16 replies to this topic

[Ralgas]

Hey all, this is going to be a long one (ie TL:DR's are going to miss the point). I don't think anyone here believes the heat scale in place is as tweaked as it should be, although the fix idea's are far and wide.

Personally i don't believe any 1 method of change is going to fix heat balance (and in turn alpha boating) but it will need to be a blend of a raft of changes that have been suggested. I put them forward here for discussion. All i ask in reply is you look at the full picture instead of "this one point hurts this!" The aim is to add consequence and choice for putting out high dmg in short spaces of time.

* Heat cap- has to become lower, being able to dish out 120+ dmg before even worrying about heat is not doing length of combat any favors. Dropping Heat containment from the pilot trees (20% drop on everybody) is a start, making dhs (including engine sinks) only affect the cap by 1 point if that's not enough. Boost Cool running from 7.5/15% to 10/20%

* Heat penalty - blowing a little past 100% to shutdown is ok, being at 98% and alphaing is not, especially in high dmg boats. An aplha strike is supposed to be a risky calculated move not every second press of your fire buttons. Above 120% heat internal dmg is caused as if the mech was on override and a hard cap at 140-150% is imposed that would destroy your engine as if out of bounds for too long

* Multi weapon penalty - Here's where i get a lil more unique, after considering the investigation post made by paul i wondered at how that could work and came up with an idea (all numbers a tentative). Small and large weapons get assigned a separate % scale (my definition would be anything that does over 9 dmg falls into large wep). each level is dependent on how many weps are fired together ie 2wep/3wep/4weps and so on

Light- 10/15/20/25/30/35
Heavy- 15/30/45/60/75/90

when fire together under the time it take to chain fire (preventing fast fire macros giving advantage) the scale adds the percentage for each wep together based on how many weps are grouped ie

a med laser and an Llas are fired together. the penalty for the group fire is 10% of the med (.4) and 15 % of the Llas (1.05) for a total of 1.45 extra heat on top of the basic weapons.

Add an srm4 to the above and it's then 15% of the srm and med as well as 30% of the Llas.

Heat would have to be applied at chain fire intervals post shooting (ie there will be a little heat "lag" as it gets calculated and applied) and the Uac5 would get a 10% drop in it's base heat so as not to disadvantage it on a double tap.

I welcome discussion on it but i believe the above would sort a lot of the current "boating" issues without destroying the builds, it becomes a play style choice between higher dmg for higher heat or closer to chain fire. There would still be advantages to the quad/hexappc/poptart builds now but they would also suffer for the playstyle that brings them hate now as the sustained dmg would go down.

Edited by Ralgas, 01 June 2013 - 03:13 AM.

[Chavette]

All these heat penalties are only going to gimp energy weapons, and make boating ballistics the same way more desirable.

[Ralgas]

Chavette, on 01 June 2013 - 03:18 AM, said:

All these heat penalties are only going to gimp energy weapons, and make boating ballistics the same way more desirable.

When 3 ballistic is about the limit of what you can get on a mech, is it going to be that serious? ac/40's will still be a problem but atm that's what seismic is for imo. this will still hurt uac's a little.

Edit: 12 v 12 is going to limit these builds over ammo concerns as well

Edited by Ralgas, 01 June 2013 - 03:27 AM.

[AnnoyingCat]

the DEVS are working on heating and boating

[RiceyFighter]

Ralgas, on 01 June 2013 - 03:22 AM, said:

When 3 ballistic is about the limit of what you can get on a mech, is it going to be that serious? ac/40's will still be a problem but atm that's what seismic is for imo. this will still hurt uac's a little.

Edit: 12 v 12 is going to limit these builds over ammo concerns as well

AC40 is not a problem. The mechs that boat them are competely fragile. The jagermech and catapults has huge disadvantages to mounting AC40. Also AC 40 is close range mech so fire support usually take them out before they get close. It is a one trick pony with many drawbacks.

Edited by RiceyFighter, 01 June 2013 - 07:29 AM.

