Balance in MWO has long been a contentious subject, on that is difficult to really look at clearly because of the number of factors that interact with each other. There is no one issue, or one single bullet fix, that can patch over the issues currently afflicting the game. It’s a complex integrated system, and there’s three main parts contributing to the current state of play.
Before I get into those three interlocking factors, I need to talk about weapons, and playstyles in a general sense.
What we generally have, are two (and a half, ish) sorts of weapon paradigms.
Weapons that are very efficient damage per ton, but with generally awful damage per heat. (Energy weapons)
Weapons with bad damage per ton, but excellent damage per heat. (Ballistics)
Weapons that fall into the middle ground, with a balance of both, with no extremes either way (Missiles)
There are variations inside the three categories (rapid fire ACs vs AC20s, etc), but Battletech starts with these three base sorts of weapons, and that’s where you need to start with the balance.
The different playstyles want different weapons:
Brawlers want weapons that are very efficient damage per heat- Generally once you are in a brawl, you aren’t able to disengage and spare time for cooling down, so you need to be able to keep up the most efficient damage for as long as possible.
Snipers want the most damage per ton, so they can front load the most damage possible. They generally always have an opportunity to back off and cool down, or rotate out with a friendly team mate.
Missiles fall into a mixed spot, with SRMs being invaluable for brawlers, allowing them to load up with decent damage per ton as well as damage per heat weapons, that are not as weight and size constrained as ballistics. They’re also essential for light mechs to be able to effectively engage heavier targets.
This is pretty simplistic, but that’s what a general overview of weapons should look like, and how they should work. Sooo, the current problems? Going down the list:
Mech health is generally far too low. Snipers rely on being able have enough heat capacity to burst enough weapons fire to critically damage an approaching brawler before their heat cap drastically cuts their DPS down.
For an ideal example, take the typical Highlander 732 with 3 PPC + gauss and 15 dhs, versus an AC20 + 3x SRM6 mech with 18 dhs. The highlander has a much higher peak DPS, almost double that of the brawling mech. However, it can sustain that level of damage for a much shorter time than the brawler can. If a fight managed to go on for 45 seconds, the brawling mech would pump out 500 damage compared to the sniping mech’s 350. Now, back in the golden age of SRMs, around November/December of last year, the brawling mech would have pumped out 780 damage vs the same 400 damage sniper mech.
This leads me to my next point:
All the brawling weapons are broken to unusability. SRMs, which are the bedrock staple of both brawlers and lights alike, are flat out nonfunctional in their needed role. Between hit detection and quite low damage, they just plain don’t work at all. See the above example for the difference in damage levels. That kind of difference between brawler damage over time and sniper damage over time was absolutely necessary to maintain a balance between weapons and playstyles.In addition to SRMs, the smaller ballistics need some serious weight and size reductions to fix the issues they have being useful on anything smaller than 65 tons.
PPCs should also get their speed buff rolled back, and their heat upped to 9 per shot. ERPPCs should keep the current projectile speed. They don’t really need anything other than that though, it’s the other broken weapons that need buffs.
Finally, the matchmaker. The interactions with the matchmaker and the game types just reinforce the existing problems. Since there is no tonnage matching right now, there’s no reason not to go 6 assault 2 fast mover- This also just happens to both almost require a sniper comp, as well as working best with a sniper comp.
The requirement is because, with 6 assaults, you’re going to be slow in general. You require the longer ranged weapons to exert the area control needed, since you can’t quickly reposition like a lighter force can.
The other half of the coin is that snipers work far better the heavier you are, because of their weapon choices- The ideal burst/sniper weapons are the ones that have the most damage per ton. Since their function relies on having enough tons to pack in enough of them for the highest burst, they really only work well on the heavier mechs. A more balanced 2/2/2/2 composition really just does not work out ideally with a heavy sniper composition, compared to 3/3/0/2, or even heavier groups. Anything lighter than 2/2/2/2 practically requires good brawlers, because it just plain does not have the critical mass of sniper burst power necessary to win.
tldr: It ends up being a self-reinforcing cycle of weapons, matchmaker, mech health, and the random map pool all contributing to there being only one viable choice of gameplay right now. However, ALL of it is solvable just with pure numbers tweaks. There is absolutely no need for extra complicated and unintuitive systems layered on top of the base gameplay in order to have a balanced game.
e:
Extra stuff for those that made it through this far- I didn't want to knock people out with any more of a wall of text than this already is.
Health: Along with increasing health in general (I do prefer a greater % increase for internals vs armor, mechs should spend more time alive but damaged and missing weapons), we also need something like Hardened or Modular armor to add real options to armoring a 'Mech. Right now, there's zero choice to armor. You max your head, torsos, and most of your arms (Depending if you have arm shields like atlases or cents, or useless arms like hunchbacks), and generally up to about 49-57 armor on legs. There's no choices involved, this is just what every good player does. Adding the ability to actually sacrifice weapons, engine, ammo, or heat in exchange for much more armor would make for actual choices, which is a good thing.
But what about Lights and Mediums?
The TT health scaling from lights to assaults is really, really out of whack, and translates poorly (Surprise) to MWO, because hitscan weapons exist, and we can aim. I mean, the Locust has a max of 24 armor + 12 internal health on the CT, if it is implemented as planned. It can be one shotted by, well.. Just about anything.
I'd totally want to see lights and mediums get their internal health scaled up a bit so that there's not so large a gap between the heaviest mechs and the lights. I don't think scaling armor is really possible at present- There is only one armor item, and it can only be set to one value for "Number of points per ton." But, internal HP can trivially be set for each individual mech. A hunchback's hunch could have double internals with one number change in the mech definition file.
Weapons: Even with more health, without a re-balance, pinpoint burst weapons will still reign supreme. To be balanced against rapid fire weapons, or DOTs like lasers, the pinpoint weapons need to do considerably less paper DPS. They've got so many advantages outside of DPS, that when you ALSO give them the highest dps (As it is now in MWO), well, the result is obvious. They're better brawling weapons than the actual brawling weapons. Also, ammo needs to go up, as a given with more health. Ballistics have long been handicapped by never getting the 200% ammo that missiles did way back in closed beta. UACs also need to copy MWLL's mechanics if they ever hope to be balanced, but that need is far off down the line.
Matchmaker wise, I can offer no suggestions there. I can identify the current issues with it, but I don't really have any ideas for a fix other than "We need tonnage limited CW drops" or other things that are on the horizon. That said, if the other stuff is fixed, odds are the matchmaker issues won't be as big a deal as they are now. It's only when all 4 of these factors are working together that things get as bad as we currently have them.
Edited by Gwaihir, 15 July 2013 - 06:19 PM.
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Lonestar1771, on 12 July 2013 - 07:29 AM, said:
