62 replies to this topic

[Feircus Blacktooth]

I think ammo explosions due to high heat should be factored in. One to many restarts after shutdown or running at a constant high heat and BOOM. Also a critical on the ppc charging coils could set them off too. Happens to the gauss, so why not the ppc.

[MustrumRidcully]

I am a bit skeptical on relying on ammo explosions for balance... Even if we add some for PPCs.

[Corvus Antaka]

we surely need ammo explosions caused by exceeding 100%, as well as heatsinks burning out in conjunction with the internal damage.

Really PGI is smart to tweak this down slowly until they hit a good cap, it eases gameplay for the rookies right now and when a future release comes it can be solidified.

I'm still with a 20 damage no heat penalty cap. Anything over 20 damage incurs an x/y factor of additional heat for each point of damage over 20 you do in a single shot spaced at .5 to 1 second. this forces pilots to either link fire or group fire and space their shots slightly to maximize heat efficiency, or choose the big alph with the knowledge of exactly how much heat penalty dumping all that damage at once will incur.

It gives a natural drawback to the benefit of dumping all your damage at once, falls inline with btech risks for alpha strikes.

really the only question left beyond this then is where to set a hard instanuke heatcap (ie 125%) and then make the heatbar render the entire heatscale and get rid of this "magical extra heatcap" no one can see, exceed, the mystecial damage done when overheating, etc. just show us - make it 0-100%, at 80% or higher you move into a red region where your mech starts taking internal damage and you can actually see this.

The mech3 heat bar would be perfect here really. green, yellow, red, purple, boom.

the numbers are up to PGI. imho 4 ppc or 40 damage should be the max cap, push any more than that out at once and you should be into 80%+ and taking heat damage right away territory. PGI wants to keep DPS down, this is the way to do it and stop big boating/massive alphas.

only issue left is gauss, and imho dual gauss could incur a similar heat penalty or be given a recycle penalty to give it some flavour.

a note on those that think nothing is wrong..just wait for pro teams with perfect aim that take 12 6 ppc stalkers and focus fire together at mech groins, thus gaurenteeing CT hits regardless of the mechs orientation. Combine this with base camping on assault and you have a nearly impossible to win situation unless your team also takes the same mechs. 40 damage in an alpha with no drawback is much to much, and 60 damage is beyond ridiculous, 3 stalkers can focus fire 4 enemy mechs in 12v12 with perfect fire discipline, and nothing will be able to withstand that, and if they have good FPS aim they wont need more than 3-4 shots each to win entire matches.

Edited by Colonel Pada Vinson, 29 June 2013 - 01:46 PM.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

I love how splintered the community is at this point. Not even 100 votes overall on any one options, barely 3 pages.

It's sad.

[BlightFang]

Simplest, most direct, easiest to balance, and a solution that actually "fixes the problem" unlike some of the other ones on here.. - Increase total hit points by a value between 0 and 100%. The actual percent would be the balance where players start using an equal amount of "dps" weapons vs "high alpha" weapons in high elo matches.

[Corvus Antaka]

BlightFang, on 29 June 2013 - 03:46 PM, said:

Simplest, most direct, easiest to balance, and a solution that actually "fixes the problem" unlike some of the other ones on here.. - Increase total hit points by a value between 0 and 100%. The actual percent would be the balance where players start using an equal amount of "dps" weapons vs "high alpha" weapons in high elo matches.

hit points already have been doubled. RoF needs to be curbed. however, you are dead on that dps guns need to be balanced vs high alpha guns to fix the overall problem.

[Skyfaller]

Garth Erlam, on 11 June 2013 - 09:28 AM, said:

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

Garth,

None of those address the root source of the problem.

Pinpoint accuracy weapons+front loaded damage+heat mechanics allowing multiple alpha boated strikes...and finally the very odd thing that for some reason you can load the largest, heaviest weapon into a weapon slot that the mech model clearly could not possibly load in the chassis in that location.

How to fix it all in one? Easy:

1- Change convergence from pinpoint to 'spaced out'. That is, the weapons do not auto-converge on one spot. The farther they are from the CT the farther left/right/up/down they hit.

