Soooo much QQ in here people losing their iWin buttons... Ermagherd now you actually have to try!
You do realize that a huge number of the posts I see in here are people complaining about the system not because it killed their alpha strike builds, but because it DIDN'T, and that it makes the game HARDER FOR NEW PLAYERS?
The posting situation literally the exact opposite of what you're claiming. We don't like this system because its convoluted and yet still doesn't fix the big issues. It also makes a difficult to learn game even harder to learn for new players.
The one change in this patch that really annoys me is the almost complete rollback of the JJ shake. I rewarded PGI with real money as thanks for the JJ shake change and now it is almost gone and poptarts are becoming more prevalent again. My hope that PGI will make MWO a success as a true MW title continues to rob me of my common sense as I have regretted multiple decisions along this path before. It's like having a psycho but hot girlfriend that you keep hoping will become normal so you keep investing time and money...
I should note: The JJ shake change is purely cosmetic. JJing still screws with your aim just as much as it did before, it's just less visually annoying.
I rewarded PGI with real money as thanks for the JJ shake change and now it is almost gone and poptarts are becoming more prevalent again.
Actually, with the old JJ shake the screen bounced obscenely but I still had amazing aim with my AC/2s and lasers. Now, the shake is very subtle but I can't aim for jack with those same weapons as they are all over the place. Insanely unrealistically so.
But back on topic... The penalty scale works to a point.
It is attacking my 0.25 millisecond 3 AC/2 macro which was made to give myself a nice, smooth, constant firing rate to allow me to imagine my 18 ton AC/2s to be an 8 ton multi-shot AC/5 variant. Like an oversized, slow firing machine gun. The penalty also attacks firing 3 AC/2s firing at the same time without a macro (as one inexplicably slows down), and it even attacks them in regular chainfire, spiking heat up as much as 15% for a single shot. I don't remember anything being said about punishing AC/2s. I mean what else can a 4G hunchback have? Bad enough our aim always favors the Northward direction instead of the center of our crosshairs.
It's punishing us for deliberately spreading our damage and straying from the pinpoint convergence heavy hitters. Should we not be encouraged to spread our damage?
Aside from that... this penalty thing has done its job except in the case of regular PPCs, where 4 PPCs simply aren't punished much at all. However standard heatsink users suffer even more with penalties and the incredible discrepancy between standard and double heatsinks.
With 10 true DHS and 8 1.4 DHS (18 total), versus 36 single heatsinks it's apparent that the 36 SHS should be superior (since 10*2 + 8*1.4 does not equal 18*2). However the not only is the dissipation rate slower for the SHS, but the threshold is lower too.
Having incredibly high thresholds was the source of our high alpha frequency and ultimately one of the two sources of abuse. This penalty system has bandaged it and it does work, but it doesn't fix the underlying cause. I thought Russ said the patient approach is to identify the cause and fix that. Just for the sake of it, set the threshold to 30, turn off the penalty system, and set DHS to 2.0 cooling. Let ~nothing~ increase your threshold for any reason, use mechs without the threshold and cool run pilot efficiencies. Now try firing lots of PPCs. Try using AC/20s frequently. Try spamming LRMs, SRMs, etc.
There may still be a use in the penalty system for the AC/20s, but aside from that nothing else should genuinely need it. It'd be difficult to alpha strike anything at all with a threshold fix. It'd be a lot less complicated. It'd be easier to explain. There would not need to be yet another chart to study.
It's a complicated fix to a very simple problem, and the heat penalties address the symptom rather than the cause.
Less focused damage, but overall damage can still be achieved. I saw a fellow merc doing 700 + dmg with a 4 PPC stalker. Overall, gameplay has changed. I've seen less "nerfed" builds, more people running Large lasers, instead of PPCs, Gauss, and i've seen more SRMs.
I agree with most of that, the only think I would say is to set both DHS and SHS to a threshold value of 1.0, or perhaps 0.9* to cope with pilot skill additions. (You could do the same with heatsinks, make the DHS 1.9 dissipation)
The devs said they were looking for a way to make SHS useful, well now there is, you can run a lot of SHS and have a higher cap and terrible dissipation, or DHS with a lower cap and good dissipation.
Bingo, both are useful, heat issues are solved, massive alphas are gone, the convoluted heat cap system can go in the bin where it belongs - and snipers can still use SHS for a higher heat cap to fire a few PPC's off, but get punished for it by being incredibly vulnerable to brawlers and lights.
And SHS's are a viable choice instead of DHS being an instant, immediate upgrade for any mech.
*The actual numbers will probably need to be lower, just an example.
Of course, this can't be viable as I'm apparently a basement dweller and hence must be wrong.
I agree with most of that, the only think I would say is to set both DHS and SHS to a threshold value of 1.0, or perhaps 0.9* to cope with pilot skill additions. (You could do the same with heatsinks, make the DHS 1.9 dissipation)
The devs said they were looking for a way to make SHS useful, well now there is, you can run a lot of SHS and have a higher cap and terrible dissipation, or DHS with a lower cap and good dissipation.
Bingo, both are useful, heat issues are solved, massive alphas are gone, the convoluted heat cap system can go in the bin where it belongs - and snipers can still use SHS for a higher heat cap to fire a few PPC's off, but get punished for it by being incredibly vulnerable to brawlers and lights.
And SHS's are a viable choice instead of DHS being an instant, immediate upgrade for any mech.
*The actual numbers will probably need to be lower, just an example.
Of course, this can't be viable as I'm apparently a basement dweller and hence must be wrong.
The Basement Dweller seems to be right and he should be upgrade to half a basement dweller!
You do realize that a huge number of the posts I see in here are people complaining about the system not because it killed their alpha strike builds, but because it DIDN'T, and that it makes the game HARDER FOR NEW PLAYERS?
The posting situation literally the exact opposite of what you're claiming. We don't like this system because its convoluted and yet still doesn't fix the big issues. It also makes a difficult to learn game even harder to learn for new players.
It's not nearly as convoluted as people are making it out to be. Right now new players might not understand it, but I would imagine it will be part of the tutorial in ui 2.0 which should fix that. At the same time it's not like the game is fully released and on steam w/ 3rd person view for everyone and anyone who knows nothing about mechwarrior to try out... Most likely anyone that's playing atm did so purposely and is familiar with the forums\patch notes.
The problem is still the fact that people can put a lot of damage on CT without much of it hitting anywhere else. When you look at what weapons are the worst for that, it's AC/20 and PPCs. The solution? Make them spread their damage. Koniving has a lot of great ideas about pretty much everything, including a suggestion that the AC/20 be replaced with one or more burst-fire variants that do the same damage but spread it out over time (supported by the lore), and the PPCs just getting their damage spread around as splash (supported by the visual effects). The Gauss rifle would remain unchanged; it is extremely heavy, very few mechs can mount more than 2, it needs ammo for additional slots and weight, and it adds a weakpoint that can do heavy damage to your own mech when destroyed.
From what I've heard, PGI is working on fixing splash damage since their previous implementation was borked but ended up being too tied into other systems to easily change it. No word on burst-fire auto cannons.
It's not nearly as convoluted as people are making it out to be.
It's convoluted because there's no easy rule it sticks to that applies to all weapons, you just have to rote learn which weapons the devs didn't like this month.
It's been 3 days since the patch. Do we still know how heat scale works, any word from PGI? I mean how much extra heat does 3rd and 4th PPC give, what is the formula where this mystic scale multiplier is embedded?
The heat system NEEDS to be hit with a hammer. 30 heat cap, and possibly add in heat penalties.
Lets take a look at what would happen if we had 10 heat PPCs and 15 heat ERPPCs with a flat, unmoving 30 heat cap:
Take the 2 PPC, 1 Gauss build that currently returned to dominate the metagame thanks to PGI's heat system. If we had 30 as our heat cap, and the newer heat values, you could fire twice before having to wait for a significant period of time.
