74 replies to this topic

[General Taskeen]

If they rippled fired, SRM's could return to a staple brawling weapon and be balanced at the same time.

[FupDup]

General Taskeen, on 27 May 2013 - 05:59 PM, said:

If they rippled fired, SRM's could return to a staple brawling weapon and be balanced at the same time.

So much this. Benefits of ripple-fire:

1. Allows them to be highly accurate at their maximum range
2. Spreads out the damage they deal, making it more difficult for mechs like Splatcats to focus their damage into a single area (unless the target is slow/unaware)
3. Mechs that can't boat a large number of SRMs would still be able to deal effective damage due to being accurate and being able to increase damage per missile without issues like the Splatcat

[cyberFluke]

PEEFsmash, on 27 May 2013 - 11:27 AM, said:

If PGI just fixed SRMs, this game would be fixed. PGI's balance team, if they have one, really needs help. Big time help. The answer here is right in front of our eyes and is so simple. If SRMs were good enough to make brawling worthwhile, and if streaks were nerfed to be less effective than SRMs of equivalent numbers assuming the person shooting SRMs could aim, then lights would be much better and the sniper meta would be balanced because brawlers could tonnage-effectively take out snipers if they got in range.

This crit seeking, jump jet shake, cone of fire, accuracy reduction crap will not help, and will make the game uniformly worse.

So far from the truth, you'll need a map to find your way back.

[OneEyed Jack]

Rhent, on 27 May 2013 - 11:14 AM, said:

For SRM's that is a big NO. SRM's are not crit seekers. It is nice to see you have a creative imagination, perhaps you should start writing childrens books than trying to rewrite 20 years of Mechwarrior Weapons use?

armyof1, on 27 May 2013 - 11:21 AM, said:

Let's once and for all drop the whole crit seeking weapon concept, because it's so much crap. It does not help when weapons that spread their hitting area considerably are crit seeking, because you have pinpoint weapons that can focus firing on specific parts on mechs and with enough damage that you don't even need the whole crit concept, you just put damage fast and take out that whole mech part and thus all equipment there.

Maybe quit flying off half-cocked and pay attention to what you're reading. He said they are traditionally crit-seekers, which they are, since they come from a system where a single crit destroyed the component, regardless of damage. Obviously they don't have the same effect here. I think a big part of the problem for balancing SRMs, and LBX, is that the guys at PGI are TT fans and really want them to keep the feel of TT, but the system they created, where components have HP, doesn't let them keep that feel and still be useful.

Texas Merc, on 27 May 2013 - 04:09 PM, said:

interesting... now what to do with getting 1-shotted from 1000meters ?

For starters, we could quit making up bull-****. Even a 6xERPPC Stalker isn't one-shotting anything at 1000m, besides maybe a Light that neglected to bring armor.

Seriously, until people quit being arsehats and can converse intelligently about how weapons actually work, rather than spouting a constant stream of hyperbole in an effort to make the Devs think the sky is falling down because of whatever particular weapon/system/effect/whatever they've chosen to whine about today, then feedback continues to be useless.

[LordBraxton]

im fine with huge spread, they just need huge damage

really

short range

low velocity

unguided

missiles

better have fat *** payloads

streaks can trade payload for guidance system, makes sense to me

[cyberFluke]

OneEyed Jack, on 27 May 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

Seriously, until people quit being arsehats and can converse intelligently about how weapons actually work, rather than spouting a constant stream of hyperbole in an effort to make the Devs think the sky is falling down because of whatever particular weapon/system/effect/whatever they've chosen to whine about today, then feedback continues to be useless.

This. These effing forums remind me of the House of F*cking Commons here in the UK. All hyperbole, made up b0ll0cks and bent statistics to get their own way and them at the top of the pile. This is why Open Betas are sh!te for anything other than final finishing of a product. Luckily, the devs only pay cursory attention to the amount of whine here.

Edited by cyberFluke, 27 May 2013 - 06:24 PM.