CT weapons would hit directly pinpoint damage. RT/LT would hit about 2m left and right of the CT aimpoint. Arm weapons would hit about 5m from CT point left and right.

Draw a dot. That is the CT convergence.
Draw a circle 1cm radius with the dot as center point. The RT/LT weapons hit on the far left and right of the circle.
Now draw another circle 2cm radius from the dot. Thats where the arm weapons will hit on the far left and right of the circle.
Up/Down spacing on top of left/right is up to the mech's model where the weapons are located (lower slung arms or head-high weapon slots).

This effectively makes shots more than ~200m have a very low chance of hitting a single point and only point blank shots could be pinpointed into one armor location (which means lights CAN pinpoint damage since they have the speed to close in and out).

This fixes pinpoint damage and makes boating not have the uber damage potential it has now. It also fixes front-loaded damage (PPC/Projectile) since they would not be impacting the same location most of the time.

2- Heat mechanics which allows multiple alpha strikes: The problem is engine DHS @ 2.0 plain and simple. You cannot load six ppcs with single heatsinks and hope to fire more than 1 alpha. Double heatsinks? Pffft it allows up to 3 or more. So the solution is simple: Change engine heatsinks so they are: SHS: 1.0 heat dissipation, 2.0 heat capacity. DHS: 2.0 heat dissipation, 1.0 heat capacity. ALL In-Engine heatsinks are 1.0 heat cap, 1.0 dissipation (regardless if DHS is set).

This simple, easy change makes the DHS perfect for sustained fire mechs (brawlers) while SHS becomes the heatsinks of choice of long range mechs.... because they have the juice to fire twice as much as the DHS but it takes forever to cool down whereas DHS can fire half of the SHS capacity but it cools very quickly.

This brings balance to heat mechanics allowing multiple alphas. Since the engine heatsinks are 1.0 the current DHS mechs lose a ton of heat capacity and the current SHS have no chance (since they do not allow multiple alpha to begin with). Extra installed heatsinks will give their bonuses.

3- Finally, the issue of hardpoints. Ask yourself this Garth: What is the point of mech variants if you can load the same alpha strike damage in most of them? It doesnt matter if one variant has 4 energy and the other has 2 energy 2 ballistics... people will boat 4 PPCs or 2 gauss 2 PPC. It doesn't matter if one variant has two 20-tube launchers and 2 6-tubes when another variant has 2x10 tube and 2x6 tube.. both mechs can and are being boated with quad LRM15s.

Look at the mech chassis itself. Tell me, does the Catapult torso ballistic hardpoint look like it can hold 2 gauss rifles? Hell no. Its a SMALL torso and its weapon barrels are small caliber. Why then can people cram two Gauss in there? The solution to this is ridiculously simple:

Assign a size to each weapon hardpoint and each weapon.

Energy: base it on the slots they occupy. Small/medium lasers =size 1, large lasers=size 2, ppc=size 3.
Ballistic: base it on the damage they put out. AC2/MG=Size 1, AC5/UAC5= Size 2, Gauss/AC10= size 3, AC20=size 4
Missile: Based on number of tubes in the chassis. You cannot load a missile launcher that has more missiles than the number of tubes the launcher has.

Next, simply allow players to load as many weapons they can to fill in the 'size' of each weapon slot as long as they have the crit slots and tonnage to put them in. Aka a size3 energy slot could load a single PPC or 3 small/medium lasers or 1 large and 1 medium. Ballistics are automatically limited in how much you can cram in due to ammo tonnage requirements, their much higher slot costs and weapon tonnage. Missiles again are based on missile tubes. You can cram 2 LRM10 into a 20-tube or 5xLRM5.. or 10 SSRMs. Damage wise the launchers end up doing basically the same damage given their number of tubes potential (aka 1 LRM20= 22dmg 1km range and 10 SSRM2's = 30 dmg, 270m range and an insanely higher heat, tonnage and crit slot cost)

The mech's hud would simply have to have a second 'weapons&weapon groups' display added to accomodate increased weapon loading.

Sounds like a lot but consider the logic behind it: It makes mech chassis be UNIQUE for a change. It enables a vastly larger amount of mech builds and they are not imbalanced.. if there is a mech with 4xsize4 ballistic slots and the player loads up 16 machine guns in there thats his choice... mgs are 1dps now so its 16dps at very close range and the ammo/crit slot needed to load all that will cripple his mech in other areas. And he will not and can not possibly load 16 AC2s..no tonnage to load them and no heat to fire them.

[Hotthedd]

Harmonics.

Each weapon hits the crosshair at a fixed distance. This distance can be changed in the mechlab.

It does not remove skill from the equation, it actually ADDS a layer of skill needed to land multiple shots on one spot.

The distance could even be set to "infinity", making every shot from that weapon fire straight forward.

[Schrottfrosch]

We first need to get the weapons away from tabletop rules - that means we need to read the books and the rules to see where the differences are. Imo this game should be closer to the books as we do not need the clumsy simulation with 2 D6 dices.

Edited by Schrottfrosch, 01 July 2013 - 12:52 AM.

[AndyHill]

The weapons are far from tabletop. The TT numbers are mostly about the balance between the weapons and that has been an issue in MWO right from the start, so the current balance is hardly better than in TT. It's likely that a real-time simulation environment will require some tweaks to the weapon stats, but moving further from the original numbers is only going to get us from bad to worse if there's no clear idea on where we need to go with the numbers.

[Hotthedd]

AndyHill, on 01 July 2013 - 09:47 AM, said:

The weapons are far from tabletop. The TT numbers are mostly about the balance between the weapons and that has been an issue in MWO right from the start, so the current balance is hardly better than in TT. It's likely that a real-time simulation environment will require some tweaks to the weapon stats, but moving further from the original numbers is only going to get us from bad to worse if there's no clear idea on where we need to go with the numbers.

True. If they were to stick STRICTLY to TT, then each weapon would do their damage per 10 seconds.

Weapon Damage per shot = TT damage/10 (seconds) x ROF (seconds).

This would actually also work to keep high alphas under control.

[Lightfoot]

I have a really broad perspective on all this because I played MW3 and MW4 including online league play.

Based on those games and what I know the Clans are bringing I am not perturbed by Alpha-Strikes, Convergence, 2x AC20's, (except it's too wierd that only 65 ton mechs can do this, really, wierd). 3 and 4x PPCs are within the likely configs you will see although it's better to mix Gauss and PPCs.

What does disturb me is how fragile the Mechs in MWO are. That they can't withstand basic IS tech configs better. That the Devs are unwilling to give assaults 2xGauss or 2x AC20. This may sound shocking if the only MechWarrior game you have had much experience with is MWO, but Clan tech is the real deal. MWO's mechs aren't ready for it if they fold so quickly to 2xAC20.

So they need to be tougher, but I oppose removing accuracy from the game by creating even more convergence barriers. MWO already has two convergence points now, sometimes 3 and it's hard to line them up all the time. The arms always lag behind the torso for some reason. Anyway, I guess that was so vexing to new players they made a toggle to turn it off or on as the player preferred.

I really think the best way to diffuse accuracy is to have the hitboxes overlap and let players compete normally. If hitboxes overlapped a bit, damage would get spread across two to three sections unless the hit was spot on target. You could fiddle with this per mech and get the balance just right. Then the lack of convergence in the two aim points we have now would produce much more damage spreading also.

Anyway, the only thing I am shocked by in MWO is how fragile the Mechs are. The configs and gameplay are about the same as previous MechWarrior games, except MWO is a much better giant robot sim, so I know things are going pretty well and just need some balancing. But that's just my calloused veteran Mech pilot appraisal.

I would be all for a more defined hardpoint usage set-up in Mechlab, but as you may have noticed, there are no assaults with 2x AC20's, yet.

Edited by Lightfoot, 04 July 2013 - 10:24 AM.

[Hotthedd]

Lightfoot, on 04 July 2013 - 10:18 AM, said:

I have a really broad perspective on all this because I played MW3 and MW4 including online league play.

Based on those games and what I know the Clans are bringing I am not perturbed by Alpha-Strikes, Convergence, 2x AC20's, (except it's too wierd that only 65 ton mechs can do this, really, wierd). 3 and 4x PPCs are within the likely configs you will see although it's better to mix Gauss and PPCs.

What does disturb me is how fragile the Mechs in MWO are. That they can't withstand basic IS tech configs better. That the Devs are unwilling to give assaults 2xGauss or 2x AC20. This may sound shocking if the only MechWarrior game you have had much experience with is MWO, but Clan tech is the real deal. MWO's mechs aren't ready for it if they fold so quickly to 2xAC20.

So they need to be tougher, but I oppose removing accuracy from the game by creating even more convergence barriers. MWO already has two convergence points now, sometimes 3 and it's hard to line them up all the time. The arms always lag behind the torso for some reason. Anyway, I guess that was so vexing to new players they made a toggle to turn it off or on as the player preferred.

I really think the best way to diffuse accuracy is to have the hitboxes overlap and let players compete normally. If hitboxes overlapped a bit, damage would get spread across two to three sections unless the hit was spot on target. You could fiddle with this per mech and get the balance just right. Then the lack of convergence in the two aim points we have now would produce much more damage spreading also.

Anyway, the only thing I am shocked by in MWO is how fragile the Mechs are. The configs and gameplay are about the same as previous MechWarrior games, except MWO is a much better giant robot sim, so I know things are going pretty well and just need some balancing. But that's just my calloused veteran Mech pilot appraisal.

I would be all for a more defined hardpoint usage set-up in Mechlab, but as you may have noticed, there are no assaults with 2x AC20's, yet.

Who has been advocating removing accuracy from the game?

The ideas so far have been to have alpha strikes not have perfect convergence, or to have them at PLAYER SET convergence distances, or to remove alpha strikes from the game completely. None of these ideas remove accuracy, in fact they REWARD accuracy. Multiple weapons converging on a single spot is unrealistic, and (more importantly) is a broken game mechanic. The fact that previous MechWarrior games had it does not make it less broken.

[Lightfoot]

Hotthedd, on 04 July 2013 - 01:58 PM, said:

Who has been advocating removing accuracy from the game?

The ideas so far have been to have alpha strikes not have perfect convergence, or to have them at PLAYER SET convergence distances, or to remove alpha strikes from the game completely. None of these ideas remove accuracy, in fact they REWARD accuracy. Multiple weapons converging on a single spot is unrealistic, and (more importantly) is a broken game mechanic. The fact that previous MechWarrior games had it does not make it less broken.

If you remove Alpha-Strikes from the game it is no longer MechWarrior. MechWarrior invented the term Alpha-Strike (as far as I know) so suggesting it's removal is unacceptable. There is no problem with MWO except that the mechs are not tough enough. You don't remove iconic elements of gameplay to fix minor imbalances. You all really need to take a breather and stop freaking out about some minor inconsistencies.

I oppose the idea of making Alpha-Strikes an AoE damage stream, also called removing convergence, because it creates a tool to kill Light mechs with an LBX-like attack. Any thinking MWO player would just fire alpha-strikes at Lights as soon as they come into view and hit them with much greater consistency than now. There are other balance problems with replacing accurate group-fired weapons with aoe-damage streams, but I won't go into it. I am just going to say you don't re-invent the wheel to fix a flat tire.

Flame away, but you all have not thought this "remove convergence thing" through. It would make assaults unstoppable and lights easy kills and create a whole new series of balancing issues to solve. It would also give players less tools to play MechWarrior with. That's a bad thing. You want to empower players to take resourceful actions in a simulation, not dumb it down.

[Hotthedd]

Lightfoot, on 04 July 2013 - 07:30 PM, said:

If you remove Alpha-Strikes from the game it is no longer MechWarrior. MechWarrior invented the term Alpha-Strike (as far as I know) so suggesting it's removal is unacceptable. There is no problem with MWO except that the mechs are not tough enough. You don't remove iconic elements of gameplay to fix minor imbalances. You all really need to take a breather and stop freaking out about some minor inconsistencies.

I oppose the idea of making Alpha-Strikes an AoE damage stream, also called removing convergence, because it creates a tool to kill Light mechs with an LBX-like attack. Any thinking MWO player would just fire alpha-strikes at Lights as soon as they come into view and hit them with much greater consistency than now. There are other balance problems with replacing accurate group-fired weapons with aoe-damage streams, but I won't go into it. I am just going to say you don't re-invent the wheel to fix a flat tire.

Flame away, but you all have not thought this "remove convergence thing" through. It would make assaults unstoppable and lights easy kills and create a whole new series of balancing issues to solve. It would also give players less tools to play MechWarrior with. That's a bad thing. You want to empower players to take resourceful actions in a simulation, not dumb it down.

Alpha Strikes exist in Battletech canon as a shot of last resort. It was never intended to be the default system of shooting. Unfortunately, that is what it has become, and it is a game-breaking mechanic. Everyone has to do it, because the OTHER guy is doing it. There needs to be risks associated with the reward of easy mode.

It is the current one click - six hit meta that is discouraging lights being played. All it takes is one lucky potshot and the light is dead or legged. There are ways to remove convergence without adding in any random mechanics (you can find them all over this thread and others).

Believe me, I have thought more about the pinpoint alpha strike issue than you think. The mechanic was broken in previous MechWarrior games, as it is broken now. It is a tool that lessens the need for aiming skill. It will make lights more survivable overall, but not as brawlers. It will make mediums usable again, and yes, heavies and assaults would be able to tank a bit longer.

Magic instant converging alpha strikes are what "dumb the game down", NOT having to aim and fire each weapon.

Edited by Hotthedd, 05 July 2013 - 10:45 AM.

[Lex Peregrine]

To counter the idea that light mechs would loose usefulness by eliminating convergeance, I propose the following:

Light mechs due to their smaller profile, should have a better convergeance than bigger mechs, as their weapons are mounted closer together.

My vision of the perfect system is a circular cross-hair, the size of the circle depends on the size of the mech, so smaller mechs will have a smaller circle. When firing, the shots direction should not just be random position anywhere inside the circle, right arm weapons should shoot more to the right area of the circle, left arm weapons to the left, and so on.

Assault mechs with their large profiles will be most usefull against other large mechs at close range, while having a harder time to hit fast moving smaller mechs, BUT: One big influence on the size of the crosshair should be speed, an Assault mech that does a full stop should get a small enough cross-hair to be able to hit a fast moving small mech, or to have a good enough accuracy at long range.

Then you could add other damaging effects: High heat levels and targeting computer damage affecting the cross-hair size or add more randomness.

Please give us a sim, not an arcade shooter.

[Major Derps]

Lex Peregrine, on 05 July 2013 - 12:44 AM, said:

To counter the idea that light mechs would loose usefulness by eliminating convergeance, I propose the following:

Light mechs due to their smaller profile, should have a better convergeance than bigger mechs, as their weapons are mounted closer together.

My vision of the perfect system is a circular cross-hair, the size of the circle depends on the size of the mech, so smaller mechs will have a smaller circle. When firing, the shots direction should not just be random position anywhere inside the circle, right arm weapons should shoot more to the right area of the circle, left arm weapons to the left, and so on.

Assault mechs with their large profiles will be most usefull against other large mechs at close range, while having a harder time to hit fast moving smaller mechs, BUT: One big influence on the size of the crosshair should be speed, an Assault mech that does a full stop should get a small enough cross-hair to be able to hit a fast moving small mech, or to have a good enough accuracy at long range.

Then you could add other damaging effects: High heat levels and targeting computer damage affecting the cross-hair size or add more randomness.

Please give us a sim, not an arcade shooter.

I thought you would have learned by now, that arcade is the only way for MWO. I just hope they have a hardcore/traditional game mode I can select by launch.

Look, to put simply: rigid mount hardpoints (i.e anything not on a humanoid type arm) should be effected by 'mech movement, and should not converge, though should be allowed a preset convergence range (I honestly can't think of anything that simple, that makes that much sense?). I believe Lex's idea of the reticule behavior(although arcade shooter ish...sorry Lex just my opinion), is the best way to visualize this. Swap the cross hairs, so that torso/rigid hardpoints are depicted as a circle (refer to Lex's post), and (humanoid) arms become the crosshairs, or another type of crosshair.

