Well,that's the thing with LRM's. You aren't aiming them. They're not hitting a specific section, and thus they are essentially not getting the benefit that all aimed weapons get from being in MWO as opposed to TT. Your missiles are hitting random locations.
It's a tradeoff from you not having to aim them.
... You can't be ******* serious.
Please... tell me what is so complicated about this game that means that pointing at the red box roughly the size of a battlemech is any different from "aiming" a pair of lasers in this game.
How hard is it to put your 10 pixel diameter dot over the 50 pixel wide battlemech and click the mouse?
Did you have to aim each arm separately, or something?
Do you have -any- idea what goes into missile shots?
Range, firing arc, target type and probable velocity, nearby cover options, source of your target (is aly probable to hold or will he terminate the lock?), and can you physically hold the lock (are you likely to receive more fire than is responsible to hold that lock)?
That's just to put a salvo on target. That's not applying the support role requirements - which include things like overall battle objective, enemy disposition, the need an ally has for support (a team of Jeagers doesn't really need you to drop missiles on a single Hunchback, unless they're green as grass), and the probable effectiveness of your shots (nearby AMS/ECM) for your team.
That's all on top of basic concerns like "am I getting shot at?" "Where is the nearby cover?" "Which direction am I walking?... am I walking? Why am I walking there?"
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The problem was that he was only firing two LRM5's, on a commando. This is such a small number of missiles that it can't really saturate an AMS system like multiple LRM 20's can.
AMS wasn't present.
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The key point is that until you are firing more missiles than AMS can destroy, then you aren't going to do ANY damage. It's not that AMS destroys X% of all incoming missiles.. it's that AMS destroys the FIRST X missiles.. so if you only fire X missiles, then it's the same as not firing any at all.
What's your answer to that catastrophic waste of 240 missiles?
Six volleys of 40 missiles.
SIX. With help from a swarm of what appeared to be at least 40 from someone else.... oh - and a whole team pumping direct fire into him.
Visual confirmation of something next to 100% hit rate.
When the thing died - it was showing orange armor and had been cored. Even if you take the damage that should have been done and stretch it out across the mech's armor ... it shouldn't really have any left.
Something is borked with detection right now.
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No man, if you're running around at 150 kph, you're really not likely to be seeing the tracers from enemy AMS.
Odd, see them all the time at 142.x in my Jenner.
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This isn't to say that you will NEVER notice the effect, but it's definitely not the case that simply because you didn't see it, that it wasn't happening.
He shot something like 200 missiles into the target. I think it speaks poorly of your own cognitive reality if you expect people to miss something as obvious as your swarm being destroyed by an AMS over the course of 20 weapon recycles and fires.
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The reality is that LRM 5's are such a small number of missiles, that if anyone between him and his target had AMS, it'd wipe out most of the salvo... and result in the negligible damage that he got.
Well, sure. I put AMS on my Jenner because I got tired of streak-ravens, and since it's been beefed up - I can hear it making a difference against the occasional person who is playing around with LRMs.... at least in the number of missiles that are coming for me. I have still tanked LRM-40 salvos in my Jenner (decided to stand still for once and see if missiles were at least working for other players) and come out giggling and saying it tickled. I even took a sizable salvo to my rear while running a parallel vector away from incoming missiles (which you never should do in a light - because all of them hit your rear armor) ... and come out barely scathed. I've had worse encounters with small lasers.
In over 70 matches now testing LRMs I can say these things again for the 10th time.
Missile damage is WRONG it is NOT 0.9 per hit (sometimes it is higher, sometimes lower)
Missile damage tends to be low against lights, and high against assaults but it depends on where they are hit, and possibly many other factors.
Missiles will almost never hit a fast moving target my estimates are:
99%+ miss a mech moving over 130kph
90%+ miss a mech over 100kph
80% miss a small mech (light/cicada/hunchback) moving over 80kph
66% miss a large mech moving over 80 kph
66% miss a small mech moving at all
20-40% miss a large mech moving at all
20-50% miss a small mech that is standing perfectly still entire missile flight with TAG+ Artemis
75-100% miss any mech if it jumps less than 1 second before missiles would hit
Artemis increases chance of missiles hitting large/slow targets by 5-10%
Artemis decreases chance of missiles hitting targets moving over 100 kph (they normally only get hit by missiles that are spreading farther away from here missiles are targeting, so having a wider spread actually can help)
Also LRMs have a large spread based on number of tubes firing at once per launcher
1 tube (RVN-3L / TBT-7M) : No spread always goes direct aim for center torso (can still miss do to enemy movement)
5 tubes : very small spread (better chance to hit most targets, no chance to hit small fast targets)
10 tubes : small spread
15 tubes : medium spread
20 tubes : large spread (better chance to hit fast targets with a small number of missiles, will get some misses even on still targets)
There are some possible techniques to make missiles hit lights, I have tried a bunch of times and been successful maybe 2-3 times, this is very hard.
