93 replies to this topic

[aniviron]

Coralld, on 14 June 2013 - 09:17 PM, said:

Currently, I am in favor of having Heavies and Assaults torso twist and arm movement speeds be more sluggish, I am constantly astonished how fast they can whip them selves around. And perhaps also a slightly slower turning speed as well. This will not fix all the problems the Mediums face, but it would help.

This is more an issue with the fact that everyone runs an optimized build. Go run the trial atlas for a while; good luck trying to hit a light, ever! But if you add endo and dhs and use a clever weapons loadout, you can load that fatlas up with a 325+ engine, and suddenly you can twist oh so rapidly- especially if you have unlocked and doubled the applicable pilot efficiencies. Every assault pilot knows this too, so we all put gigantic engines in our mechs, and that means never having to be afraid of anything fast. Sure, the extra speed is nice, but the real reason to get a big engine is for that torso twist speed.

[YueFei]

Trauglodyte, on 14 June 2013 - 10:51 AM, said:

And that leads back to the problem that allowing drops of 4+ Assaults with the rest being predominantly Heavies is a major issue. Medius are called the work horse of the mech world because they were build with a lot of punch for their weight but at a very small cost. It was always wiser to build a force around a heavy stallwart of an assault with a few heavies and lights but with the bulk of the weight being designated for mediums because they could do so many things. The lack of a weight limit or BV limit means that the intended strengths of the medium weight class is wasted.

Then, you have the bulk of the people that see the land scape being what it is (go heavy or go home) and trying to turn their mediums into small assaults. Combine that with the Rambo factor and a complete inability to drive with intelligence and you've got a weight class that is getting shreded.

So, the ineptitude of the Medium is due to the idiocy of its users and the environment built around the biggest alpha. This is, once again, an issue of "Don't blame the tool, blame the user(s)".

I usually pilot a hunchback 4sp, and do alright, but more and more I find that it is my slight strategic speed advantage over a heavy that lets me do things that a heavy cannot (excluding the Dragon).

The hunchback really does not have a tactical speed advantage over a fast heavy, or even some of the mid-speed heavies going 75+ kph. My hunchback with max engine goes only 4 meters/sec faster than a heavy. If I act a bit adventurous and get caught in a bad spot, it will take a loooong time to disengage. If I need to go just 50 meters farther than a pursuing heavy to get clear of its weapons, it will take me over 12 seconds. In 12 seconds, a heavy can fire off 4 alpha strikes with heavy weapons, which I will probably not survive.

So, instead, I try to use my strategic speed advantage to arrive in a location where a heavy cannot reach in the same amount of time, to fire upon the enemy from vantage points that I hope they don't expect. If I try to duel a heavy, I better be damn sure he doesn't have a friendly heavy around, because even 2 mediums vs 2 heavies is lights out for the mediums if the heavies are in a loose deuce and cover each other. Plus, in a circling "dogfight", a skilled heavy pilot knows how to turn the fight into a "one-circle fight" instead of a "two-circle fight", so that he mitigates his inferior turn radius and can still bring weapons to bear on the medium.

Really, mediums can still be useful, but they aren't sexy. Maybe if they are given better agility across the board. Same speed, but even a slow medium ought to have some pretty sweet turn rate and acceleration/decelleration. That extra agility could make them harder to hit repeatedly in the same spot, and increase their survivability.

[Sephlock]

Umbra8, on 14 June 2013 - 04:53 PM, said:

Mediums will return when SRM damage has been boosted to a respectable level.

So... in a few months?

As it is, SSRMs are slated for a nerf, and LRMs are meh at best.

[Victor Morson]

The real problem with mediums is there's no reason to take a medium (that moves under 120kph) in an unlimited weight environment. Cut & dried.

[Coralld]

aniviron, on 15 June 2013 - 01:01 AM, said:

This is more an issue with the fact that everyone runs an optimized build. Go run the trial atlas for a while; good luck trying to hit a light, ever! But if you add endo and dhs and use a clever weapons loadout, you can load that fatlas up with a 325+ engine, and suddenly you can twist oh so rapidly- especially if you have unlocked and doubled the applicable pilot efficiencies. Every assault pilot knows this too, so we all put gigantic engines in our mechs, and that means never having to be afraid of anything fast. Sure, the extra speed is nice, but the real reason to get a big engine is for that torso twist speed.

This is true, however, it could be made so that Heavies and Assaults don't get the full twist speed and other agility bonus the larger engine provide, say they only get 50% of that (50% is just a place holder) Add on the natural agility buff as suggested by YueFei and Mediums would be performing a bit better.

Edited by Coralld, 15 June 2013 - 09:45 AM.

[LoveLost85]

KharnZor, on 13 June 2013 - 01:45 AM, said:

Its not PGI's job to tell you how to pilot your mech

not sure about the Trebs, but from everything I can remember about Cents in any other BT/MW game ive ever played they are tall but very skinny. nothing like the fat things in MWO

[Stoicblitzer]

didn't it cost pgi like $200,000 to make a mech? doubt physical size will be changing. SRMs need to be buffed.

[LordBraxton]

Stoicblitzer, on 15 June 2013 - 03:04 PM, said:

didn't it cost pgi like $200,000 to make a mech? doubt physical size will be changing. SRMs need to be buffed.

