Thontor, on 17 July 2013 - 08:09 PM, said:
It's helping the game by penalizing high pinpoint damage builds like 4 PPCs and dual AC/20s etc which discourages them from alpha striking and encourages them to stager fire wih less damage per shot:
It doesn't actually just penalize pinpoint damage builds. What about my 4 Large Laser Blackjack? That's too much - but:
My 6 Medium Pulse Laser Blackjack - which still has a 36 point alpha?
And the AC20 goes from generating manageable heat to being completely and arbitrarily stupidly hot if you fire two at the same time?
The mechanics are so inconsistent that it's laughable.
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It therefore increases the skill cap for those builds to do that damage to one specific location in two seperate shots. And that also gives the target time to react and have a chance at avoiding that second shot or at least preventing it from hitting the same location.
It was a little frustrating, before - but really the problem existed with PPCs. Since no one has thought to revisit PPC mechanics (as laser mechanics were thought about before this game went into play) - a weapon which has been fundamentally unbalanced in every MechWarrior game to date.... we have issues with PPCs. Particularly when the hardpoint system allows any small or medium laser to become a PPC on a large enough chassis while decent ballistic builds (which are the up-front damage dealers) are few and far between with poor hardpoint options.
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It's not perfect... There are ways to corcumvent it. One of those ways is to use 2 ERPPCs and 2 PPCs. We know that will be changing... I just hope the devs are considering combining other weapon systems as well, like a gauss rifle counting as a PPC as far as the heat scale is concerned.
That's just insane - and is exactly what I have said would happen if this were implemented: "Wheel of Stupid."
Because people will start shifting their builds around to deal damage that is
effective for this game, there will be a never-ending crusade to get weapons and weapon combinations added to this table.
This table then becomes an additional point of balancing concerns for every weapon on it. "The heat scale for this weapon is too much!"
"Why can't we increase the number of large lasers that can be fired simultaneously?"
"Why do my SRM6s suffer a heat penalty for doing slightly more distributed damage than the 6-medium pulse laser builds I see running around, now?"
".... Why the hell are streaks on this list?"
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So yeah, there are a few builds that might circumvent the system a little, but I have a feeling those will be dealt with. And I think the system has already made a huge improvement on the high pinpoint damage problem.
The high pinpoint damage problem was largely an artifact of PPC behavior.
Remove the existing PPC behavior and replace it with a charge-and-release effect, and you fix most of the high-alpha problems. There's a canonical base for it, too:
http://www.sarna.net...i/PPC_Capacitor
The AC40 builds do exactly the same amount of damage (when they converge properly) to a mech as the tabletop version of the AC20 (because armor has been doubled). I really don't see a problem with it.
The main issue is the PPC. It's been -the- bane of MechWarrior balancing since the dawn of the game. If you give it a charge-and-release style firing mechanic with a pulse-laser like damage output (except a shorter duration) - then you fix most of the problems with the PPC. You make heat management for the PPC more complicated than simply: "can I fire this weapon" - you actually have to charge the weapon (which would generate a portion of the heat to fire). It would also add in functionality for expansion -when- the game decides to take a time-skip and incorporate later era technologies.
It's called brainstorming. These guys should do it.
Then you can look at issues like convergence.
But right now - a 30 point alpha from PPCs is unthinkable. But a 30 point alpha from gauss rifles is okay (and I'd like to see the thought process on justifying firing two gauss rifles overheating your mech... like firing 2 AC20s does...).
It's just stupid and arbitrary. Why not just set in hardpoint restrictions that make only a few mechs able to wield 4 PPCs? You may as well.
There are only two mechs in the game that can wield 2 AC20s - the K2 (which everyone said was ******** that it could turn machineguns into AC20s - but the devs said that is the kind of customization they wanted to support) and the Jaegermech (which has to make some considerable design compromises to do so - much the same as if it decides to field 2 gauss rifles - though it costs 6 more tons, or nearly 10% more of its total mass, to do it).
Assaults have absolutely hilarious and stupid hardpoint configurations (do you want the victor, victor, or victor?) specifically to prohibit the mounting of two such weapons. Yet the AC20 STILL gets a "boating nerf."
There's nothing sensible or comprehensive about this. They just decided: "These are builds we don't want people using. We're going to make you es'plode for using them."
Hardpoint restrictions were put in place to control just this. That is what the original concept behind the hardpoints was for... to control plausible builds for balancing and characterization reasons. Because they only thought through half of their solution - we still ended up with huge boating problems (mainly with PPCs).
rather than fixing PPCs...
or fixing their hardpoint system.
They decided to implement another layer of complexity and balance that will take another whole year for them to "get where we want to be."
What the hell are they going to do when they implement the Clans, and I can have a 12 small pulse laser Nova with a 40+ point alpha dealt over 0.5 seconds?
Or 'omnimechs' are truly 'omni' and can be used to circumvent the existing hardpoint system all together - meaning their heat-scaling is going to have to be applied to every weapon in the game?
This is what happens when people don't think beyond the end of their nose.
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