First you need to fire at long range and change target to lose tracking this makes the missiles go dumbfire, then you need to require target on them while missiles are about 40-50m above the ground so they start tracking it again. At this point the missiles will if the target is far enough away make a curve and go at a shallow angle toward them around 10-20m above the ground. At this angle they tend to get alot of hits. Reproducing this is very hard, and takes luck on the enemy movements, and position so still really is not worth doing.
On issue of seeing AMS I almost always see it go into effect if they have it, even at ranges over 500m, it is very very extremely obvious. And yes AMS will destroy between 1-20 missiles depending on how close it is to targeted mech (up to 20 if missiles travel over mech with AMS to reach target, about 8-10 if AMS is on targeted mech)
Please... tell me what is so complicated about this game that means that pointing at the red box roughly the size of a battlemech is any different from "aiming" a pair of lasers in this game.
Are you actually asking this question? Do you ever play with any weapons which AREN'T missles?
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How hard is it to put your 10 pixel diameter dot over the 50 pixel wide battlemech and click the mouse?
Do you understand that this isn't what constitutes aiming in mechwarrior?
It's not good enough to simply fire lasers at a mech, and score some portion of damage over some portion of his mech. That's not aiming.
Aiming means being able to fire on a specific location of that mech. To be able to hit not merely their mech, but a single component.
With travel time weapons, at max range, that means you are leading a mech by multiple body lengths, and it's taking about a second for your weapons' fire to hit the target. If the target's a light mech, it can move about 40 meters in that time.
With lasers, you no longer need to lead the target, but now you need to hold your reticle over the exact location on their mech, and follow their movements while it discharges.
Seriously, there is no comparison to firing LRM's. LRM's do not require aiming.
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Do you have -any- idea what goes into missile shots?
Range, firing arc, target type and probable velocity, nearby cover options, source of your target (is aly probable to hold or will he terminate the lock?), and can you physically hold the lock (are you likely to receive more fire than is responsible to hold that lock)?That's just to put a salvo on target. That's not applying the support role requirements - which include things like overall battle objective, enemy disposition, the need an ally has for support (a team of Jeagers doesn't really need you to drop missiles on a single Hunchback, unless they're green as grass), and the probable effectiveness of your shots (nearby AMS/ECM) for your team.
LRM's tend to require that a team have some organizational skill in order to support the LRM shooter and provide him with opportunities to put his missiles on target, but the shooter himself is not exercising the same degree of piloting skill.
An LRM shooter's skill is reduced primarily to his own positioning, and recognizing the positioning of his teammates... but you are mistaken in your belief that this is somehow unique to an LRM carrier. This is a requirement for any pilot, regardless of the particulars of his role. What you are describing is simply basic situational awareness, that every good pilot has.
Like I said, I ran support mechs for my unit quite often, over a period of literally years. I understand the role quite well. But I also run every other role, so I understand that the things you are describing are not somehow unique to LRM support mechs.
So, I just came out of a game in Frozen City. I took the cave and found an afk Jenner. I have 2 LRM5s on my Mando (lulz) with 2 tons of ammo. It took 340 missiles to core the Jenner (no artemis) and that doesn't count the 2-3 salvoes that someone else pumped in. At the end of the game, I registered 1 kill and 87 damage done. Doing the math, that is 0.26 damage per missile. There was no AMS, no buildings in the way, nothing to diminish the damage done. IF, and I'm being generous here, I somehow missed with say 20% of the missiles fired (not sure how that would happen but I'll do it anyway), that would mean that only 272 missiles of the 340 fired landed which means each one did 0.32 damage. I know that a lot of people have been rather displeased with what is going on but the game isn't even registering the 0.75 damage per missile that PGI implemented after the original Splashpocolypse hot fix. And with splash being reduced to, according to the last ATD39, something like 2cm to outright kill any semblance of splash, the damage is still awful. I knew something was up when I took 3 straight salvoes from a Stalker sporting 2 LRM15s and 2 LRM10s and was still sitting pretty with yellow armor.
it's a continuing problem..especially on lights. I've tested it in the proving grounds....Beside the hit reg prob...lights take proportionatly less damage. I think it's intentional. I note the light mechs are disproportionately small and the denv know this.
