62 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

4-6 PPC Stalkers, Dual AC/20 Jagermechs, Dual Gauss Rifle Cataphracts, Jagermechs and Catapults. Whatever worries you the most probably, is usually related to high damage with high precision that comes in a single alpha strike. The damage comes instantly (particularly at longer ranges, possibly surprising after someone just popped out of cover and then went right back before you could do something.) and is often strong enough to seriously damage components, in some cases, cripple mechs.

A few things "help" doing this:
- Convergence. The game converges weapon at the point your cross-hair is aiming at. That means instead of all weapons firing parallel, they adjust their angles slightly to converge on a point - ideally on the enemy mech. Without convergence, weapons would hit the enemy at the same distance from each other as they are on your mech, which also leaves a good chance that one of them would miss completely.
- Equipping identical weapons. If you don't equip identical weapons as "alpha" striker, you have the problem that the weapons will behave differently. An AC/20 and a PPC together have a good alpha, but the AC/20 needs more lead then the PPC, so it only works well against targets that are stationary or don't move perpendicular to you.
- Single Shot Projectiles. Lasers have a beam duration - if you realize someone is shooting you, you can start torso twisting and moving. Even if you don't do it intentionally, if you do it at all, the enemy will spread his damage.

---

So, if we deem it problematic, what could be done about it?

1) More restrictive hard point system.
This is supposed to eliminate or reduce the possibility of building "boats".
The problem I have with this is that there are stock mechs that are boats by design, and these either would have to be removed, or will keep being boats. That might not solve the problem. And the other thing - it limits customziaton, which is part of the fun of making builds (but admittedly it gets stale when you realize that you "must" build a boat if you want to have top performance.

2) Lowering the effective Heat Capacity.
This can include adding heat penalties, you mights till be able to get to the heat levels you can get now, but you get very hefty penalties for it. An outright reduction of the heat capacity to either half the current value or a fixed value of 30 would limit some of the more egregious examples of alpha strike boats. Low heat weapons can probably still get higher alpha values, but low heat weapons usually require also ammo and more tonnage, which can require making more sacrifices during mech design (low ammo, low speed) and provides drawbacks on the battlefield as well (going out of ammo, explosive ammo).

3) Introduce an "Energy System".
On top of heat production, weapons draw energy, and if they draw too much, you can't fire another weapon.
I am personally not a fan of this, since it adds another, potentially complex, subsystem, that really resembles the heat system a lot and makes me wonder why we don't just use that.

4) Remove Torso Convergence
Weapons in the torso regions cannot converge. It kinda makes sense - they seem to be installed at fixed locations with no ability to change their angle.
You can still deliver good alpha strikes with arm mounted weapons (unless we say that you need to have a full set of actuators to get arm convergence, too), but arm weapons are also the weakest armored sections.

5) Global Weapon Cooldowns and Alpha Strike as Special Ability
Whenever you shoot a weapon, all weapons go on a global cooldown (server enforced). That means you cannot group fire or alpha strike anymore.
Since Alpha Strike is a feature of Battletech, it would need to be "artificially" re-added as special ability with its own cooldown.

Making this work for all weapons individually can cause its own problems - The more weapons you have, the more you need to spread out your shots, which makes smaller weapons unattractive.
On the other hand - it seems to resemble the Battletech rules the best, since there, every weapon requires its own to-hit and hit location roll.

6) Location "Lockout" Weapon Cooldowns
This is a variant of the cooldown idea. Instead of having every weapon go on cooldown when another weapon is fired, only weapons mounted in a different hit location then the fired weapon go on cooldown. So if you have 2 PPCs in the left arm and 2 PPCs in the right arm, you can fire the right arm PPCs together, but then must wait before you can fire the left arm PPCs.
A mech like the Hunchback that can carry most of its firepower in a single hunch could still alpha strike with great potency, but this mech still has the same drawback as it is has now - all eggs in one basket.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 08 June 2013 - 09:55 AM.

[ExtremeA79]

Some people have no idea how the hardpoint restriction system would work. It would eliminate boats that are not suppose to be boats but keep boats that should be boats. That's it. Otherwise, it does nothing else.

[AndyHill]

Well the more restrictive hardpoint system would also give the different 'mechs a bit more character, so although I don't think it would help that much with boating (in fact it would probably make certain variants clearly superior if alpha-ability stays the way it is now) I'm all for it.

[Zyllos]

Darren Tyler, on 08 June 2013 - 10:39 AM, said:

Some people have no idea how the hardpoint restriction system would work. It would eliminate boats that are not suppose to be boats but keep boats that should be boats. That's it. Otherwise, it does nothing else.

That is why a combinatorial change is needed. You have to include weapons to balance out multiple weapons in multiple fashions in multiple settings before you can achieve balance.

Battletech is a very intertwined game. Changing one thing makes wipe implications to other systems. That is also why you can't just change one thing and make things balanced.

This is what I just suggested in one thread a bit ago:

Zyllos, on 08 June 2013 - 09:31 AM, said:

• All weapons lose individual convergence to the crosshair (basically shoot straight, including arm mounted weapons).

• Arms will physically point to the center of the arm crosshair (basically weapons shoot in the physical pattern that they are mounted on the arms), thus give their convergence in this pattern.

• Torso mounted weapons will point directly straight from their respective locations and not converge their aim at all. The torso crosshair is basically just used to tell what perpendicular line the torso is facing, from the center of the torso.

• All ballistic weapons (and ballistic style weapons, like PPCs) have small Cones of Fire. The Cones of Fire are small, not enough to miss targets except against Small mechs at extreme distances 800m+. The Cones of Fire shrink down to firing directly straight, like other weapons, in a linear function to throttle. Machine Guns will also be effected in the same manner.

• Missiles will ripple fire their weapons at a rate of 0.1s per salvo. SRMs (and SSRMs) shoot 1 SRM per salvo while LRMs shoot in 5 LRMs per salvo. If you shoot more missiles than is physically seen on the mech, there will be a 0.5s delay between each complete ripple fire.

• SSRMs and LRMs will home in the same manner. Each missile or salvo (5 LRMs) will home onto a random location on the mech.

• More restrictive hardpoints will be introduced. A "Large", "SRM", "LRM", and "Multi-Missile" hardpoints will be added. Large hardpoints allow for the largest of the class of weapons to be equipped. PPC/ERPPC, AC/20, LRM/20, SRM/6 is what is considered "Large" weapons. "SRM" and "LRM" is used to separate those mechs that actually distinguish between these weapons (Stalker) while "Multi-Missile" is used for those that do not (Catapult).

• Some changes to how heat is done (there is a multitude of ways, just take your pick). But most importantly, DHS need to have the same values across both mounts (inside/outside engine).

• Critical seeking weapons (LBX, Machine Gun, and SRMs) will have greatly increased critical damage due to their natural multi-shot style. LBX pellets will deal 5.0 damage for each critical hit, Machine Gun will deal 1.0 damage per critical hit, and SRMs will deal 5.0 damage per critical hit.

• The LBX will be modified to shoot a flak canister, which explodes when within 50m of a solid object.

• Pulse lasers will be modified to be a weapon with a RoF, to allow more control of what heat is expended and be some of the best DPS weapons for energy weapons in exchange for their heat and range.

With all of the above introduced, this should balance out any use of any combination of weapons. If you boat all ballistic style weapons, you have to either be standing still or have a small Cone of Fire introduced into your shots. And if you stand still, you still have to compensate for your shots based on their location, arms will physically point at the arm crosshair, torso weapons will need need some time to aim, alpha striking all those weapons will hit different locations. This is to be balance to those weapons that place all their damage up front on a single location (not all weapons hitting the same location, but a single weapon placing all their damage on the location they hit). The LBX will be the special case ballistic weapon which sacrifices all damage onto a location for spread damage, like Missiles, but gain the ability to shred internal equipment and do it at extended ranges.


Laser weapons will still be the king of accuracy but require continued aiming. They can easily be adjusted to when firing to get their damage to where they need to be duration their duration. Pulse lasers allow for even more flexibility in that you can stop firing them, to not use heat, until you know where they are landing. Pulse lasers are not useful in alpha strikes but they will be amazing DPS weapons for exchanges in extra heat, tonnage, and range.

Missile weapons will be weapons either used for indirect fire or superior range weapons, or used for fast strikes for their tonnage. For single launchers, they require little aiming as they ripple fire their shots in short order (0.5s for the SRM/6). They do spread their damage if your aim is off but SRMs will be good at destroying internal equipment on a mech with an unarmored location. LRMs and SSRMs will still be the kings of getting damage onto the mech with ease but with LRMs spread and SSRMs smaller warheads, dealing less damage than SRMs, they are mainly used either to weaken mechs overall or to get in almost guaranteed strikes against fast targets.

The arm convergence and torso convergence changes is to make arms useful for allowing easy aiming of (but not all damage from arms hitting a single location easy) the weapons mounted here. They will be extremely useful in sniping situations due to pointing directly where you aim. Torso mounted weaponry are for weapons to be protected from incoming fire due to lots of torso armor. They generally suffer from aiming issues due to only firing straight from the torso, thus will most likely be fired independent of arm weapons due to hitting different locations.

The differences in convergence will enforce the idea that shooting at arms of players will hurt their accuracy if you blow off the arms, but arms will be a bit harder to hit due to where they are located, but is dependent on the mech. This also is further enforced with more spreading of damage, in general, so it's not extremely easy to just blow off a side torso and ignore the arms.

Missile changes for rippling their fire is used as a way to balance out large blocks of missiles being fired at the same time. If a mech can mount many Missile weapons, it will take longer to fire all those missiles, thus more aim is needed.

I have other balancing ideas that I would like to do but I think these listed above are some of the worst offenders in this game.

[Shakespeare]

Heat capacity, hands-down. I LIKE some of the other ones, and they'd make for some interesting dynamics I'd wager, but having both heat cap AND heat cooldown tied to the number of heatsinks creates a balance nightmare. Your efficiency expands in two directions at once for every HS you add, and installing double heatsinks in the engine is a no-brainer for every build.

Creating a global heat limit, perhaps a chassis-specific, but unchangeable. heat limit, should slow down the pace of battle, particularly with high-heat weaponry. It will simplify coolshot balancing, improve the relative combat performance of lighter mechs vs heavier ones, and may even allow room for single heat sink usefulness (although not on its own.)

In addition, I'd like to see a real build penalty to DHS internal installation, beyond money. It takes no crits and no weight. why wouldn't you do it for all mechs always? Perhaps this, too, could be mech-specific.

Now, these suggestions, if enacted, would definitely shake up some mechbuilding mechanics. There'd certainly have to be a total heat balance pass to account for global reduced heat capacity...but not as much as many might think, as the current heat values are hard to evaluate when both capacity and rate-of-cooldown is so...fungible.

It's also the only thing on this list I see as possible considering the development time of the existing systems. Hardpoints aren't getting a complete overhaul, nor is torso convergence or alpha-strike management. The weapons will always be in our hands to do with what we will, for better or worse. The only severe changes that I see being made are directly tied to the heat system.

I just wish I believed they'd be willing to make such a drastic change. Instead, we'll be on the whack-a-mole treadmill until we all tire of the latest combat superiority race. Sorry to end this on a negative note, it's just I've had this conversation a lot, and nobody can really offer me hope for the long term as far as combat goes. Now, community warfare? Organized matches? Better teamwork tools? New UI? All exciting, can't wait.

But the core of this game is slow to change. Infuriatingly so. If it's going to shift gears, it HAS to be in beta...that's what beta is for! We didn't see many shake-ups post CB, and, we're swiftly approaching the point of no return for sweeping changes.

Do we have any left?

Edited by Shakespeare, 08 June 2013 - 09:11 PM.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Voted for more hard point restrictions and for heat cap reduction.

The latter is easy, add graduated "soft" heat penalties (% reduction in things like move speed, arm reflex, turn rate, convergence speed, etc.), lower the maximum heat capacity (20 + 1 per heat sink perhaps), increase overall heat dissipation rates (true DHS would be viable, and maybe reduce the time scale across the board to, say 7 seconds), and punish people who overheat (past 100%) by more than a certain amount (with a hard engine kill at some large amount past 100%).

This punishes high-burst-heat while allowing sustained heat generation builds to survive (making burst damage harder to get and dps easier to maintain). It also gives more of an edge to people who are good at managing their heat (increased skill cap is always good).

The former could be used further to differentiate between variants. Got an AC20 HB? It has 3 Large Ballistic hard points (any Ballistic weapon). AC10 HB? It only has 1 Medium Ballistic hard point (AC 10 and smaller). Got an Awesome with 3 PPCs and a SL? It has 3 Large Energy hard points (any Energy weapon) and 1 Small Energy hard point (SL, SPL, and TAG only).

Most Stalkers would have 4 Medium Energy hard points and 2 Large Energy hard points, along with 4 Medium Missile hard points (LRM 10s and SRM6s would both be Medium I'm assuming).

Raven 3L would have 2 Medium Energy hard points, 1 Small Energy hard point (TAG), one Medium Missile hard point, and one Small Missile hard point (NARC).

Splat-Cat or Streak Cat would have 6 Large Missile hard points (so both builds would remain entirely valid).

K2 would have 2 Large Energy hard points, 2 Medium Energy hard points, and 2 Small Ballistic hard points (AC2 and MG).

It would be restrictive only in an upward direction. You can always put a smaller gun into a larger slot, but you can't put a larger gun in a smaller one. This would allow boating of smaller weapons without making it possible to boat larger ones on the same variants, and would retain the ability of stock boats to do their jobs well.

I do see some problems with this, namely that many of the potential builds for non-boats that have one or two small weapons of one type or another would become far more limited than they are now (no LLs on Catapults unless they're the K2's arms, to take one example). I'm not convinced it's a good idea, and would prefer the heat option be tried first to see if it's sufficient (I think it would be). Still, if necessary, it should be possible for PGI to implement something like this. If they did I'd like to see them do another hard point pass, though, to be a bit more generous with multiplying some of the smaller hard points.

[General Taskeen]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 08 June 2013 - 09:30 PM, said:

K2 would have 2 Large Energy hard points, 2 Medium Energy hard points, and 2 Small Ballistic hard points (AC2 and MG).

I'm not sure they will mess with more restrictive weapon placement though. Otherwise all they had the modelers do was waste their time creating new 3D Modular visuals for weapon placement on Mechs (I.E., ac's, gauss, ppc models on K2).

At the basic level, at some point the Devs need to go back to the drawing board and re-feature Heatsinks and Heat from the ground up. No more of this raised heat threshold by bigger engines and more DHS. Right now its not even anything close to Battle Tech heat management and previous Mech titles.

Then from the there it is literally just a matter of adjusting any weapon's damage, heat, cool down, or ammo per ton for balance.

This mess could have been avoided by better design choices.

[Bendak]

I propose moving and shooting for XL engines. That is all.

[MustrumRidcully]

Bendak, on 08 June 2013 - 11:23 PM, said:

I propose moving and shooting for XL engines. That is all.

Not sure if 4-6 PPC Stalkers use XL Engines. I wouldn't. The Dual AC/20 Jagers certainly do, however. (You don't have to, but the extra speed and maneuverability seems worth the risk to me.)

[DocBach]

Have convergence speed affected by if the shooter is still, walking or running, how fast the target is moving, how far the target is away, how much terrain/trees/obstructions is between the shooter and the target, and how much heat the shooter is at. And give us some idea on how off we are from pinpoint accuracy like an expanded reticule that closes as our targeting computers get convergence, like, I don't know, every other shooter out there.

[One Medic Army]

Heat.
It's the one aspect of global balance that the devs really haven't tweaked yet (apart from making DHS not true doubles).

+1 vote for nonexistant option: add a radial inaccuracy component (individually for each weapon, so they hit different spots) for any of the following:

• Walking
  
• Running (more than walking)
  
• Jumping (more than running, already implemented)
  
• Being at high heat
  
• Eventually for having damaged actuators

You want perfect accuracy? You still can! Stand still and don't overheat.

You want to run around at top speed sniping out cockpits while at 90% heat? No go, perhaps you should get more sinks or go easy on the trigger.

Oh, and I never said anything about the amount of inaccuracy, you can have maximum spread from all factors combined be such that a center-mass shot still hits light mechs at 900m, or you can make it so that the worst penalties will make hitting an atlas at 50m only happen 25% of the time. It adds another possible dimension to both balance and mech control.

Heck, you can even give every weapon it's own "accuracy" coefficient, make ERPPCs less vulnerable to represent their design as long-range weapons. Make AC/20s take larger penalties due to being short-range weapons, or whatever, more ways to balance weapons.

Edited by One Medic Army, 10 June 2013 - 12:16 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

I realized I also forgot to add the dev heat idea, of alpha striking multiple identical weapons producing more heat per weapon than shooting the weapons seperately. But then, I hate that idea so much ...

I also forgot another option:
Alpha Strike with pinpoint precision is mostly a ballistic and PPC thing.
What if we changed ballistics to fire short (0.5 second) long bursts of multiple (10-20) projectiles?
What if the PPC was also a beam weapon? (cue people complaining that we alredy have a blue colored beam)

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 10 June 2013 - 01:54 AM.

[AndyHill]

I remember the devs stating that the ballistic weapons are what they are now because they bring an instant damage weapon into the game, so it's a design thing. Of course you could ask if such a weapon should exist in MWO at all and personally I would say no. That's why I also think ACs should fire bursts and PPCs could have a beam duration or they could be considered a burst weapon much like the ACs. I would even go so far as to make the gauss a burst weapon.

With these changes and removal of alpha ability the game would probably be a more dynamic DPS fest instead of the mostly hide and snipe oriented style we have now.

[Bloody Moon]

If ACs and PPCs would fire in short bursts it would solve most of the problems with the current weapon balance. The more i think about it the better this idea seems to be.

It closes the gap between Lasers and PPCs, the current implementation favors PPCs.
Reduces the hated pinpoint accuracy while retaining the potential to punish players who violate the first lesson of mechwarrior training:
Don't stand still.
Completely Lore-friendly implementation.

[Jestun]

Lower heat cap & slower weapon convergence (but not no convergence).

[MustrumRidcully]

Are there any other specific suggestions or opinions? (I won't change the poll after the fact for them, but it might be neat to have a bit more ideas.)

[DeadlyNerd]

Darren Tyler, on 08 June 2013 - 10:39 AM, said:

Some people have no idea how the hardpoint restriction system would work. It would eliminate boats that are not suppose to be boats but keep boats that should be boats. That's it. Otherwise, it does nothing else.

That's pretty much what'll prevent high pin point alphas. Absolutely no mech is capable of dealing a high pin point alpha, without having some sort of either design, or loadout restriction.

[Gaan Cathal]

You mention entirely removing torso convergence (hilariously biased in terms of mechs punished) but don't posit simply making all convergence non-instantaneous, which would be a more general solution.

[Tombstoner]

AndyHill, on 10 June 2013 - 04:16 AM, said:

I remember the devs stating that the ballistic weapons are what they are now because they bring an instant damage weapon into the game, so it's a design thing. Of course you could ask if such a weapon should exist in MWO at all and personally I would say no. That's why I also think ACs should fire bursts and PPCs could have a beam duration or they could be considered a burst weapon much like the ACs. I would even go so far as to make the gauss a burst weapon.

With these changes and removal of alpha ability the game would probably be a more dynamic DPS fest instead of the mostly hide and snipe oriented style we have now.

The all or nothing element is ok for PPC's and Gause i think and can be balanced against the slashing DOT lasers if AC's are converted to Burst fire. this creats 4 types of weapons. energy vs. balistic.... all or nothing vs slashing DOT.
i do like your idea since it directly gets away from the all or nothing pin point alpha that's just going to get worse

[Garth Erlam]

Design is looking at this, no worries, but I wanted to give my own opinions.

One thing I want to avoid is anything that punishes Light mechs for 'boating' similar weapons, or to make movement-based accuracy reductions. For the former, take the Jenner F. You really can't play the Mech without boating. Also - you NEED to alpha that damage as the beam time (of 1 second) means you want as much as possible hitting exactly where you want. The beam, though, means the enemy can react and spread the damage, which I LOVE - anything that can be countered with skill I enjoy seeing. For the latter, accuracy being reduced when moving will encourage people to never move, and will make things more stagnant, gameplay wise.

I want to tackle the problem weapons, which I think are pretty narrow - PPC/ERPPCs in large numbers, and combos of Gauss/AC20's/PPC's. Suggestions I've already forwarded from here, twitter, facebook, PM's, ingame, Reddit, etc:

-'Beam time' PPC's (shorter than a LL, but noticeable)
-'Charge time' PPC's (it takes 'x' of a second to charge up before firing)
-PPC's with 3 health
--PPC's with 3 health that explode, doing 10 damage
-Individual heat scales for PPC's (so PPC's can overheat and explode when constantly used)
-Give both ERPPCs and PPCs a minimum range of 'x' where they do ZERO damage.
-Allow only 'x' damage to a single location every 'y' seconds
-Give all ballistic weapons 'burst' fire - IE. Gauss could be 3 5 damage shots in quick succession, AC/20 is a pair of 10 damage shots, etc.
-Lower PPC travel speed
-Have weapons lose convergeance the more weapons are fired at once

And many more, but those were ones I can remember off hand.