PPC
Gauss Rifle
AC20
Now, the reason I am defining this triangle is that these weapons were all considered underpowered during closed beta, but have since changed because of the increase in the availability of good weapon slots on some of the newer mechs. The Gauss Rifle got good because people figured out that mounting two of them on a K2 would give you a 3 shot kill on an Atlas, the AC/20 jumped up there because people figured out that the same setup would give you a 2 shot kill on an Atlas, and the PPC got there because people figured out that the PPC could do the 2 shot (or even a 1 shot sometimes) at better range if you had 6 of them on a Stalker. While other weapons have been considered OP at times, these are the 3 that have contributed to the High Alpha problem.
So, what's the point of defining this? Well, the fact that all three of these guns have the same drawback: A low fire rate. While two of them have high heat generation and one of them has the possibility of an explosion, the common factor is that all of these guns are dependent on putting one huge alpha strike on a pinpoint location once every 5 seconds or so. The solution? It's not to weaken the guns or to weaken the size of the alpha, because the former will weaken the utility of the weapons used alone and force people to boat them and the latter will just force people to min/max even more.
The solution?
#1: Give the autocannon family, SRMs and machineguns a few new tricks: All of them should break weapon convergence when they hit a target (if you get shot in the shoulder, something tells me you won't be able to keep your gun pointed at the guy who shot you!) and the larger autocannons (AC10, LBX 10, AC20) should actually throw the target's torso off to one side if you hit in the side torso, and light mechs should get completely blown off their feet if they get hit by an AC/20. This should only work on the Autocannon Family, SRMs and MG's because lasers work by burning through a location, not imparting a massive force on a location, and Gauss Shells are meant to go straight through the target, not embed themselves in it. LRMs are also not going to help here because they come down on the target, meaning all of their force is directed straight down.
Clarification: This would only work within optimal range, aka within the range where your weapon lights up green. That way it wouldn't help snipers nearly as much as it helps brawlers, and it would contribute to the real point of such a change, which is limiting the effectiveness of weapons like the PPC that can plow most players at range once the distance has been closed.
#2:
This will do a few things for the meta: People will actually run the AC/10, for starters, because the higher fire rate will make it possible to lock down larger mechs from around 500 meters or so and make it possible for a medium or heavy to skirmish at medium range with an assault, without increasing the one alpha lethality of these smaller mechs because it won't knock an Atlas completely off target if you hit in the dead center. This will also make massed machine guns a reality, because being able to consistently prevent your opponent from sniping off a body part with 2 AC/20's or 6 PPC's
The important thing is that people will stop running high alpha, one gun cheese builds because they won't work anymore. The 6 PPC Stalker wouldn't function if it couldn't put more than 2 of its PPC's into one location on a consistent basis, the 2 Gauss Rifle anything build would drop off the face of the earth if they couldn't fire when MG's are hitting them, and the AC/20 would get dominated by the AC/10 because of its lower fire rate.
For anyone that doubts whether something like this is valid in canon, watch this video, in particular the nova cat and the mad dog (vulture, for the newcomers).
http://youtu.be/aHGfIyYyIuY?t=3m36s
Then watch this video, and pay attention to when the Thor is able to cap our friendly Timber Wolf (Mad Cat)...
http://youtu.be/BNLBj8IyVN0?t=45s
This is a part of Mechwarrior and Battletech. Half of the fight is keeping your opponent's guns off of your mech, and being able to sacrifice lethality on your end to cut lethality on the opponent's end will go a long way towards solving the balance problem.
Edit: Lasers will be affected heavily by this change, so they'd all need some sort of buff. Most likely a DPS buff over duration, since this change would make holding a laser on target pretty difficult. Or the damage could be shifted to the front end of the beam, so that most of the damage is dealt on the initial hit.
Quoteception: More good stuff, same basic idea. The part about hitting a target dead center slowing them down makes a ton of sense. Thanks Miekael.
Miekael, on 26 June 2013 - 11:22 AM, said:
It doesn't have to be drastic, but just having heavy ballistics, and even SRMs throw off aim to enemies, or say if you hit dead center cause the enemy to slow down a few KPH and have to rebuild the acceleration momentum, could be good quirks introduced to gameplay to make it feel like you are in these three story tall walking death machines. Although with this idea, it would work better if convergence was actually a factor in the game, it could be less rock the mech and more restart the convergence of weapons for pinpoint strike. As for energy weapons, if convergence was ever tweaked, I would let one of their advantages to be having better/faster convergence over ballistics.
TL/DR: The fix isn't to make every gun perfectly balanced because that will just encourage min/maxing and boating, because people will pick one gun and use it exclusively. The fix is to reward players that take varied loadouts by allowing them to stop their opponents from being able to use their cheese effectively, and the suggestions I gave above will do just that.
Edited by TheBossHammer, 26 June 2013 - 12:39 PM.