[Chavette]

Ralgas, on 01 June 2013 - 03:22 AM, said:

When 3 ballistic is about the limit of what you can get on a mech, is it going to be that serious? ac/40's will still be a problem but atm that's what seismic is for imo. this will still hurt uac's a little.

You realize the weapons/variants currently in the game are a fraction of what there will be in a year....

You can't just add a function to balance 3 weapon systems and hope it will work the same way with 30 others added.

[Felbombling]

Two things...

1. I cannot find Paul's investigation post that you mentioned in the body of text, but would very much like to see it. I thought it would be a Command Chair post, but I didn't notice anything new.

2. I get rather worried when I see a round hole, a square peg and a hammer. Some of the ideas I have seen floated around, especially by the development team themselves, seem fairly convoluted. Would it not be much easier to revisit the root causes of weapon boating and adjust there, rather than dream up new game mechanics like assigning heat penalties for multiple weapons fired together, etc?

[keith]

AnnoyingCat, on 01 June 2013 - 07:24 AM, said:

the DEVS are working on heating and boating

have u read ask the devs? i have lost all faith they know wtf they are doing. think they are too busy sipping on maple syrup

[Aslena]

why bother doing any crazy heat stuff when fixing missiles should take care of the problem... poptarts will have to keep there heads down more

[Ralgas]

StaggerCheck, on 01 June 2013 - 07:37 AM, said:

Two things...

1. I cannot find Paul's investigation post that you mentioned in the body of text, but would very much like to see it. I thought it would be a Command Chair post, but I didn't notice anything new.

2. I get rather worried when I see a round hole, a square peg and a hammer. Some of the ideas I have seen floated around, especially by the development team themselves, seem fairly convoluted. Would it not be much easier to revisit the root causes of weapon boating and adjust there, rather than dream up new game mechanics like assigning heat penalties for multiple weapons fired together, etc?

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2355607

Quote

Under investigation right now:
To curb boating with high alphas... we are testing a system that induces a heat scale when firing multiples of the same weapon within a specific time frame. The more weapons fired of the same type, the higher the scale climbs.

Possible internal damage on certain heat levels of the player's Mech. If you blast past your shutdown threshold and then some, you start to take damage internally.

Investigation items are not locked in and are exactly that... thoughts and tests. Do NOT go flying off the handle about how this won't work or that won't work until we make an official post. It will severely help your blood pressure.

Aslena, on 01 June 2013 - 01:10 PM, said:

why bother doing any crazy heat stuff when fixing missiles should take care of the problem... poptarts will have to keep there heads down more

And we go back to 60-100 missile at a launch stalker/a1 boats? The idea on heat isn't just to prevent the ppc boats but to break the idea that to alpha 4-6 weapons is the main attack of all "cookie cutter" mechs. The idea is to allow it but add consequences that make it inefficient.

It should make things like the aws more competitive (as long as it's not alphaing) by slowing down the big dmg while keeping the swayback from being too unfairly affected (it would fire in pairs and keep up an almost constant laser stream)

Edited by Ralgas, 01 June 2013 - 04:01 PM.

[Felbombling]

Thank you very much, Ralgas.

[Raso]

I've some similar ideas like this at length before but no one ever seems to care (probably because I come into a topic mid argument). I don't think that the problem needs to be stretched to increasing the heat generation when boating we just need to re build the entire heat system.

To quote myself from another thread:

Quote

I think we need to lower the heat cap, increase heat dissipation under 50%~60% heat and make it so that firing more than 3 PPC or 2 ERPPC at a time puts you over that 50%~60% threshold. Past this threshold heat will decrease the rate at which it dissipates along an exponential scale. At this point your HUD will also flicker out as the heat starts to effect your electronics. Other effects could kick in at even higher heat levels like reduced acceleration speed, reduced weapon accuracy or even your engine stalling out when moving at top speed just to list a few ideas.

If we start from there and rework the heat for some other weapons then you'd be forced to mount other weapons to use while your heat is dissipating or risk a shut down (when shut down you should probably cool at your base level rather than the decreased dissipation rate). This would force PPC snipers to increase the time taken before shots, reduce the number of PPCs they boat but also encourage them to load up alternative weapons or risk being ineffective at dealing damage.

Ideally if this were implemented properly it would mean that loading up on weapons which are effective at multiple ranges or have various heat signatures would be more beneficial than loading up on nothing but a few PPCs and a ton of heatsinks.

We could go one step further. Some mechs could have a quirk that increase the threshold at which they will experience reduced heating efficiency. One mech off the top of my head that would be a perfect match for such a quirk would be several of the Awesome variants. Finally they could shine as the long range, direct fire support, PPC boats many wish that they were.

From: http://mwomercs.com/...d/page__st__100

Edited by Raso, 01 June 2013 - 03:52 PM.

[Ralgas]

Raso, on 01 June 2013 - 03:52 PM, said:

I've some similar ideas like this at length before but no one ever seems to care (probably because I come into a topic mid argument). I don't think that the problem needs to be stretched to increasing the heat generation when boating we just need to re build the entire heat system.

To quote myself from another thread:

Which is the concept. Even though "it's just a thought" i don't believe just adding to "like" weapons will go far enough (from pauls quote) as it may just lead to say a ppc,ac/10, erppc used together to circumvent.

My system would still add heat to this, no matter the mix

[stjobe]

Chavette, on 01 June 2013 - 03:18 AM, said:

All these heat penalties are only going to gimp energy weapons, and make boating ballistics the same way more desirable.

Yes. That's the whole idea.

You see, ballistics and missiles are already balanced by weight and ammo dependency (and also spread for missiles). You cannot really boat more than two or three big ballistics, and although you can boat four to six big missiles, they don't all hit the target with pin-point accuracy.

Energy weapons are supposed to be balanced by heat in such a way that you cannot mount more than the equivalent number of ballistics - but heat is seriously borked in MWO, hence all the suggestion threads on how to fix it.

A 6-PPC 'mech in BT would have to have 31 single heat sinks (or 16 DHS, which is impossible together with the PPCs) to not automatically shut down on the first alpha. There's a reason the Awesome was awesome in TT - it's three PPCs were just about the max a 'mech could practically carry and fire.

That's where I want the game to go, to a place where high-heat energy weapons are as restricted as the high-weight ballistics.

The way to get there is to my mind to lower the heat cap drastically, and increase heat dissipation. Chain-fire, not alpha would be the way to go then, and I think it would make for a much more interesting game.

Edited by stjobe, 01 June 2013 - 04:14 PM.

[Chavette]

Did you read my other post? I've already replied to just that. Conveniently OP didn't notice it either.

[Ralgas]

Chavette, on 01 June 2013 - 09:00 PM, said:

Did you read my other post? I've already replied to just that. Conveniently OP didn't notice it either.

With a blanket statement about gear that may or may not be included, as well as missing the limited ammunition comment in a 12v 12 enviroment. Add to that my system is still appling a heat penalty there (albeit a lesser one due to ballistic heat) it will be a new consideration to those builds if one is to go around firing full salvo's every cd.

[topgun505]

While this point is true ... there still aren't many ballistic weapons that can be 'boated'. The worst you can do is around 6 AC2 or 4 UAC5.

6 AC2s create tremendous heat as it is. But if the devs deem that it is overly abusive all they would have to do is up the firing heat by one point and that problem would be solved. Not to mention they chew through ammo like you wouldn't believe ... so when we get up to 12 v 12 it just won't be viable. Having a heavy mech which only carries enough ammo to kill 1 opposing mech doesn't do you much good.

4 UAC5s require a heavy mech or larger which will be pretty slow and/or will require a XL engine making it fragile.

In either case ... the worst offenders of a 'ballistic boaters' have some significant drawbacks.

Chavette, on 01 June 2013 - 07:30 AM, said:

You realize the weapons/variants currently in the game are a fraction of what there will be in a year....

You can't just add a function to balance 3 weapon systems and hope it will work the same way with 30 others added.