[OneEyed Jack]

FupDup, on 27 May 2013 - 06:06 PM, said:

So much this. Benefits of ripple-fire:

1. Allows them to be highly accurate at their maximum range
2. Spreads out the damage they deal, making it more difficult for mechs like Splatcats to focus their damage into a single area (unless the target is slow/unaware)
3. Mechs that can't boat a large number of SRMs would still be able to deal effective damage due to being accurate and being able to increase damage per missile without issues like the Splatcat

Good Gawd no.

Ripple fire makes them a horrible brawling weapon. High time on target and slow flight to not combine to make a good weapon for close-range, twitchy brawling. Take a run in a TBT-7K with 2xSRM6 in the arm some time. It's great when the target holds relatively still for you, and is crap the rest of the time.

[AnarchyBurger]

Thomas Hogarth, on 27 May 2013 - 11:09 AM, said:

Conceptually, weapons like the LBX series, LRMs, and SRMs are traditionally considered 'critseekers'. They have a good chance of hitting everywhere, and if there's a location open, there's a good chance you can get a critical hit.

The issue twofold: All direct-fire weapons are accurate enough to target open locations, and critical hit chances are fairly low.

Until it is made more difficult to easily target a single location, and until critical hit chances are increased, critseekers will be answers to questions nobody is asking. Sure, we could re-tool them into more-or-less direct fire weapons, but why bother at that point? We already have plenty of those.

This reminds me of the "LRMs are support weapons" excuse. A bad weapon type in a FPS type game is a bad weapon type, no excuses. All weapons should be viable otherwise they are a waste of data.

[FupDup]

OneEyed Jack, on 27 May 2013 - 06:24 PM, said:

Good Gawd no.

Ripple fire makes them a horrible brawling weapon. High time on target and slow flight to not combine to make a good weapon for close-range, twitchy brawling. Take a run in a TBT-7K with 2xSRM6 in the arm some time. It's great when the target holds relatively still for you, and is crap the rest of the time.

Good point on slow missile speed, although that is easy to fix by just adjusting one number (move it up to somewhere around ballistic speed?).


As for time on target, one missile at a time would indeed be terrible but that's not what we're talking about. I image 2 missiles at a time and a relatively short time between each "ripple" would be ideal (with dramatically faster projectile speeds). Large and medium lasers seem to overcome the uptime issue pretty well...maybe the total time it takes for an SRM6 to get out all missiles should be ~1 second just like those lasers (or maybe even slightly less)?

Edited by FupDup, 27 May 2013 - 06:42 PM.

[Victor Morson]

PropagandaWar, on 27 May 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

Yeah it is you get a lot of bonuses using lerms like staying out of the fight, and not everyone runs around with ams. That's also why I don't run one weapon rigs. My pult has a lerm 15, lerm 20 erppc and med laser with tag equipped.

Can you point me to where I can get these lerms? Lerms sound awesome, and LRMs suck.

[FupDup]

Victor Morson, on 27 May 2013 - 06:39 PM, said:

Can you point me to where I can get these lerms? Lerms sound awesome, and LRMs suck.

Real men use Lurms.

[ZonbiBadger]

We are getting an srm buff soon. Stop whining.

[Thomas Hogarth]

jeffsw6, on 27 May 2013 - 04:10 PM, said:

I am so sick of you TT long-beards saying oh but it works this way on a board game with dice!!! OF COURSE IT WORKS IN TT THERE ISN'T ANY AIMING. YOU ROLL DICE TO FIND OUT WHERE **** HITS! G E T A C L U E.

Calm down, you're going to blow a gasket. We're not talking about world hunger here, we're talking about weapons in a game with imaginary robots.

The point I and others have tried to make is that SRMs are not useful right now due to the way other weapons perform. I claim that those other weapons have performance that is too high in terms of accuracy. Two ways to fix this: Fix all the other weapons, and incidentally fix the issues with the HTAL armor layout, or just make SRMs a different way of doing the same job.

