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1. Heat system
Right now a mech with only the minimum required 10 engine double heat sinks and all pilot skills unlocked has a heat cap of 60. With 16 sinks the heat cap is at 70 and with 22 sinks at 80. What I propose is severely reducing this and making the heat cap independent of the amount of heat sinks. A base value of 40 would mean 48 with all the pilot skills unlocked. This would still allow you to alpha strike 4 ER PPC's or 6 large lasers or 9 medium lasers but that would get you very close to the cap.
Now to balance this out, heat dissipation should be doubled. Also remember that the current value of 0.1 heat per second is originally in line with weapons firing once per 10 seconds. In MWO weapons fire more than twice that fast so quicker dissipation is reasonable just for this. And remember, heat capacity is NOT raised with heat sinks in my proposition so sinks need to be more useful for dissipation.
So a single heat sink would be 0.2 dissipation per second.
IS doubles should be 0.3 for the 10 engine heat sinks. Extra heat sinks true doubles so 0.4.
Clan doubles (which take only 2 critical slots) would be same as singles for the 10 engine sinks but once again true doubles at 0.4 heat dissipated per second for the extra engine sinks and external sinks.
This would make both the Inner Sphere and Clan doubles usable depending on your build. If you don't need much sinks, IS doubles are better, but if you need lots of sinks, go for the Clan versions. Also note that mechs with only engine heat sinks wouldn't suffer as much from the above heat capacity change as would those with many external sinks. This is why it would be reasonable to make the external sinks better in dissipation that engine sinks. Otherwise cooler mechs would gain a huge buff compared to hotter mechs.
2. Ballistics
I'm not gonna get into numbers here but just lay out the main rules for regular AC's, Ultras and LBX-cannons.
Regular AC's should be the ones with greatest range. You wanna snipe with ballistics, get regular AC.
Ultras should be the dakkadakka so better ROF but at a cost of range. Also throw out the double-shot and jamming mechanics completely to make balancing easier and game less dependent on luck.
LBX AC's should be the ones that pack the best alpha punch per ton. They are already lighter than others so just make them able to use normal ammo. The balancing factor compared to regular AC's would be once again lesser range. Also make the scatter shot do 1.25 damage per pellet.
3. Lasers
The main problem in balancing normal lasers and pulse lasers is the difference in range. MPL and LPL suffer badly from short range while SPL actually has the same range as normal small laser.
So first of all increase the range of normal small laser from 90 to 135 meters. Now we have a universal rule of normal lasers having 50% more optimal range than pulse lasers.
Then apply a range multiplier of 3 to pulse lasers. This would mean that while their optimal range is less, they actually have the same max range as regular beam lasers. So pulse lasers would still be a bit gimbed in range, but not so much.
On top of that the difference in beam duration should be somewhat bigger to separate the pulse lasers more from beam lasers. This should naturally be balanced by heat as well as tonnage, but once again I'm not gonna get into specific numbers here. Maybe later...
4. PPC's
Drop the projectile speed of regular PPC from 2000 to 1500m/s.
Apply the 90 meter min range to ER PPC as well. Not a hard limit, mind you, but linear damage reduction closer than that.
5. SRM's
Buff the damage per missile to 2.
Set the heat values to 2, 4 and 6 for corresponding laucher sizes.
Set the cooldowns to 3, 3.5 and 4 for SRM2, 4 and 6.
So basically buff them up a bit generally but most importantly make it so that SRM2 is usable as well instead of everyone just using SRM6.
6. LRM's
Make them fire and forget. No need to keep looking at the enemy once the missiles are off.
Make the lock-on time significantly longer to balance out the buff above.
Dmg, flight speed, heat, rof... these here are the small things to be used to balance them out. My main point is making it harder to get a lock-on (right now it's almost instantaneous with TAG and Artemis) but once you get it, fire away and start doing something else instead of keeping the target. So a quite major change in the basic functionality of LRM's.
7. Artemis, TAG and NARC
NARC shouldn't be shot off so easily. Only TAG and NARC should reduce the lock-on time. They should also improve tracking but not make the missile formation smaller. Note that since LRM's would be fire and forget, it would be up to you if you wanna get better tracking with TAG after launching the missiles.
Artemis should just improve tracking and be the only equipment to get a smaller formation (for both LRM's and SRM's) and of course only when enemy is in sight. No lock-on bonus for Artemis. Notice that smaller grouping (=better coring) would be only possible with direct sight since TAG and NARC wouldn't help with this.
Also make Artemis' weight (and maybe size) dependent on launcher size so it would also be usable for launchers such as SRM2 and LRM5.
8. AMS
Make it shoot down a percentage of incoming missiles instead of a certain amount of missiles. This way it would be more useful against 3xLRM20 boats while not completely blocking a single LRM5 launcher. So basically instead of a targeting autocannon it would fire flak bursts.
9. ECM and BAP
I'm not gonna get into this now
They are actually pretty good now. Not the way I'd prefer, but more balanced than ever before.
10. Streaks, MG's and Flamers
Well, there's already a patch coming that will make Streak missiles hit not only Center Torso but other parts as well, so fine. MG's and Flamers still need love but I believe some further buffs were on the way as well. So no comment for now.
11. Weight class balance
Medium mechs should be shrinked down a bit. They are just too huge. Making them a smaller target to hit would improve them quite a bit and thus hopefully make mediums more attractive to more players.
12. Heat penalties
At 75% weapon recycle times and all maneuverability (max speed, acceleration, deceleration, leg twist, torso twist and jump jet power) suffer a penalty of 5%. At 100% this penalty is raised to 10% if pilot overrides shutdown.
At 125% heat you will start taking damage. No matter if you override the shutdown or not. If you alpha strike yourself to 150% heat it's gonna take time even in shutdown mode to lower the heat below 125%. Firstly the damage should be done to all extra heat sinks so they pop out. The required 10 engine sinks cannot be destroyed but once extra sinks are destroyed you start taking damage to internals (possible ammo explosions included).
If a pilot overrides shutdown and lingers long in the 100-125% range, the same damage effects as over 125 start taking place.
13. Soft hard point sizes
There should be two different sizes of weapons and weapon hard points. Small and large. But the limit in hard point size shouldn't be hardwired, you could work around it by paying a bit extra. This way free customization is not killed but we do get some more variety to mech variants, they represent better what they're designed for and boating and cheesy builds can be curbed a bit.
Whenever you put a large weapon to a small hard point, you have to pay 10% more tonnage rounded up to closest half ton. So a 5 ton weapon retrofitted to a too small hard point would weight 5.5 and a 7 ton weapon 8 tons. Basically you have to do some tinkering to make the weapon fit, some extra support structures and such.
Energy weapons: PPC's and Large lasers are large, the rest small.
Ballistics: Gauss and AC20 are large, AC10 should probably be considered small.
Missiles: LRM20 and LRM15 are large, even SRM6 should be small, I think.
Let's take STK-3F for instance. It would have large energy hard points in side torsi and in the arms one large and one small. Or maybe all in arms small? Well, let's go with one and one for now. So if you wanna go for 4 PPC's, the normal way would be two in the arms and two in the torso. If you wanna put them all to your arms, you gotta pay 2 extra tons.
The ballistic hard points in CPLT-K2 are small so if you wanna equip Gausses, they weight 16.5 tons each.
STK-5M could perhaps maintain large missile hard points in its arms but those in the torso are certainly small. So you cannot strap on 5 x LRM15 in that chassis without paying a bit extra.
Edited by arghmace, 17 June 2013 - 10:37 AM.