In addition to this, hardpoint restrictions need to be tightened up, aside from weapon type restrictions, all the current 'mechs are essentially omni-mechs. Also, PPCs should have a lower heat efficiency, and higher slot cost of 4 slots (canon just doesn't work in this case). Their current stats make them far too effective.

Alpha strikes should be left in the game, the biggest problem, IMO, is the weapon convergence.

[Lex Peregrine]

Mokey Mot, on 05 July 2013 - 03:05 AM, said:

Look, to put simply: rigid mount hardpoints (i.e anything not on a humanoid type arm) should be effected by 'mech movement, and should not converge, though should be allowed a preset convergence range (I honestly can't think of anything that simple, that makes that much sense?). I believe Lex's idea of the reticule behavior(although arcade shooter ish...sorry Lex just my opinion), is the best way to visualize this. Swap the cross hairs, so that torso/rigid hardpoints are depicted as a circle (refer to Lex's post), and (humanoid) arms become the crosshairs, or another type of crosshair.

Yes you are correct, I think the circular reticule idea is a good compromise between sim and arcade, and I support your idea of keeping the arm weapons in the crosshair while torso weapons get a dynamic-size circular reticle with limited convergeance.

However keeping arm weapons have no convergeance issues will make people focus on mechs with many arm hardpoints, but I see no easy way around that right now.

Agreed on the rest too, except maybe the ppc 4 slot issue, would prefer a different hardpoint restriction more MW4 style.

[Zyllos]

As long as weapon's fire is 100% accurate (LBX, SRMs, SSRMs, LRMs, and Machine Guns don't count as allowed to have "player skill"?), single sections and very little weapon damage spread is going to happen.

As long as players can easily place their damage onto a single location, you will not be able to curb players from just coring a single location out. This will also perpetuate PPCs, Gauss Rifles, and AC/20s due to high damage onto a single location as the best weapons unless you add so much heat/drawback that they will become pointless. Do by this fact, they will always be top tier in meta or worthless and never played.

There are only one of two ways out of this, either accept the fact that we are playing CBT in real time, thus we need to introduce some degree of random spread so that the rules of taking damage will be inline with the TT, or we need to completely deviate from CBT in all manner and will need to redo all weapon's stats, armor points, ect.

The CBT rules are so intertwined within each other, in spite of their independent systems, all of them have to act in a specific manner to become balanced.

The post with Garth talking about ways to curb the current meta is not very encouraging due to one fact. He says the current meta is broken by a few weapon systems, PPC, Gauss Rifle, and AC/20. This does not bold well because those weapon systems are not the cause of the issues, but the symptom of weapon convergence and a few other mechanics. They are the best weapon systems with the current rules.

Changing those rules only shifts the balance over to Large Lasers, or many Medium Lasers, or stacks of AC/5 or AC/10s. That is because the flaw exists on the way weapon systems works, independent of the actual weapon itself.

Hopefully PGI will see that it is a mistake to only balance the weapon's they deem imbalanced instead of take the time to review how all weapons fire together.

[Waking One]

Around my TS channel a couple of ideas are generally accepted that would probably help fix the problem a lot, esp if used together, first two being the main ones:

*remove convergence for anything but arm weapons in arms with lower actuators, or (more advanced) make it so that you set convergence for fixed weapons before battle (like war thunder for example) at a certain range

*remove the heat ceiling boost heatsinks provide, let everyone have the same (maybe some mechs/variants higher, to make certain variants more likeable) and increase dissipation across the board. 3 PPCs can't be fired more than once on cooldown without overheating, but if you chain fire some you can fire them for a looong time for example.

*this is the most advanced and time consuming, but: limit the size of hardpoints to what the variant has in terms of default weapons size, which you can then adjust for some variants to make them more likeable, as before. It would limit a lot but it would truly make mechs unique.

Oh and PPC heat is too low, should be brought back to its old value. it was changed because you couldn't hit anything before HSR (and to be fair, nobody used them even after the change, until HSR came in) but it's now not needed.

Edited by Waking One, 05 July 2013 - 06:16 AM.