Tincan Nightmare, on 27 May 2013 - 05:58 PM, said:

The point being made was that SRM's did scatter damage across a mech in TT, versus pinpoint damage like a PPC strike. Since we can aim in this game should an LBX do all damage to a single location when firing cluster rounds? PGI chose to make a game based off an existing IP, stop bitching and moaning about people that want a product that stays as close as possible to that IP. I don't see jedi carrying machine guns in Star Wars games or ships in Star Trek games firing cannons and machine guns, because if you choose to work within an IP you have to remain true to it. Do I think SRM's are where they should be, no, but stop lashing out at BT fans whose support kept the IP alive to make a game like this.

I kind of agree with this point of view. Less entitlement, more "because no other Mechwarrior has had the balls to try to make it work, and they've all had the same set of issues."

OneEyed Jack, on 27 May 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

is that the guys at PGI are TT fans and really want them to keep the feel of TT, but the system they created, where components have HP, doesn't let them keep that feel and still be useful.

You really think so? I find myself disagreeing with the bold part of your statement, but the rest makes sense.

AnarchyBurger, on 27 May 2013 - 06:38 PM, said:

This reminds me of the "LRMs are support weapons" excuse. A bad weapon type in a FPS type game is a bad weapon type, no excuses. All weapons should be viable otherwise they are a waste of data.

What? How are support weapons not viable? How are weapons that exploit situations created by other weapons not viable?

Also, the bold part is exactly what is wrong with MWO in my eyes.

[PropagandaWar]

Victor Morson, on 27 May 2013 - 06:39 PM, said:

Can you point me to where I can get these lerms? Lerms sound awesome, and LRMs suck.

Lerm's are awesome. I just like calling them those.

[Mr 144]

ZonbiBadger, on 27 May 2013 - 06:45 PM, said:

We are getting an srm buff soon. Stop whining.

It's called history. Since Closed Beta, SRMs have been in a state of flux completely dependant on what they are doing balance wise with streaks and LRMs. There has NEVER been any dedicated attention paid to them. They are always an afterthought, and always....always, "Just about where we'de like them"...regardless of what change was made to them. Simply put, either PGI has no clue, or they don't care about SRMs. Every single Streak or LRM horror has resulted in meaningless changes to SRMs for no apparent reason.

Consider, LRMs and Streaks track CT and produced excessive splash damage. Let's totally ignore the fact that excessive splash in the numbers thrown around could only be substantiated on certain chassis (commando) due to the style of modeling and the inherent size. PGI's Solution was to reduce splash damage (now down to 5cm) and base missile damage.

SRMs do not, nor have they ever tracked to CT. They however still reduced both splash AND base missile damage the exact same way as they did for streaks...and in fact use identical numbers. So while streaks still retain some usefullness due to CT tracking (which is why they received both nerfs)...SRMs have in fact been double nerfed.

To make matters worse, they keep changing Artemis patterns in an attempt to balance LRMs. Personally, I doubt they intentionally change the patterns for SRMs, but rather it's built directly into the Artemis code and however it turns out for SRMs, it's "meh, WAI".

They cannot balance SRMs if they continue to judge them based on the behavior and damage numbers of LRMs and Streaks. They are not lock-on weapons and need to be treated differently because of it. So far they have only shown ineptitude in this regard.

Mr 144

[aniviron]

One Medic Army, on 27 May 2013 - 12:28 PM, said:

Well, hitting close targets is easier due to not having to lead, SRMs now no longer go from useless to hyper-mega-facepunch as you close from 270 to 0.
Now they can bring damage back up? Pretty please?

It's easier to balance SRMs as a weapons system overall if the spread amount is consistent at all ranges. So hopefully we'll see them getting buffed in the near future.

SRMs haven't been hyper or mega anything for a while now, except maybe hyper mega underwhelming. Usually takes about 200 srms to get through an atlas' armor now at 100m; I can't think of a single other weapon that requires two tons of ammo to core someone. Not even mg.

[Lagster]

Yesterday I unloaded 158 ASRMs into an Atlas, almost none missed, Atlas was still alive after taking 158 missiles. Just sayin'.

