461 replies to this topic

[DeaconW]

I was pretty disappointed at first...but then I just switched my 4 PPC Stalker to chain fire, my Misery to 2xERPPC and Gauss, and my AC40 to 2xGauss and it just doesn't matter. I am now amused vice irritated at how useless the heat scaling change really is. I also stripped SSRM's from most of my builds. 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 think my answer to every change from now on will be "Meh, whatever". PGI has effectively killed a lot of my passion for the game as a MW IP. As long as I view it as a "stompy robot" casual distraction game, it can be fun. Can't wait for 3PV, powerups and respawn!

(in case anyone from IGP is reading this, my last sentence was sarcasm...)

Edited by DeaconW, 17 July 2013 - 10:14 PM.

[tigermaster]

just made a quick test with my jager double ac/20 on frozen city night

alpha strike = 34% heat
time to overheat = (4 alphas, 8 bullets) 16 seconds

single shot= 1% heat
time to overheat = never

even without a macro assign ac20a to left mouse and ac20b to right mouse

alternating the ac20 shots shooting the right one when cooldown of the first is at middle, so 2 seconds more or less (same dps basically after the initial shot) = heat increasing very slowly
time to cooldown = after 48 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 34% heat

this is why this heat penalty is useless, it solves dps on the initial shot but after 2 seconds you will be able to deal the same identical dps as before with almost no heat penalty.

now lets try to shoot the 2nd ac20 a bit earlier, lets say i shoot after 1 second, so i just need to aim the target for 1 second and have 3 seconds to move my mech= after 47 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 38% heat

so basically the penalty if you alternate shoots by 1 second is still minimal

lets try even faster now, 2nd shot after 0.5 seconds = after 46.5 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 41%

this heat penalty doesn't affect my dual ac20 buil much honestly, i just have to chainfire and i can shoot them with a slight delay and get almost no penalty.

probably also othe build can find an easy compromise that adds very low heat penalty and still be able to use their high alpha dps bursts.

also this heat penalty encourages the using of macros.

bad idea, really, remove this and find another solution, thanks.

in my hopinion there's no need for balance at all, but if you still want to listen to the whiners... well, find another solution.

why you don't enable weapon convergence limited only for arms like lots of people suggests?
this will limit also high alpha builds being effective only at very near distance and it will add more depth to the game and something you will have to take care of.
enabling this will also encourages the use of ligth mechs, as an assault mech will find very hard times to hit a light with all the weapons.

Edited by tigermaster, 17 July 2013 - 10:56 PM.

[WolvesX]

(1) The new heat penalty system is illocial.

(2) Its ANTI-physics.

(3) Its inconsistent.

(4) It hurts beginners and casual players.

( 5)Its horrible.

I don't have a problem with it personaly, if you want me the make groups out of my 4 PPC STK-F3, you can have it, I fire them with my macro then.

****, a macro itsn't even needed.

(1) If you fire 2 AC20 at once, which is not OP to begin with, because the weapon is already hot, 270m effective range and only 7 shots per ton, but ok. If you just make them into a group and fire them with chainfire... no problem, no heatpenalty, in fact you shake the enemy more than before.

BUT if you fire them at once you get a heat penalty of 48 HEAT. wow.

(2) I think I don't even need to explain this, but if someone comes up with such a system, well I have to:

If I light 3 candels instead of 2, are they vastly hotter than 2? NO. No sane man would even think it would work THIS way.

(3) 3 LRM15 = HEATPENALTY, 2 LRM15 + 3 LRM10 not... 4 PPC = HEAT PENALTY /// 2xPPC 0.5 secs 2xPPC = NO HEAT PENATLY. wow.

(4) New players / beginners / casuals don't read patch notes, they just OVERHEAT to death. Good players will not overheat after this patch, as it was before.

(5) Please consider balancing just the weapons, no additional stuff.

Its just complicated.

ALSO how do peps even know about the system?

It no where explained in game.

Please remove it from the game. Thank you.

Greetings.
Wolves

[Villz]

this whole "heat penalty" is bordering stupidity . Making more complex rules (to an already complex game especially for new players) as a band aid to the real problem. Weapon balancing.

All they had to do was increased heat dissapation but decrease total heat capacity so mechs got hotter faster but cooled quicker.

Change the heat values on a few OP weapons PPC - ERPPC - AC-20

Presto game balances itself out without the need for stupid complex rules that break cannon builds.....

Honestly lowering the heat capacity of mechs but increasing heat disapation would solve alot of this alpha bs.

Blowing up when firing 6 ppc's at once would be a tad of a deterent


**Please Like This Post If You Agree**

The way i see it right now sustained fights dont really exist due to low constant dps.
However with such large heat capacities on these big mechs (70-80 heatunits) the peak dps for the short period of time your running cold is insanely high in comparison.

This lends itself to stacking enough heatsinks to fire 2wice as u pop in and out of cover be it from a ridge in the case of a staker or around buildings in a highlander or even JJing.

Encouraging stagnant gameplay (IMO why the light and medium class's feel so useless now)

Lowering the heat capacity in heat units but buffing dissapation would bring the peak dps number and sustained dps alot closer.

IE. make doubles proper doubles? but not add to heat capacity? make engine size dictate the total capacity of heat on a mech. Add another layer of risk reward to XL engines!

Edited by Villz, 17 July 2013 - 11:13 PM.

[Foster Bondroff]

Aim64C, on 17 July 2013 - 08:19 PM, said:

This solution is going to turn into Wheel-Of-Stupid. Every two weeks, we're going to have a new list of weapons to add to the heat scaling list and remove from it. That will go on for a few months before they start playing craps with the heat scale values and the number of weapons that trigger heat scaling effects.

They've got a whole separate table (aside from the ones for damage values, range, heat, weight, weapon space, etc) of nonsense to spend another year trying to balance.

Not only is it a poor solution in terms of how it works. It's also a poor solution in that it creates even more problems and even more factors (for EVERY WEAPON) to be juggled in discussions of balance. They've already been all over the place with regards to damage values for weapons (just about everything has been nerfed and de-nerfed, supped up, then nerfed again) - now they've created another table of values to do the same thing.

What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall at the design meetings for this game... (or do those actually occur?)

Amen.

As you said they could have gotten the same result by modifying the existing values (weapons heat, DHS mechancis/values). But they decided to add another layer they have to balance.

As the past year showed it already was a huge issue for them to balance the existing system. And now it got even more complex. Which means in the future they will need even more manhours to balance this out with less chances of actually achieving it.

From all possible solutions discussed heat scaling (btw can remember it being discussed ever in the community) easily qualifies as one of the worst.

EDIT: When it comes to balance and especially with this new addition they remind me somehow of an inexperienced juggler.

A juggler that is barely able to juggle with 3 balls and still drops one of them regularly. But instead of working on his technic or changing the properties of the balls (making the smaller/larger, lighter/heavier..). The inexperienced juggler grabs a 4th balls and hopes for the best....

Edited by Foster Bondroff, 17 July 2013 - 11:32 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 17 July 2013 - 08:41 AM, said:

I understand your point. However, mech3 also had the possibility of building mechs with 0 heat problems. As far as I now understand the PGI design vision, this is not the case here, where outside the MG every mech will build heat and need more time to dissapate than perfect unless they run more light loadouts.

there is a problem here, and its dissapation. we've often cried for lowering the heatcap and bumping dissapation, and are nearing that point more now with the 100% heatcap.

Still, mech3 and all mech games before all had a huge problem - c6 dominates, regardless and despite no boating penalties. mech3 a dual ac 20 boat was always a smart choice.

even with mech4 hardpoints we saw the same issue like dual gauss madcat MK2.

so this leads us to the cries for "Stock" games in MWO.

but MWO is an MMO with CW. having a stock game mode would mess with what PGI is trying to build.

The solution now gives direct benefits to stock type players in easier heat management and much less risk of overheat on alpha strike, and it penalizes c6 mechs with obvious beenfits, the same benefits these c6 mechs saw in every other game that led everyone to play only them and everyone else to play stock mode only.

Is the solution perfect? dual ppc/gauss says no. dual gauss screams no.

but it's a start. games are better. loadouts are more varied. its a system that can work to fix the c6 only minmax mechs viable issue, while allowing for their use by top skilled pilots without allowing these builds to dominate the game.

The Hunchback 4P and the Awesome 8Q and 9M are stock mechs, and they are penalized by this system.

Stock mechs are never a real solution, because some stock mechs are well designed, others are not.

The problem since MW3 (and maybe MW2, too?) is pinpoint convergence coupled with group fire. With that, boating is always a great choice. You shoot once, deliver all your damage to one spot, and can spend a lot of time on torso twisting or manoeuvring.

The heat system with its high heat cap is a problem particular to MW:O, however, and makes hot energy weapon boating more effective, and it also makes balancing weapons harder. The idea behind ballistics vs energy wepaons is that energy weapons don't cost much weight on their own, but if you bring all the supporting heat sinks for them, you end up at weight values similar to a comparable ballistic weapon that produced less heat. But a high heat cap allows to not load up all the sinks normally required, which can make energy weapons suddenly more weight efficient.

[MustrumRidcully]

tigermaster, on 17 July 2013 - 04:20 PM, said:

you can easily bypass this limitation, manually or with a macro, doesn't matter, it's a bad idea cause can be avoided so no significant changes basically.

i have to test it but what about a macro that delay shots by 10ms ? no penalty and the shoot is almost an alpha strike.
no sense to me.

You mistake bypassing the heat penalty with bypassing the limitation.

The goal wasn't to make every Quad PPC Stalker explode from high heat and impossible to use.

The goal was to stop the Quad PPC Stalker from alpha-striking with pinpoint precision to deal 40 damage to a single spot and letting you spend the other 3.5 seconds between shots for torso twisting or moving into cover without any consequences. Now there are consequences, and you have a choice.

In that regard, the mechanic accomplished what it should accomplish.

It also happens to nerf stuff that didn't need nerfing, and it does it in a very arbitrary way, and makes a lot less sense once we get into other boating examples (like Double Gauss Rifles) that should be balanced without requiring heat tweaks.

[MustrumRidcully]

Quote

They implemented another system that will take years for them to play a weird balancing game with - with each new weapon being a complicated balancing act of not just damage, range, heat, etc - but also this new heat scaling idea.

Balancing? That part is actually easy. Just apply a hefty penalty that no one would be willing to take. Just look at the AC/20 for an example. They might not realize it, but that's where it will boil down to, because anything else would be impossible to balance, it would require them to quantify how much better x converged damage is compared to x chain-fired damage. But since everyone already optimizes his mechs, they will lack statistical data to really see the differences, and I don't see them figuring it out with spread sheets, because if they could do that, the game balance would have been much further than it already is.

[Distemper]

People need to look beyond the immediate effect to their builds.

This game needs new players and the simple fact is that the heat scaling system is unintuitive, illogical and overly complicated to the point where it will deter newcomers.

This is another backwards step for the future of MWO.

[Sephlock]

I've been going back and forth on this. At first, I had the same reaction as just about everyone else sane: I didn't like it- although I felt that at the very least the PPC heat changes might be okay (Not a good idea, but if that's the fix they want to implement, I can live with it).

Naturally, I didn't much care for the other heat nerfs... especially not the large laser nerfs.

Then I started rationalizing it all away and thought "well, I can just use LRM20s or maybe LRM10s... and I guess I don't NEED to have more than 2 large lasers.... ".

Then it occurred to me that a n00b is going to hop into this game, get massacred in a trial mech, pick one he likes, buy it, load more than 2 large lasers or ppcs on it, and explode the second he pulls the trigger.

Not good.

Not good at all.

[CrashieJ]

Roll back the Heat Penalties and then raise the heat back to Tabletop numbers. Done:

-PPCs become specialist sniper weapons that take skill to use

-Lasers now become the "Workhorse of the Inner Sphere" like it has ALWAYS BEEN AND ALWAYS SHOULD BE

-Pulses become the intermediaries with the best of both worlds (even though we still won't use them)

- Ballistics are now a more clear choice for shorter engagements while Lasers hold longer

- missiles seem alright... for once (except for streaks)


all this additive crap is getting on my nerves, have we tried SUBTRACTING something to get a desired result?
PGI LOLGIC

[DeaconW]

Sephlock, on 18 July 2013 - 02:51 AM, said:

Naturally, I didn't much care for the other heat nerfs... especially not the large laser nerfs.

Then I started rationalizing it all away and thought "well, I can just use LRM20s or maybe LRM10s... and I guess I don't NEED to have more than 2 large lasers.... ".

Besides your excellent n00b point also consider this: This heat scale nerf/buff mechanic will not be constant. It will now change continuously as people vie to nerf weapons that they don't like and advocate ones they do...so which weapons are "good" or "bad" will now be on spin cycle...so they will "fix" the "LRM loophole" next month...and then the "Gauss boating" (evidently 2 of the same weapon type is now "boating"...have you noticed? As ridiculous as saying 2xAC20 is "boating") If it goes the way I fear, pretty much the only weapons we will be able to have more than one of without penalty in 3 months are MG's and small lasers....and there will be people crying about those...

[Rippthrough]

DeaconW, on 18 July 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

....and there will be people crying about those...

People are already crying about machineguns ffs....

[Masterrix]

in BETA since 1 year and the game is still halfbanken, shortly before release

and your new heat-system will change nothing: fixing old issues by creating new issues ..... genius

since BETA, PGI has always put much more efforts in introducing "quantity" instead of "quality".
u can find it in every aspect of the game.

MWO is nothing more than an over-engineered game full of halfbaken content, and the show goes on

even the visuals are terrible, who has made this terrible textures ? is there any kind of quality-control before releasing ugly textured monsters likle "Alpine" ?? ? as I said: quantity > quality

[Zargar The Barbar]

Burpitup, on 17 July 2013 - 05:47 PM, said:

Ok so if i fire my 6 ppc stalker all at once now i die. How is that good. Next you are going to tell me that 6ppc's is to overpowered and had to be nerfed. Really it never was a good set up. You couldn't get to shots off in a row with out shutting down and getting killed in shut down.

This is just another example of how the Whiners are ruining this game.

You still can use 6 PPC man, you can use 2 weapon groups of 3 and get a little heat punishment, or you can use 2 weapon groups of 3 with chain fire and get the same heat as Alphas worked before. The patch only punishes you if you fire all your ppcs within .5 seconds of each other. The PPC has a 4 second cool down. So that is easily enough time to cycle through chain fire with out any heat penalties. Your Stalker with 5 - 6 ppcs is still an beast, you just can't shoot all ppcs at once hitting the same target with massive pinpoint damage.

[Warge]

Niko Snow, on 16 July 2013 - 08:24 AM, said:

Tell us what you think of the new Heat Scale Additions!

Could this idea help? Cause new Heat Scale rules intuitively unclear and confusing.

[Gulinborsti]

tigermaster, on 17 July 2013 - 10:18 PM, said:

just made a quick test with my jager double ac/20 on frozen city night

alpha strike = 34% heat
time to overheat = (4 alphas, 8 bullets) 16 seconds

single shot= 1% heat
time to overheat = never

even without a macro assign ac20a to left mouse and ac20b to right mouse

alternating the ac20 shots shooting the right one when cooldown of the first is at middle, so 2 seconds more or less (same dps basically after the initial shot) = heat increasing very slowly
time to cooldown = after 48 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 34% heat

this is why this heat penalty is useless, it solves dps on the initial shot but after 2 seconds you will be able to deal the same identical dps as before with almost no heat penalty.

now lets try to shoot the 2nd ac20 a bit earlier, lets say i shoot after 1 second, so i just need to aim the target for 1 second and have 3 seconds to move my mech= after 47 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 38% heat

so basically the penalty if you alternate shoots by 1 second is still minimal

lets try even faster now, 2nd shot after 0.5 seconds = after 46.5 seconds (26 bullets) i was at 41%

this heat penalty doesn't affect my dual ac20 buil much honestly, i just have to chainfire and i can shoot them with a slight delay and get almost no penalty.

probably also othe build can find an easy compromise that adds very low heat penalty and still be able to use their high alpha dps bursts.

also this heat penalty encourages the using of macros.

bad idea, really, remove this and find another solution, thanks.

in my hopinion there's no need for balance at all, but if you still want to listen to the whiners... well, find another solution.

why you don't enable weapon convergence limited only for arms like lots of people suggests?
this will limit also high alpha builds being effective only at very near distance and it will add more depth to the game and something you will have to take care of.
enabling this will also encourages the use of ligth mechs, as an assault mech will find very hard times to hit a light with all the weapons.

The intention of the heat penalty was not to remove "high damage" builds but "high damage ALPHA STRIKE" builds.
Having 6 PPCs or 2 AC20s on chain fire is fine and still deadly enough in skilled hands.
But it actually takes skill now, before the change it was simply easy mode.

However, some weapons need to be tweaked and adjusted (Large Lasers, some missle launcher), it just not feels fully consistent at the moment.

In case PGI sticks to this penalty system they now have a powerfull but complicated balancing tool at hand. A tool, that easily allows to screw thing up if not used carefully.

[Mack1]

I think it's time for a Public Test Server and I don't mean 2 hours a week. We need to roll out every new patch on a PTS for a good week of testing, this will avoid ridiculous patches like this ever going live.

[Roheryn]

I truly believe this is the wrong fix, and is clearly a cludge. It is also riddled with obvious insanities.

That being said it is better than nothing, if you are committed to this path I personally think the time between shots needs to be raised to 1 second from .5secs though.

Half a second on 2 ac20's is basically irrelevant.

[arghmace]

Roheryn, on 18 July 2013 - 07:03 AM, said:

Half a second on 2 ac20's is basically irrelevant.

When shooting at a moving mech and/or you yourself are moving it makes all the difference in the world. 2 shots between half a sec are quite likely to not hit the same section if you blunder your aim even a bit.