First fire generates 21 heat. Lets assume you have 15 DHS (a common amount). You have 20 + (1.4 * 5) dissipation per 10, or 2.7 dissipation per second. In order to dump 12 heat (the amount you'd need to lose to fire immedietely again and reach your heat cap), it would take 4.44 seconds (12/2.7). So you have to wait almost half a second for another full alpha strike (After your weapons have recycled, that is).
Okay, now you're at exactly 30 heat. You have to wait to dump 21 heat again to be able to alpha strike. That means you need to wait for 7.77 seconds (21/2.7) just to alpha strike again. Keep in mind that 4 seconds of that is recycle time, so you effectively must wait for 3.77 seconds. To dump all of the 30 heat, it would take 11.11 seconds.
If you went the much more common 2 ERPPC/1 Guass build, those numbers obviously get worse at 15 heat. You can't even alpha strike with that build without mech efficiencies to increase your heat cap. Firing even a single ERPPC at 15 DHS, you'd need to wait 5.55 just to go back to 0 heat, meaning to stay totally cool, you'd have to wait 1.55 seconds after your ERPPC recycled to fire it again, and that's the only weapon you can fire (unless you're also shooting a Gauss rifle off). So 2 ERPPC / 1 Gauss would effectively be killed, because the only way it would work is to chain fire, or to fire one gauss + 1 ERPPC at once, then wait for a second and fire your ERPPC.
Would you look at that? The game encourages (or in this case, forces) you to stagger your weapons, not because of an arbitrary number, but because you MUST play in the heat system, and there is no silly weapon combination you can use that will get you out of it.
The system is also more new user friendly because it can be straight up told to them. "Your heat cap is 30. SHS dissipate 1 heat. DHS dissipate 2 in engine, 1.4 out" and that's all they'd need to know. Nothing about "Oh, go check this table PGI decided to stick numbers on. You can't have X of this weapon, but hey, remove the other and put Y weapon and its effectively the same thing!"
As an added benefit, this system slows the game down a bit more, because people actually have to WAIT for their alpha strikes if they want to do them.
Off topic, but I won't be happy until they fix LRMs. Streaks need a damage buff too. They're just about worthless. I hit a cicada yesterday with 8 alphas of 6 streaks. That's equivalent to 16 SRM 6!!! I couldn't kill it. This game still has a long way to go.
While spacing weapons is a good idea, and the heat penalty system forces this though it actually fails in some regards...
Would a simpler method not have simply been to remove the fact that our maximum heat threshold increases with every heatsink we install?
-----------------------------
I know what you're thinking, "oh god another person quoting tabletop." Deal with it.
Tabletop's threshold standard is 30 points. A turn is 10 seconds. 1 ER PPC in TT is 15 heat. 6 ER PPCs fired one at a time over 10 seconds is able to be sunk, it's true, and thus you can actually do that in tabletop. In MWO with 10 standard heatsinks if you space out your 6 ER PPCs, you can make it easily within 80 to 90% heat so long as you fire 1 PPC every 1.66 seconds. But 6 ER PPCs fired at the same time in tabletop is 90 heat and instant death.
Even in MWO, an ER PPC is 11 heat. How many could you fire at the same time with a threshold of 30? The answer is 3 fired together from 0 heat will you shut down. How many standard PPCs? At 8 heat each, 4 standard PPCs from zero heat and an instant shutdown. What about lasers? 5 large lasers at 7 heat each would cause a shutdown when fired at the same time. 8 medium lasers would cause an instant shutdown.
Twin AC/20? Yes you can still use that without an issue. Though the penalty has benefited us here. AC/2 spam? The amount of time you can safely spam rapid AC/2s would be significantly reduced.
(AC spam.)
Watch that spam time!
Just to throw it in there, AC/2s and AC/5s generate 1 heat each. Within a 2 second window I make 12 shots, 4 of the AC/5s and 8 of them AC/2s. That's 12 points of heat generated for 36 points of damage every two seconds. Now watch how long I can fire non-stop before I overheat. o.O;
------------------------
What other benefits would fixing the threshold have given us?
Well first off the huge discrepancy of standard heatsinks would be gone. 10 Engine 2.0 DHS + 8 1.4 DHS (18 total) should have less efficiency than 18 true DHS, which is 36 SHS. Therefore, 36 SHS should be superior. But it's not. Yes, the 36 single heatsinks cool faster. But the heat percentage with the same weapon loadout fired at once was lower with the DHS than with the SHS. With faster cooling the 36 SHS should also have the lower heat percentage generated. Instead the DHS received that, meaning 18 DHS have a higher threshold than twice that number of SHS.
Mathematically, 2 times 18 is 36. 2 * 10 + 8 * 1.4 = 31.2, and therefore regardless of how the threshold multiplier works 36 SHS should be superior. They are inferior and leave you with a lower threshold. Thus, it's broken.
Fixing the threshold would make SHS and DHS equal in how much you can alpha. If 3 ER PPCs shut you down with DHS, 3 ER PPCs shut you down with SHS. The only difference -- ever -- should be how fast you cool with the DHS. And if you have 10 DHS, 20 SHS should give you identical cooling and no change in threshold.
In MWO's current system, the difference is how fast you cool and how much you can alpha strike. With double your number of DHS in SHS, you will never be able to alpha strike as much even though you cool faster with that number of SHS. That just is not fair. 1x DHS should = 2x SHS. But currently 2x SHS cools faster than 1x DHS, but 1x DHS allows more alpha heat than 2x SHS. Yes. 1x DHS allows almost as many alphas than 2.3x SHS.
Tests before the penalty system suggested thresholds for 18 DHS to be in the 90s, and 22 to be around 110. Then there's a 20% threshold increase for having an elite mech (Heat containment = Threshold + 10%. *2 for elite) and a 14% increase in cooling rate for Cool Run (Cooling rate + 7% * 2 for elite). That brings the 22 DHS threshold into the 130's. That's an alpha strike of 12 ER PPCs fired at the same time to hit 100%. A few patches back it required approximately 300% to guarantee your own destruction. That's over 390 threshold. That's 35 ER PPCs fired at the same time. Almost 49 standard PPCs fired at the same time.
Proof? Keep in mind this mech has 12 or 13 DHS. Since 10 PPCs with lots of cooling brings me to shutdown, that means at the very minimum I have a threshold of 80. Though clearly with frozen city and I had to wait about 2 seconds for each PPC to reload, and a macro spams them in a rapid chainfire, there's a lot of cooling time there which means if I were on forest colony (the happy middle ground in ambient temperatures) my threshold would probably still be higher than 80. But let's just say it was 80 for the sake of argument. So if my threshold is 80, 300% of that is 240 heat. Now. I pump out 30 PPCs before I die. At 8 heat each, 30 PPCs comes out to...240 heat. Hm. Isn't that what I just said 300% of 80 is?
Feel free to check the math in that vid.
Now we get damage at 100%. Great. We die instantly somewhere between 150% and 200%. Cool. But the fact is our thresholds are that insanely high unless you've got standard heatsinks, which may as well be removed from the game if they won't fix the threshold issue.
TL; DR
Our heat thresholds are borked, and the penalty system is a band-aid. While it kind of works, it doesn't actually fix the core problem. Like medication it treats the symptoms instead of curing the disease.
Someone who thought as PGI did, on 18 July 2013 - 09:03 PM, said:
The TT threshold is not 30 points. it is based on the number of heat sinks you have. Once you go past it then you are overheating which in this game is automatic shutdown and damage instead of penalties. They added 30 points to every mech on top of the heat sinks which I believe was a mistake because it raises the amount of weapons that can be fired before you overheat. Take away those 30 and increase dissapation you shoud see a few less PPC boats as most would overheat in one Alpha.
Person in response to someone who thought as PGI did, on 18 July 2013 - 09:09 PM, said:
Also, you are incorrect. Tabletop 10 second uses an 'assumed' 10 second round and abstracts out further penalties, creating this illusion. In Solaris, the truest to the second version of a battletech fight, you go over 30 heat, you shut down, and it takes 10 seconds to cool while you can act every 2.5 seconds.
Koniving, on 18 July 2013 - 09:10 PM, said:
On Megamek, whether I have 10 standard heatsinks or 22 DHS, I get 30 threshold of unsunken heat. Then per turn x number of heat is sunk. In a turn there is 10 seconds. It's the same as sitting in MWO for 10 seconds waiting for your heat to cool off. 18 DHS "sinks" 60 or so heat within 10 seconds. Anything it cannot sink within 10 seconds goes into "excess heat," or unsunken heat, and the overall "excess heat" built up is limited to 30 points of threshold. To even reach 26 of 30 heat has risks such as the pilot losing consciousness, slowed movement, loss of balance, poor aim, etc.
That means you have a 30 heat alpha strike threshold. Regardless of heatsinks. The only thing heatsinks change is how much heat you can sink within 10 seconds. Also note that in tabletop, you cannot truly alpha strike. You can only queue all your weapons to shoot within your turn, which are then spaced out over 10 seconds.
The reason for TT's random aim is it accounts for the fact that you just moved, your target just moved, and you fired, and all of this is done within 10 seconds, at the same time. Thus you're walking and shooting at a target that is walking and likely also shooting back at you. Thus, it tries to account for all of that with a random hit and miss system.
Someone who once thought as PGI did and now sees the light!, on 18 July 2013 - 10:20 PM, said:
Ok I think I get what they are saying. I always looked at heat sinks like they added to the heat scale and if I went over that I started overheating (30 point heat scale). Though what happens in TT is you track that heat and at the end of the turn before applying the heat to the 30 point heat scale you subtract the dissapation from the heat sinks. Either way it works the same on TT. In that regard then all mechs in MW:O should have a 30 heat cap and no more, and heat sinks should dissapate faster. Which would also mean that any alpha over 30 heat should shut you down.
Koniving, on 19 July 2013 - 08:39 AM, said:
Now you got it! If only if PGI could get it.
Orzorn, on 19 July 2013 - 08:40 AM, said:
As always Koniving, excellent post which says essentially the same thing I've been saying.
Besides the 15 people that liked the patch (http://mwomercs.com/...23-16-jul-2013/), pretty much nobody like the changes. Hopefully that will register with PGI.
Besides the 15 people that liked the patch (http://mwomercs.com/...23-16-jul-2013/), pretty much nobody like the changes. Hopefully that will register with PGI.
Sad. It appears as if the fans of Honey Boo Boo and Jersey Shore have achieved significant penetration into the player base of MWO. Of course, the question doesn't really ask the right question. It asked about the perceived *effect* of the heat scale system, not the system itself....of course people want "less boating". If you asked them, "do you like the new heat scale system" you would likely get a different answer. At least I would hope so.
That poll says they pissed off half their community.
But, the question is, is it the same half that was already pissed before the patch, or a different half?
DeaconW, on 19 July 2013 - 04:21 PM, said:
Sad. It appears as if the fans of Honey Boo Boo and Jersey Shore have achieved significant penetration into the player base of MWO. Of course, the question doesn't really ask the right question. It asked about the perceived *effect* of the heat scale system, not the system itself....of course people want "less boating". If you asked them, "do you like the new heat scale system" you would likely get a different answer. At least I would hope so.
Well, unfortunately, that's the closest poll on the topic. Of course, you can start a new one. Are you up to it?
22
Razuko, on 18 July 2013 - 07:27 AM, said:
