1263 replies to this topic

[Deathlike]

Kunae, on 11 June 2013 - 12:23 PM, said:

Only slightly.

My point was that the highest point alpha Highlander will be unaffected by this "fix".

That's pretty much with the problem with this change to begin with. They don't address the underlying problem... it only mitigates it, but will still be exploited oh so differently (it's not that hard).

[Esplodin]

Balance out of whack? Invent a new system!

Every single additional mechanic you add will create more imbalance.

WTF PGI? How many complex systems do we really need in this game to make it not suck balance wise? I'm calling it now - this will have unintended consequences. Sucker bet, given the track wreckord.

Systems already in place that can deal with boating:
1) Weapon heat (no PPCs, heat got reduced, PPC EVERYWHERE, increase heat until it is not everywhere, DONE)
2) refire time (PPC recharge increase was a move in the right direction)
3) Mech quirks (why is a stalker better than an awesome for PPC?)
4) Convergence (herp, 3 body parts can focus on a single section at 800m instantly, derp)

NO NEW SYSTEMS.

The MG damage increase just makes them less stinky poop. Remove the RNG and let aim and skill matter and it might be OK.

Pulse laser change is crap, but if it is just a normalization pass to be followed by a tuning pass that is an acceptable first step.

150% heat? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHALOLOLOLHAHAHAH! My side torsos are critical! HAHAHAH!

SRMpocolypse - calling it now, since every change so far to missles have resulted in a weekend of fighting in the shade. I hope I'm wrong since they are on the level of pillow fighting at the moment.

Edited by Esplodin, 12 June 2013 - 04:01 AM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Deathlike, on 11 June 2013 - 12:20 PM, said:

You forgot about the BJ-1X that was recently introduced to the eco-system.

Oh yeah...


Yeah, I think 150% is a bit of a stretch...

HOWEVER there already is a system in place that causes Random Damage to your internals if you are any-at-all over 100% if you force your Mech to remain powered-up. The new proposed system would cause CT-Specific Damage if you breach 150% Even if your Mech is shut-down. This will be the first Heat Penalty that damages you when you are shut down.

Here is the implication:

Old System -> fire alpha, fire alpha (heat now close to, but not quite 100%), Press "O" to engage override, fire alpha (heat now over 100%), fire alpha (heat now over 150%), Press "P" to shut down
Result -> In this case, you fire 4 alphas, and only suffer minor Random Internal Damage for the time it takes between firing your third and forth alphas. When your pilot shuts the Mech down, all heat damage ceases, and you can chill-out peacefully.

New System -> fire alpha, fire alpha (heat now close to, but not quite 100%), Press "O" to engage override, fire alpha (heat now over 100%), fire alpha (heat now over 150%), Press "P" to shut down
Result -> You are now cooking to death because you're over 150% and your CT will explode shortly.

Edited by Prosperity Park, 11 June 2013 - 12:29 PM.

[DemonRaziel]

I don't want to seem overly skeptical as it's a positive thing that you guys are going for a significant balancing changes, but...

- Increasing LPLs damage AND heat will keep LPL just as much overlooked as it was up to now - there is no chance this weapon can compete with the other 7t energy weapon - (ER)PPC. (unless you are planning to give it significantly lover heat penalty for alphaing a lot of them, compared to PPCs; but still)

- Making SSRMs less of a CT-lovers is great. Now if you'd please also fix the flight paths (having the missiles circle a 'Mech 3 times before they hit is kinda.... weird), otherwise they are still, in essence, free damage.

- MGs have finally been buffed in damage to a decent amount. How's the cone doing?

- Heat penalties. THIS is your solution to high alphas? Macroing the 3 & 3 combo will make 6 PPC Stalkers nigh unaffected. Same goes for 4 PPC ones. 3 PPCSs + Gauss is just where it was before this "fix". And 4 PPCs + Gauss will have marginally higher heat output (compared to their pinpoint damage capabilites). On the other hand, you showed those OP Hunchies and Blackies out there, good job And while the 2x Gauss and 2x AC20 builds aren't as much of an issue, compared to the PPC boaters, they still can dish out a crapload of pinpoint damage. Just saying.

- Heat damage. Cool. Great even. Long time overdue. Though 150% of the threshold seems a too high a tolerance, still.

PS:

Paul Inouye said:

We considered the notion of doing a max heat threshold reduction but this would have ended up nerfing every weapon system and every Mech in the game.

Forcing more cautious use of available weapons. Reducing amount of heavy and hot weapons in favor of more heat sinks or smaller and less hot weapons. Reducing the overall amount of aplhastrikes significantly, mostly to situations where there is no other option. This all would most likely lead to a longer, slower paced combats and would turn MWO into a "thinking man's FPS", in my opinion.

[Hysteria]

*Golf clap* All of this sounds like an awesome step towards better balance. Loving it so far.

[Deathlike]

Do some of you remember the day where one guy "misquoted" Paul and somehow got him to respond?

At this time, that was kinda silly... but when you now get to this point and realize the changes that are coming through the pipeline... it doesn't look so silly anymore. It's tragic.

Edited by Deathlike, 11 June 2013 - 12:33 PM.

[Tennex]

its very unintuitive and clunky convoluted mess. (much like the ECM/BAP system now)

i think they should rethink it

[Inkarnus]

ManDaisy, on 11 June 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

150% heat also seems WAY too generous. 125% would be much more realistic as many more mechs other then the most min maxed variants would have fall into this category.


What I would suggestion is a system where max heat generated at once, decreases the effectiviness of heat sinks, rather then create more heat.

20 heat = no reduction to heat sink ability
25 heat = 5% heat sink reduction
30 heat = 10% heat sink reduction
40 heat = 20% heat sink reduction

and so on. As for how long the reduction reduction period last, that would be based on personal prefferance.

So bigger alphas would take longer to cool, with any weapon mix.


This current system also fails to deal with mixed weapon high heat alpha builds. For example, you have y SRM6 boats which also include lasers, ppcs and ballistics. Individually these weapons would not constitute boating. Together however they do.

totally agree on that one
else PGI your sailing in the right waters and looking at
the numbers there seems to be wip and not finaly so
no bashing on it folks
happy now faith restored a bit
gogo PGI !

Edited by Inkarnus, 11 June 2013 - 12:38 PM.

[SuperJoe]

I think the should try experimenting with other things other than a heat penalty. Maybe cooldown/reload penalties as well. Like every extra ppc fired in an alpha adds a quarter of second to their over all cool down or something like that as an idea. Dual ac20s would need to reload one at a time after being fired at the same time. or when an a1 fires 6 srms there's a wild spray.

but if they're just doing heat penalties, i think the ones they laid out are far too generous for exceeding the heat thresh hold and ppc boating.

[IceSerpent]

3rdworld, on 11 June 2013 - 12:12 PM, said:

What is funny:

Most 3Fs run 2PPC 2 ERPPC.

If they swap to 4PPCs, they only increase their heat by 4, even taking the penalty.

Gotta admit - I run quad ERPPCs on my 3F, but if PGI really really wants me to swap two of them for regular ones, I think I can arrange for that to happen...

[MajorChunks]

I don't normally chime in on these topics. But it really seems like you're overcomplicating things by making it weapon-specific. It rewards making arbitrarily confusing builds like ERPPC+PPC+Gauss, or 6 ML+2SPL, and so on. It confuses new players and adds unnecessary hidden values.

A simpler, but almost equivalent solution, is just to scale the amount of heat generated with the initial heat burst, independent of weapon type. So (using completely made-up numbers) if you fire a group of weapons for 30 heat it gets increased to 35, fire a group for 40 heat it gets increased to 50, and so on. Fire 6 PPCs and the heat output doubles, for example. This makes it fair for everyone and prevents silly abuse cases. I'd be totally on board for this, even with my Medium 'mech ML builds.

I do think it would be very interesting to have simple heat-related 'mech quirks. Hunchbacks could have increased dissipation, Awesomes could have an increased heat cap, and so on.

The heat penalty delay could easily be increased to 1 second, as long as it doesn't stack. Even if you're chainfiring, you're at most going to be experiencing penalties for 2 weapons at once, so it's not really a huge deal and doesn't really penalize chain fire much. If the delay times aren't synced up it also gives us the freedom to later tune the chainfire delay individually while still retaining the penalties.

And to echo other posts: 125% seems much more reasonable to me, as far as a heat threshold goes. Overheating past 100% should be serious business.

Edited by MajorChunks, 11 June 2013 - 12:37 PM.

[Rippthrough]

I think you've managed to **** up yet another balancing job by not admitting that the only issue with PPC boating is that you've made all the short range weapons suck.

You've just smacked the jagger, hunchie, jenner, blackjack, etc, all because you can't balance the highlander and stalker builds (easy, they're clumsy, give people with short range weapons a reason to risk getting in their face). Just like the JJ shake crap. And guess which builds the massively OP siesmic hurts?
I'll give you a clue, it's not the long range boaters....

At least the MG and Flamer are getting a bit more love, and the heat cap is a good step, although 150% is probably too much, 125 might do it.
The new S-SRM targetting sounds like it could be much better though.

Edited by Rippthrough, 11 June 2013 - 12:43 PM.

[mania3c]

I have to join "like the idea but not sure about form" wagon..

heat penalties for boating.. I am not sure..another complexity and also it's not transparent system.. it's very hard to describe it in just few words..we will need more confusing stats in weapon charts..number of weapons causing heat penalties is arbitrary chosen based on some variants ...it doesn't make sense and also in don't fix alphas from PPC + gauss etc...

[SMDMadCow]

This "fix" is entirely too clunky.
All you have to do is crank the heat on PPCs to 10 and ERs to 15 per shot.

[WolvesX]

Heat penalty for ML or for Lasers in general is such a bad idea.

-> Points at Nova / Black Hawk

[EyeOne]

I don't have a massive problem with these changes right now. But I just read it so maybe I need to play the game with them in mind.

But I'm wondering if stronger quirks might have been better in some cases. For instance, you could make the PPC heat penalty start at 2 or 3 PPCs instead of 4 but make the Awesome-8Q and 9M have a quirk that makes them able to shoot 3 PPCs. Same for the Swayback, make the ML penalty start at 4 MLs but the Swayback can do 6. It makes to variants more diverse, yes?

Edited by EyeOne, 11 June 2013 - 12:49 PM.

[Darwins Dog]

I feel I should point out that the numbers given were there for illustration and do not constitute the final values. Perhaps we should keep that in mind before reacting too much.

I for one like the system that is being proposed. I look forward to seeing it in game.

[Victor Morson]

This is a re-post from another topic put up about this. The alpha heat management is is the worst idea put forth in a very long time.

Quote

So, let me count the horrible, horrible ways that this is the single worst idea for a reactive low-ELO nerf in the entire game. I know a lot of you are already likely jumping to say what a glorious day this is, but if you are, you don't understand why "High alpha builds" were a problem in the first place.

- First and foremost: This punishes small 'mechs. If you bought a BJ-1X get ready to throw it in the trash, because the limit on numbers of guns will absolutely wreck it. This and other 'mechs were designed to boat large arrays of lasers, so forcing them to stagger that fire out will absolutely, positively kick light and medium pilots in the balls again.

- Most high alpha builds don't carry many guns anyway! Everyone rambles about the 6 PPC Stalker, which is clearly far worse than the 4 PPC Stalker. This will punish the bad build and not punish the good one; likewise the most common setup is 2 PPC, 1 Gauss, which this will not even impact. That's because small numbers of big guns are better at heavy damage, high focus hits than large numbers of small guns a lot of the time!

- This won't stop synergy. I've said it before, and I will say it again: If you cap how many of X weapon I can effectively run, I will simply run Y and Z that have similar firing characteristics. Stop me from running 3 PPCs and I'll run 2 PPCs and a Gauss; maybe 2 PPCs and 2 Gauss, 'mech depending. Stop me from running 5 Large Lasers and I'll run 4 and an ER Large. No matter how much you smash this, it will never stop it.

- Goodbye, Secondary Guns. Does your 'mech have backup weapons? Lasers or streaks in case they close the distance? Well if you pop those 3-4 backup guns, you're going to take a huge heat penalty now, despite the fact they likely carry less than a tenth of your firepower. I know I'm not going to want to eat surges of heat for firing a bank of small lasers.

- That's the whole point to some variants! In addition to the light variants that are damaged, but what about 'mechs like the Catapult A1? You've effectively rendered the 'mech worthless. What about a less popular example, the Awesome 8Q? No more PPC builds for that! Good thing nobody is using that laserboat Hunchback, too, because that's going to be a joke now.

- This won't stop the true problem. The reason "high alpha builds" have become such a subject of ire (among the non-frankenmech crowd even) has absolutely nothing to do with the number of guns being boated. It is almost exclusively because of a lack of weight restrictions in the game (Which was one of the longest running pre-beta threads on the MW:O forums, mind you, so I can't say some of us didn't see it coming) resulting in every single person driving a Stalker or Highlander.

- Twin Gauss is Coming. Sure the Jagger and K2 can do so, but they're fragile. The 4X can do it but it's slow. Around the corner is the Victor, that can likely sport 2x Gauss and PPCs. By attacking builds running more than one PPC, all you will do is force everyone here next. Again, alpha strikes are not the underlying problem!

The problem: Guess what, no matter what you do to alpha strikes or weapon arrays this won't make the problem go away. As long as 85-90 ton 'mechs are allowed to be the majority on the field, they will ALL hit so hard you will be unable to pilot anything else!

Pretty much 110% punishment to light & medium pilots who run large banks of small weapons, while not even impacting the actual high alpha builds - this is literally the worst idea and outcome possible to fix the situation, in particular since the real issue is the fact there's no weight matching.

No weight matching means people ton up to win. People tonning up to win means even if you don't want to, you have to do the same. Bam, you just knocked out 50% of the game's content. That is a serious issue and is entirely responsible for the alpha hate, because everyone is driving top-tier 'mechs with (again, a small number of) really big weapons... leading to high-damage long-range alphas and a lot of anger on the forums.

But again like I said above this has to do with assault 'mechs being everywhere and not alpha strikes. If you smash alpha strikes, again, the only people you are hurting are in the sub-70 tonnage range!

This was a really poorly thought out idea and it should be canceled immediately.

This is a re-post from another topic put up about this. The alpha heat management is is the worst idea put forth in a very long time.

Edited by Victor Morson, 11 June 2013 - 12:40 PM.

[WolvesX]

In addition.

2 PPC 1 Gauss Rifle = HIGH ALHPA AND NOT TARGETED BY THIS NERF.

Also: =0.5....

[DEMAX51]

Everything in this post sounds absolutely awesome!

Thank you, Paul!