occupies. Adjust the recycle rate until you have a value you achieved at least this. Then adjust to taste, and you might want to give some extra DPS advantages to weapon whose recycle rate is particularly fast.
So an AC/20 could feasibly exist as a 10 damage per shot every 5 second weapon. A PPC however would need to deal about 3 damage every 3 seconds. (funny thing - the Clan ER PPC occupies only 2 crit slots, but deals 15 damage in 10 seconds. It would need a recycle rate of 1.33 for 3 damage and 3 heat.)
One of the balance assumptions behind energy and ballistic stats used to be in the table top that a lot of the weight and crits (if not most) of an energy weapon would come from the heat sinks needed to run it. That worked okayish in the table top, because heat penalties began much earlier and while high damage alphas could be nasty, they lacked the precision they have in games like M:WO, so it was wise to not heat up too much. This forced people to skimp less on the heat sinks. For 6 PPCs, a table top mech would probably normally install 25 double heat sinks to avoid being too hot (which is very hard to realistically equip). But in M:WO, we hav a high heat capacity, so people don't equip that many DHS, and trust to ride on the heat capacity and spend time cooling off in the shades. (Something that would actually be difficult for a hot mech, as heat penalties lower the speed of mech, so getting back into cover is much harder. And of course, hexes are pretty large - you don't really need to run a full 90m in MW:O to get into cover.)
So, in short, the 4-6 PPC Stalkers and Highlanders need less crit space and weight than they "should". An advantage ballistics wouldn't have to that extent, because there is not much to skimp in terms of heat sinks, and all the weight and crit space in the weapon itself.
Linking shot damage to crit slots would neatly avoid this issue. You would have systematically limited the maximum alpha potential of any mech (about 50 damage, that's approximately the number of free crit slots).
Edited by MustrumRidcully, 20 May 2013 - 10:45 AM.