Well considering if a small mech is moving at all it will take at most 1-5% hits to begin with from missiles I do not think they need nerfed further against them. Right now I could assuming damage/Hit registration bugs do not show up (these are fairly common) kill maybe 3 assaults with 1440 missiles. This assumes they are out in the open without AMS no cover etc...
On the other hand if I fired 1440 missiles at a light out in the open moving in a perpetual circle at 80 kph would probably do under 100 damage to it. If it was moving at 120+ KPH I would probably do under 40 damage to it. If the Light was standing perfectly still and I fired 1440 missiles at it with tag and artemis I would give it a 90% chance of dying before I ran out of ammo, it would probably take over 720 missiles at minimum though to kill it.
I think ill spend some time testing this in Training Grounds.
You said you did NOT use Artemis correct? Artemis changes the way the Missiles fly in the air, making them more accurate.
Without it (or no LOS), they just seem to fly as a random cluster to the target.
I think the random cluster may not be so random tho.
I want to test to see if LRM5s work better with more/less tubes, and the shape of said tubes. SRM tubes are built to shotgun, LRMs are packed tightly, thsi may have effect on how they land on targets.
So I hopped back into this topic and i'm absolutely baffled. I can't tell if half the posters lack any sort of reading comprehension, they're trolling the op or are just plain skimming posts for half-assed information and then throwing some convoluted opinion in against plain facts.
I really feel bad for you OP >.< it actually gave me a headache reading half these posts.
Either way, waiting for the missile hotfix to drop and pulling an abandon ship on this thread before the stupid somehow infects me through my computer screen.
I and others have tested LRMs in testing grounds, They are following prepatch damage and spread including splash, the devs have said this is the case as well. So until they update the testing grounds all data there is completely meaningless.
Are you actually asking this question? Do you ever play with any weapons which AREN'T missles?
Yes.
Perhaps it's because I'm an escaped genetic mutant from a super-soldier program... but compensating for something as simple as ballistic flight time and target movement is an instinct that I've had since as long as I can remember. I kind of inherently realized after the first time I did something and realized that there was a sort of forecasting element to it.
Things really only get hairy for me when stuff starts getting within 50 meters and I'm dealing with the normally 'flat' target telemetry negligible convergence factor. Even then - that's just experience before it's worked into a sort of eye-muscle memory.
That stuff is and always has been basic instinct to me.
But as I've gotten older, I've found that a lot of things that I do with all the thought I put into my next breath take considerable effort on the part of a disturbing number of people.
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Do you understand that this isn't what constitutes aiming in mechwarrior?
It's not good enough to simply fire lasers at a mech, and score some portion of damage over some portion of his mech. That's not aiming.
Aiming means being able to fire on a specific location of that mech. To be able to hit not merely their mech, but a single component.
You do realize you're speaking to someone with an IQ higher than your cholesterol count, right?
This is simply increasing the precision required for the task - which is fine motor control than anything else. The reason most people find these things difficult is because fine motor control is the first thing to go when their adrenaline spikes (which happens for a lot of people in these types of games - that's why they play shooters).
I've still got a lot of room for improvement - but I am well above the average in the handling of my Jenner and putting lasers on target.
I don't play my K2 as often - but it's not all that difficult to hit specific components even against targets that are in moderate motion. Even then - you really can't go wrong with a center-mass shot. Higher angular velocities make tracking of torso weapons a little more difficult - but that is partially why mechs have arms (though some don't help much in that regard).
Really, though, anything other than lights tend to not offer too much difficulty at nominal ranges.
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With travel time weapons, at max range, that means you are leading a mech by multiple body lengths, and it's taking about a second for your weapons' fire to hit the target. If the target's a light mech, it can move about 40 meters in that time.
Any shot against such a target is a "meh" shot. You're shooting because you have no other targets of higher priority and because the only negative outcome (assuming ammunition is not tight) is that you do not get the most favorable outcome.
There's no harm in practicing to make the odds of a favorable outcome increase - but the reality is that you're approaching granularity limits in your control/display system. Even if the controls and positioning systems are more precise than what is visually displayed on your screen - there is little way for you to actually resolve this information.
The greater the distance and the higher the angular velocity, the less viable the shot becomes.
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With lasers, you no longer need to lead the target, but now you need to hold your reticle over the exact location on their mech, and follow their movements while it discharges.
Seriously, there is no comparison to firing LRM's. LRM's do not require aiming.
There's a reason why I'd knock other LRM boats out of the water in terms of damage and effectiveness "back in the day."
I took that: "LRMs require no skill" or "LRMs require no aiming" nonsense and threw it out of the window. I did what I always do when I encounter a mechanic - analyze it and learned to work more efficiently with it. While Stalkers were sitting back with 60+ tubes and more LRM ammo than weapons on a light mech, firing to the limits of what their heat-sinks could take... I tossed TAG aside as a 'nice thought' and closed the distance. I learned to time my doors correctly (don't like risking the stray hit that knocks out half your primary arsenal) to fire between buildings on the move. I learned what inappropriate cover I could lure enemies into (they thought they were safe). I played the tactical way.
Though I do have a soft-spot for my Jenner:
Certainly room for improvement - and I'm quite possibly being mismatched in ELO at present (I have a hard time believing I'm up against even the top 20%).
But you have to understand - I play this game to kill. Sure - I can have fun with other stuff - but my priority is to take each weapon system and learn to use it on any platform to ruthlessly kill my enemy in the most effective way I can come up with.
I didn't fraps it, earlier - but I had a match on Canyon where I racked up over 800 damage in that mech. I'm not even sure how (I got a lot of leg splashes and clipped a few torsos - perhaps that is why) - an all-time record for that build.
The opposing team seemed a bit scatterbrained, though ... but, apparently, mine was, too - since most of them died and I ended up with more than a reasonable share of the damage and kills.
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LRM's tend to require that a team have some organizational skill in order to support the LRM shooter and provide him with opportunities to put his missiles on target, but the shooter himself is not exercising the same degree of piloting skill.
That really depends upon the player and the team. I certainly prefer my LRM support to be mobile and tracking to where they need to be. If all the missiles always come from the same general section - then you're too easy to mitigate.
That's like saying a sniper sitting up on a massive crystal-thing in Tourmaline is, somehow, not entitled to weapon effectiveness because he chooses to sit up there, take a pot shot, and move back a few meters to stave off incoming fire.
****-tons of pilot skill involved in that.
"But he has to expose himself to enemy fire and aim!"
No, he doesn't. He's got 3ppcs and a gauss. Forecast a center-mass shot and strip away over a ton of armor off of one torso, another torso, or the center torso. No matter what you hit - the Jenner will be able to do something with it in about one or two shots. Either core or clip.
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An LRM shooter's skill is reduced primarily to his own positioning, and recognizing the positioning of his teammates... but you are mistaken in your belief that this is somehow unique to an LRM carrier. This is a requirement for any pilot, regardless of the particulars of his role. What you are describing is simply basic situational awareness, that every good pilot has.
It's two different sets of situational awareness. The brawler doesn't have a 2 kilometer diameter he should be keeping -tactical- responsibility of. If an Atlas crops up on the sensors and starts chewing into a Centurion - it's your job and responsibility to assess that priority - because you (should) have the power to influence the outcome of that engagement. That's not to say that the Jenner shouldn't think about doing something... but he can easily be a 15-second run away. Because of their speed - light and medium skirmishers have a much wider area of tactical responsibility than most other mechs - but you get the idea.
Further - LRMs are another vehicle. Ballistics are pretty simple - if you can see them, you can hit them. When you're dropping support fire - you don't always know the details. They huddled up against a sheer face that you don't really know about from your position, but will defeat your salvos. You have additional considerations beyond piloting your mech - as you have to be able to recall relatively accurate information about topography and estimate their location to know if you're really in a good firing position.
And if you're not and your spotter informs you of what's going on... then you've increased your time to effective support yet again.
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Like I said, I ran support mechs for my unit quite often, over a period of literally years. I understand the role quite well. But I also run every other role, so I understand that the things you are describing are not somehow unique to LRM support mechs.
Not all things are. But hardly any of those factors come into lining up a shot that meets the qualifications of "does not expose one's self to fire."
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Roland, on 03 June 2013 - 10:42 AM, said:
