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What is the problem? In short being able to link all the weapons you want at pin point accuracy and making sure to focus most ( sometime all) the damage to a single mech component. That right there is not balanced at all.
With this post i just want to split the 3 weapons type we have and give a solution to balance them without actually tweaking the damage value of these, i will also set the pros and the cons for each of them.
First step of balancing; movement vs precision
Currently in MWO mech are a 100% convergence/ accuracy system. This might explained by the advances technology in the targeting computer of the future but whatever, it should'nt be there in a competitive game.
Other game use a targeting mechanics simple but yet effective. The introduction of a shooting cone or accuracy icon is a must. Also having a penality for walking mechs and moving torso. A lot of players complains about the "boating", this is a good way to resolve the problem. Currently a sniper with 4 PPC's and effectively move from cover and in cover without having any accuracy penality, this is making things unbalanced so having the aiming penality while moving would give that sniper 2 options to make a shot; either stand still in the open until you reach your 100% and having the risk to get shot while in the open, or or move out of cover and shoot while the reticle is still aiming and have a chance to miss your shot. That right there is fixing the long range boaters since they have choices to make now, safety vs accuracy.
The second change i would like to see is not a heat nerf ( i mean WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!) but weapon balance.
Energy; these are the ones causing most of the tumult out there. To give you an idea of the change i'm thinking its better to give an example. When i recharge my phone on my computer, it usualy takes 3 hours to get full charge but when i connect my phone, ipod, a portable harddrive and a USB fan ( why not?!) my phone take sometime up to 5 hours to fully recharge.
For energy it should be the same, a energy weapon with 1 second cooldown should recharge in 1 second. If we give it 20% recharge penality, firing 2 of these would take 1,4 second to reload with the 20% reload penalty applied to both. Fire 4 of them, 1,8 total reload time for all of them, this wont stop you from loading up 4 PPc's or 4 LPL's and shoot them but using multiple of them at the same time logically drains more energy from the core so longer reload. This should apply to all energy weapons and not the type of energy weapons. Chain firing would get the same treatment since this system would apply the penalties on the currently recharging weapons.
Note: Since lasers do their damage over a brief period of time, PPC and ERPPc should have a 0,5 second firing delay like the SRM to account for their instaneous damage.
Ballistics; we all know recoil but the following i've seen in in only 1 game and i found it realistically brilliant. Shooting a canon on 1 side creates recoil, that recoil rotates your mech in that direction, the greater the caliber the bigger the recoil. Shooting both arms with a AC/20 for instance should counter each others recoil ,however since your torso wont rotate left or right it would lean backward instead, so shooting these canons at once would raise your torso and give you a aiming penalty with the aiming system stated above. This system would work with all canons, continuous firing would slowly rotate or elevate your torso and giving a accuracy penalty at the same time. Once again players would have the choice on how to play with he physics of his mech, good players might turn this to their advantages (some will mostly do) but everyone would be on the same level.
Just making a note here that SRM should work with the ballistic system stated above.
LRM: these were a bit tricky but after reflection here is a system to help balancing them.
LRM should always be able to shoot without lock, this is a solid fact and shoudl saty that way.
LRM should a progressive lock, instead of a 1 lock 1 launch like we have, the missiles should lock individually. With a LRM 15 for example and a lock time of 1,5 second you should be able to fire the whole salvo with homing capability.
Locking time of 0,5 seconds would make you launch the whole salvo but only 5 missiles with the homing capability. This lock system would scale with the lrm weapons in use (lrm 5/ 0,5 second, LRM 10/ 1second, LRM 20/ 2 seconds) and all LRM would lock at the same time. 2 LRM 15 mechs would shoot 30 missiles at 1,5 seconds.
Once again the player will have the choice to wait till the end and make sure to have its full potential damage or he could rush the shot with a percentage of what he could do.
So energy suffers from reload time, ballistics gets it on accuracy and missiles on overall damage. Stading still snipers with 100% accuracy have the risk of being shot back in the open while moving brawlers wont be able to pin point your components with the moving aim penality. Heat remains the same and everybody shoot each other happily (hmmm...).
I would like to get feedback, if you have question or would like to add some ideas feel free to leave a comment.
I hope PGI team will take a look at this and i am giving them the permission to use any of the ideas and/or concepts above and change the values or numbers of anything they could see on this post.
I did this because i love and support this game and if this help resolve the disatisfaction on the forum then i m am gladly putting time into it. We just want to play the way we want no?
Edited by Bacl, 29 July 2013 - 10:08 AM.
