Farpenoodle, on 17 July 2013 - 01:55 PM, said:
The more I think about it the more I think something along the lines of what PGI is doing is really the best way to go about it. Which is a scary thought.
It really is one of the better options. I would modify their solution in three ways to make it robustly effective though.
First and foremost, add a way to throttle the penalties to individual mechs, not just blanket penalties to all weapons no matter what mounts them. This will give each mech more flavor as well as allow better balancing across the board. Baby steps would include letting the Awesome firing 3 PPCs without penalty, but a more comprehensive solution can be found
here.
Second, I would like to see some Rate of Fire penalties added to the heat penalties. Heat penalties work great when high-heat weapons are the main problem, but they won't mean much to the first assault that can mount two or three gauss rifles. Nor are the heat penalties to some weapons significant unless they have radical multipliers (AC20s, large numbers of SRM6s). Rate of fire penalties would make more sense (the mech can only move so much ammo at once, and gauss rifles have to recharge their capacitors), and would add the choice of immediate alpha vs short term dps to the heat solutions' choice between immediate alpha and long term heat management.
Third, I would put more weapons in the same penalty boxes. Putting PPCs with ERPPCs is obvious, but close in effectiveness and problem making are the 2xPPC+Gauss that is 95% as effective and suffering no penalty. Putting PPCs, ERPPCs, Gauss (and all their clan counterparts) into the same penalty box will be a huge step forward in making sure that synergistic combinations do not become overly dominant in the wake of 'pure' boats finally being addressed.
Edited by ExAstris, 17 July 2013 - 02:21 PM.