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Since my last thread was jettisoned (great way to make your community feel listened took if you want more specifics give me a chance to respond next time) Here is a more specific post with why i don't feel like playing MWO currently.
In my own personal experience with all the previous mechwarrior titles and gaming in general, I feel like the best approach to dealing with the PPC "issue" is to slow down the projectile speed. They just move too fast with the amount of damage they do and the range they have. When firing a weapon of equal damage such as the AC/10 there is nowhere near the same amount of accuracy above 500m as the PPC. Even with Gauss rifles you have to lead your target and time your shots.
In the previous mechwarrior games that we all loved, PPCs were slow"er" traveling balls of energy than what we see in the current game. Sure they had extreme range but you would only be hit with them at 1000m if you were standing still or weren't paying attention. I thought they were fine in closed beta and the heat change was nice back then. But when you sped them up the problem slowly began to take form.
Before the Heat scale was introduced i used to run a dual AC/20 jagermech and although it was deadly at close range, hitting moving targets greater than 450m was quite challenging. I still find it unusual that 1 weapon with very managable heat has such a huge penalty for firing a second. I understand it was meant to address the high alpha issue but logically it doesn't make sense at why an additional shell being fire from a separate gun in a separate location would incure such a huge buildup of heat. But i'm getting off topic here.
In the current game at 1000m i can step out from cover and instantly get tagged by ppc after ppc. Its like bopping a dog on the nose with a newspaper. So freakin anoying with little chance of them missing. If PPCs were more difficult to hit with i truely believe their popularity would shift into a different role, from a super awesome sniper weapon thats paired with Gauss rifles to a medium range brawling weapon. ER Large lasers would become useful as its easier to hit with a beam than a timed projectile. The PPC would not be appealing on light mechs for the same reason autocannons aren't appealing on them. Its much harder to fight off other fast and light mechs with weapons that require timing to land your hits.
As for the heat scale, I constantly have to go back and read the command chair post and look at all the pictures and graphs to tell what kind of penalty i would get for certain weapon max alphas. And i literally can't figure it out without those charts. There's nothing in the mechlab to tell me or warn me or provide any kind of insight as to the limits of the weapon systems. I know you guys put a lot of work into developing it but i think it causes more problems than it will solve. I'm thinking about future mechs that have variants that blow this heat scale way out of proportion. And those are stock variants that will have problems. Even the hunchback with the 8 medium lasers will throw the new guys under the bus because they won't understand why their heat is so out of control.
If you do come back and read this i hope this gives you some insight.
Edit: Since we have a handy dandy Test scheduled on thursday would you consider adjusting PPCs speed and let the community have at it? I understand your testing is currently for the 12v12 stability but weapon testing seems like it could reveal some interesting results. Even if those changes never came to be, adjusting them in all sorts of ways would provide valuable data.
Edited by Sable, 24 July 2013 - 12:42 AM.
