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Sorry Roland but I disagree. if heat was a more significant factor on much lower dmg shots and people where forced to link fire rather than alpha strike dmg would naturally spread much more and alphas would have a place timing wise while coming at the heavy cost of extra heat.
No man, you are wrong. Like I said, my statements aren't pulled from thin air. They've proven themselves over a period of over a decade of play in mechwarrior.
Your suggestions about heat are, again, just dancing around the real issue. You're trying to make some kind of complex heat management system to indirectly address the convergence issue.
And it will fail, because it will just result in folks moving to low heat, high alpha builds... Like the gauss-cat which dominated so much in the closed beta, when PPC's were much hotter. Gauss isn't affected by heat at all. So what are you gonna do then? Make some ADDITIONAL rule to specifically deal with that build? You're going to be chasing your tail forever, trying to make all of these individual patchwork fixes to deal with all of the builds that people continue to make, in order to optimize around the benefit of high alphas.
If you want to deal with the issues resulting from convergence, THEN DEAL WITH CONVERGENCE. Don't keep making a bunch of half-assed solutions that dance around the periphery of the problem.
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we could introduce a convergence system, but then we take away from pilot aiming & skill, something I am not in favour of. id much prefer heavier heat penalties, lower overall heatcap, and a limit of 20 dmg per single shot OR take a heat penalty when firing more dmg out at once.
Again, you are mistaken. There are ways to implement a system which does not ammount to a big random number generator and dice rolling. Certainly, it won't let you just fire 10 weapons and have them all converge on the same point, but that is not the same as limiting pilot skill. It is merely creating a framework of piloting rules that the player must understand and worth within.
And really, that's exactly what you are proposing... only you are doing it via complex, arbitrary rules that are designed around trying to patch away the specific builds that people are using today. Thus, your rules are going to fail as soon as new weapons or mech configurations come into existence (which they will).
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While excessive convergence is most certainly one of the causes resulting in the alpha meta we have today I don't think it's the most significant one.
Well, it is. And everyone who has played prior mechwarrior titles can attest to it.
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The real issue, as I and many others have been posting since closed beta is that the current crit slot system is far too free form. What's needed (as I repeat myself yet again) is a more restrictive iteration of the system that sets max size values to each weapon hardpoint based upon mech and variant...
Even in MW4, with a more limiting hardpoint system (or at least, limited in different ways), you had the exact same issues.
Hell, even if you removed ALL customization, what will you see then? People will just gravitate to the stock mechs WHICH BOAT WEAPONS. You'll just see folks driving things like the Hunchback 4P.
Again, you are making the mistake of dancing around the real issue...and your proposed fixes will fail because of it. You will be stuck in a neverending cycle of trying to hit a moving target. You'll patch away one flavor of the month build, and it'll just be replaced by another build focused on maximizing its alpha strike within the new constraints you have created.
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convergence is all fine and good, but this still doesnt change the fire shutdown fire shutdown meta of high heat alpha builds.
You aren't thinking things through.
If convergence isn't perfect, then the "fire-shutdown-fire" meta will change. Why? Because it will no longer be effective. You'll be spreading your fire all over the target, instead of drilling through a single panel.
Again, I am perfectly content to play with the high-alpha meta we have now... It's not new to me. But I don't bury my head in the sand and pretend that it doesn't exist, like so many other folks apparently do.
This crap is well understood by all of the advanced players in this community. Some of them like it, and don't want to really draw attention to it, because they don't want it to change. And I can understand that... kind of a "the devil you know" type of deal, because they certainly could turn it into something worse. But there are a ton of folks here who are offering suggestions, seemingly without even understanding what the core issues are. If you don't understand that the convergence system is at the root of all of the metagame issues you are seeing, then your solutions are going to fail.