250,000 to make alpine

ALPINE

its just a big white mess on top of a bunch of terribly designed geometry

we really need 2.5 damage SRMs by... yesterday

Edited by LordBraxton, 15 June 2013 - 03:19 PM.

[Stoicblitzer]

LordBraxton, on 15 June 2013 - 03:18 PM, said:

250,000 to make alpine

ALPINE

its just a big white mess on top of a bunch of terribly designed geometry

we really need 2.5 damage SRMs by... yesterday

have you gone out of bounds? there is a whole world out there. definitely worth the money.

[Angel of Annihilation]

The problem is that a true lore based battlemech regiment was made up of 80% light and medium mechs. Heavy and especially Assault class mechs were rare because of cost and limited transportation weights.

Basically Battletech battles where designed to be mostly medium mechs, fighting medium mechs. This fit well in Table Top because most wargamers try to recreate battle based on lore. Fast forward to an intense FPS competitive PvP game where everyone can play assault mechs and no one cares about realistic wargaming scenerios and you now understand why mediums aren't on par.

[aniviron]

Stoicblitzer, on 15 June 2013 - 03:19 PM, said:

have you gone out of bounds? there is a whole world out there. definitely worth the money.

I go out of bounds as often as possible on Alpine, means I don't have to sit through that tragedy of a map. Unfortunately, I am only out of bounds for about ten seconds at a time or so, which isn't really long enough to stop and smell the roses.

[Lagster]

If anything, I've recently been running a non-elited Jagermech-A and get roughly double the damage of my elited Treb. For 15 tons more.

Got me thinking that maybe the issue here is really a lack of "medium weight" weapons. Weapons are either very light or very heavy, means if you don't have the weight to load up on the heavy 5+ ton guns, you're stuck with the light 1-2 ton guns. And due to hardpoint limitations, most mediums end up with a loadout that isn't much different from a light.

E.g.: My Treb is forced to go 3 mlas and 3 streaks because it only has 3 laser points and 3 missile points, which really isn't a lot more dangerous than my Raven which is on 3mlas and 2 streaks. There's no real solution to this other than letting mediums boat the light weapons to make them deadlier than lights, or making non-canon medium weight weapons.

[oldradagast]

IMHO, the real issue with Mediums is that 2 of the chassis are vastly oversized.

Place a Centurion or a Trebuchet next to a Highlander or Atlas and marvel at how they are clearly 70+ ton heavy mechs, or maybe even small assault mechs... oh, wait - they are actually 50 ton mediums?! It really got to me one match when i was watching a Centurion follow an Awesome - a mech that nobody can claim is undersized for its weight - and the darn Centurion was about as big in nearly every dimension and *might* have been a hair taller.

These badly oversized profiles mean that these mediums are easier to hit and draw more fire than they should, and their medium mech level armor simply can't handle that level of beating.

You may notice that Hunchbacks - a properly scaled medium mech - still see some play in many matches, while the oversized Centurions and Trebuchets are noticeably more rare, despite being comparable on paper. Blackjacks are also properly sized, but that chassis has difficulty mounting a meaningful payload compared to other sturdier mediums, hence they aren't that common either.

If the Centurion and Trebuchet were properly sized, they'd see more play.Other than that, some sort of tonnage limits and reduction in the effectiveness of high-damage, high convergence alpha strikes would make a lot of lighter mechs more viable.

Lagster also raises a good point about how the weapon sizes in the game - admittedly derived from Battletech, so we can't blame PGI for this - come almost entirely in small or huge sizes.

- Most autocannons start at heavy and go up from there, making more than 1 ballistic weapon on anything under a Heavy Mech difficult to implement. Machine guns are the only light ballistic weapon, but their effectiveness is debatable.
- Energy weapons go from 1 ton to 5, showing a similar problem, unless you want 1 Large Laser or a pile of Medium lasers, same as a light mech.
- SRM's can work, but they got nerfed, and LRM's really need boating to be effective.

This all makes it harder for mediums to have proper payloads.

Edited by oldradagast, 16 June 2013 - 06:56 AM.

[Strum Wealh]

Well, we know the upper limit of the size of the current 'Mechs - we have confirmation from the Devs that the MWO Atlas is 18 meters tall.

"To clarify, the Atlas is 18m and the technician is 1.9m." - Dennis de Koning (Feb. 29, 2012)

A few months ago, someone went into the game files and created an actual scale of the 'Mechs in-game at the time (that is, just after the release of the Trebuchet).

Unfortunately, whoever made them used ImageShack.us to host the images, and all that seems to be left is a couple of small previews that come up through Google Search - and they are far too small to actually read any of the information contained therein (and apparently can't be posted to the forum due to the image extension, either).

As previously noted in this thread, the canonical Centurion would be between 10 and 11 meters tall, versus the 14 meters of the canonical Atlas.
With the MWO Atlas being scaled up to 18 meters, the MWO Centurion would be expected to be on the order of 12-13 meters tall (if height is being multiplied by a 18/14 (that is, 1.29x) ratio) or approximately 13-14 meters tall (if it's simply a matter of "add 3 meters to the original height").

Would it be okay for someone to go in and get the height settings for the in-game models, and post them here?