[Texas Merc]

HSR for missiles first, then ******

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

jeffsw6, on 27 May 2013 - 04:10 PM, said:

You're not supposed to be able to aim, either! This is not ******* TT and what SRMs do in TT is not necessarily what they should do in a FPS game where it is possible to aim 6 ******* PPCs at the opponent's CT and push fire, and have all 6 land there.

I am so sick of you TT long-beards saying oh but it works this way on a board game with dice!!! OF COURSE IT WORKS IN TT THERE ISN'T ANY AIMING. YOU ROLL DICE TO FIND OUT WHERE **** HITS! G E T A C L U E.

Sensitive much? For one, I've only dabbled in the TT. I base my understanding of the game and the setting on the fiction more than anything else, along with a certain role-based approach, namely that each weapon, each mech, each piece of equipment, etc., should have a role to play that differentiates it from all the others.

SRMs are a high-damage, short-range option that should function much like a sand blaster, stripping armor from all over the enemy mech. A single launcher should be a meaningful threat, and three 6-packs should be terrifying. They should not be the functional equivalent of an auto-cannon, punching all their missiles into a single location reliably. They should be a veritable wall of death-dealing armor-piercing warheads.

SRMs should be a brawler's punch weapon, used to create weaknesses in his target's defenses that he can exploit with more precise weapons like lasers and ACs. Fire your three SRM6s at a Stalker and see that you blew through his side armor and his CT still has covering? Now you know where to fire your AC20 to take out half his guns. Tagged that Raven's legs with a pair of SRM4s? Finish them off with your lasers.

Each individual missile should hurt enough that when you hit, even if it's with only a partial spread of missiles, the enemy feels it. If you want focused damage, you have heavier, hotter weapons to get it with. If you want light-weight, relatively-cool, high-damage weapons that are a bit less precise then SRMs are what you are looking for.

Roland, on 27 May 2013 - 03:47 PM, said:

I did some testing a few days ago, and noticed very little, if any, difference in spread due to Artemis.

Kind of sucked as a test too, since I had to pay to unload the artemis, and will have to pay to put it back on.

I've got Artemis IV on my D-DC's triple SRM6s and it seems to do the job pretty well. I can get most of my spread on-target even at pretty long range (for SRMs at least). It's mostly the lack of punch that keeps me from driving that particular mech very much right now. I'm hoping that the splash damage and Streak tracking issues get resolved sooner rather than later so PGI can give SRMs their oomph back.

[Zaptruder]

Thomas Hogarth, on 27 May 2013 - 11:09 AM, said:

Conceptually, weapons like the LBX series, LRMs, and SRMs are traditionally considered 'critseekers'. They have a good chance of hitting everywhere, and if there's a location open, there's a good chance you can get a critical hit.

The issue twofold: All direct-fire weapons are accurate enough to target open locations, and critical hit chances are fairly low.

Until it is made more difficult to easily target a single location, and until critical hit chances are increased, critseekers will be answers to questions nobody is asking. Sure, we could re-tool them into more-or-less direct fire weapons, but why bother at that point? We already have plenty of those.

At this point in time, it's better for us to consider the dichotomy between weapons as directed fire weapons and spread fire weapons.

i.e. one weapon types allow you to direct its full damage at the location you point at.

The other weapon types spreads the damage liberally around the mech.

For both weapon types to be valid (as opposed to one weapon type to be favoured), there needs to be a balance between the effectiveness of directed fire and overall damage.

Generally, this means that spread damage weapons should do more damage for its given tonnage/heat then its direct fire counterparts.

That is currently simply not the case.

While SRMs are still quite good on a pure damage vs tonnage manner, in practice, their speed, spread, heat and refiring rate all causes them to be suboptimal weapons.

The only spread damage weapons that are worth their tonnage at this point are laser weapons - and only because they have a dualistic behaviour, where they are both directed and spread damage, dependent on the skill of the pilot and the defender.

In other words, spread damage weapons need a good damage buff to justify their use.