22 replies to this topic

[Giantsaint]

So I noticed now my lrms are landing all over a mech target... Artemis control landed more missiles and grouped them together tighter... is New patch taking that into account? The patch made a definite change to the lrms. It seems other than landing more missles, artemis lrms vs non artemis lrms, show lil of improved grouping atm. Anyone else notice that?

[Kymlaar]

I haven't noticed it yet, but it might be a desirable rather than undesirable result. It's possible that just as many are hitting center torso, but with their patch note stating that missiles that weren't hitting but should have, you may be seeing damage from missiles that before were just vanishing rather than impacting.

Just a thought as to the reasons.

[Giantsaint]

the last change they made to streak srms seems to have made the randomly effectve or ineffective... so much so that their random landing patterns I have removed them in favor of standard srms.. so at least I have some direction of targeting placement at close range. Im looking to see if any other testers of lrms have noticed current patch changes to lrms.

Nods. Thanks for the insight

[Lightfoot]

Yes, it's broken. Testing them on Testing Grounds which normally gives best case results since the Mechs don't move and get hit head-on. Just fired 400 LRMs at a Cicada and it didn't even strip the armor. Normally the Cicada is dead after 60 to 90 LRMs on Test Grounds. This test was done with Artemis, BAP, and TAG-ed mechs and the LRMs appeared to get no buff from these.

I don't know why Missiles are such a big deal in MWO. They are consistently the worst missile emulation in any MechWarrior game and players just howl about them being OP. Of course these players never use them either. They wouldn't soil their hands with them, calling them a cheap shot, which is typical. I am shocked, really. MechWarrior always did fine with good missiles before. LRMs that work add great depth to what will otherwise be a Laser and AC-fest.

[Giantsaint]

I realize a fix to auto coring someone with repeated missile strikes was necessary sure. But shouldnt artemis targeting still group missiles in a tighter pattern to say strike smaller areas of a mech head/face forward on, obviously a moving mech is not the same target profile. Its obvious from my testing the damage is spread out and less, which seems to indicate to me artemis might be working for flight dynamics, but is it for the impact target areas?

Edited by Giantsaint, 31 July 2013 - 10:54 AM.

[Trader Vic]

The LRM in general took a hellacious nerf yesterday. Volleys that used to shatter mechs are barely yellowing their armor. I used to play fire support and get 3-5 kills in a decent game, but if I can eke out 1 kill before running out of ammo now I am lucky. I'd like to think I tried to be the thinking man's artillery, always using Artemis and tag and firing with line of sight when possible, and setting up bold crossfires. None of these tactics work when the warheads in your missiles have been replaced with wadded up newspaper.

People say LRMs needed a nerf because they are a "no skill" weapon. It really seems like people are starting to equate "skilled" with "inefficient and fussy" and "unskilled" with "whatever happens to kill me most frequently."

[Giantsaint]

Agreed.. An LRm build off a catapult, treb, awesome, any other mech..with two or more slots. We took a big nerf along with alpha builds, poptarts, and boats all around. It seems pgi wants all of us to play the fight out "Holy Grail Style".. The knight who keeps losing body parts saying "Im not dead yet".. Which is fun at times. But sad thing is our boats vs alpha build vs poptarting at times in my opinion were equally match here and there.. now it feels like pgi wants us all to sport variety builds! YAY!

the brawlers were missing though... at least now they have a bit of play

Edited by Giantsaint, 31 July 2013 - 01:41 PM.

[Nebelfeuer]

Will quote myself here in order to get the LRM feedback sorted into one thread:

Nebelfeuer, on 30 July 2013 - 07:17 PM, said:

First i´d like to say that I run LRMs quite often and for a long time now and on a lot of Mechs in sizes from 10-30 misslestubes divided to 1-2 Launchers.

Lets start with some observations
We currently have a quite mixed performance:
Due to the high trajectory missles(or at least part of them) hit quite often even behind cover.
Due to extreme spread and high trajectory the dmg is spread a lot over the target unless it is moving slowly and facing you even while using ARTEMIS and TAG.
The high trajectory does not react well If you stand allready on higher ground and the dmg is even more unreliable.
AMS is very strong and 2+ of them render even 20+Misslles basically useless -especially if your target happens to be behind the Mech with AMS since it can fire longer at missles passing it.
Fast moving targets(not restricted to lights) do only get neglectable damage while moving.
Small launchers(or ammounts of tubes) are more acurate then big ones due to tighter spread which incentives boating smaller launchers or mounting big ones in "unfitting" locations
Overall the performance does not feel good atm and finishing of a cored target is taking longer, if possible at all, with LRMs then coring him if he suddenly starts to evade - and that is on open ground.

Suggestions:
I do kind of like the spread and high trajectory while performing indirect fire and it feels balanced (hit often, massive spread, medium dmg) and same can be said for unenchanced direct fire(trough I would like to have a lower flightpath here aswell) and I would like it to stay the way it is.
The use of ARTEMIS and TAG/NARC should have a much better effect though.
I suggest a much lower and more compact flightpattern for ARTEMIS(we had that allready) and a much better target following for NARC/TAG ( we had that too before the flightpath adjustments - true it looked more rediculus sometimes but the current behaviour is far from realistic aswell).
The artemis change would also deincentive boating since it cost tonnage per launcher.

Against lights another slight speedincrease might be nessessary

AMS should be reduced again since it renders smaller ammounts of missles usless and incentives boating instead. The former value felt quite fine IMHO.
Another option might be to make a single AMS destroy a percentual value of missles maximum per salvo before they look for a new target(eg max 40%).


In short:
Indirect fire: good
direct fire: bad traking , flightpath too high
ARTEMIS: to much spread
TAG/NARC: bad tracking
AMS: too effective

Most of this hase been noticed over the course of the last patches but the recent one pushed it over the rim.

[Conreg]

Trader Vic, on 31 July 2013 - 12:15 PM, said:

The LRM in general took a hellacious nerf yesterday. Volleys that used to shatter mechs are barely yellowing their armor. I used to play fire support and get 3-5 kills in a decent game, but if I can eke out 1 kill before running out of ammo now I am lucky. I'd like to think I tried to be the thinking man's artillery, always using Artemis and tag and firing with line of sight when possible, and setting up bold crossfires. None of these tactics work when the warheads in your missiles have been replaced with wadded up newspaper.

People say LRMs needed a nerf because they are a "no skill" weapon. It really seems like people are starting to equate "skilled" with "inefficient and fussy" and "unskilled" with "whatever happens to kill me most frequently."

I made a similar post on this. What you said is correct. Missiles are badly broken since Tuesday's patch. I was quite pleased with the balance that missiles had achieved just prior.

Missiles are among the most effective tools that keep this game from becoming a sniper/brawl fest.

I would greatly appreciate some statement from PGI that indicates they are aware of the problem.

Our unit has been training with spotting and LRM support. I'd hate to see our efforts within that dynamic are wasted.

[The Mech behind you]

hmm now that I read OPs post. I had the feeling somethings fishy with my ALRMs the last days but I thought maybe there was some invisible wall in the LOS so that my Artemis didn't work

Is there any difference between Artemis and non Artemis boosted LRMs now? As I said I had the feeling I was shooting normal LRMs

Edited by Norman Kosh, 31 July 2013 - 02:27 PM.

[Flying Judgement]

agree lrm is one really powerful and fun tool in both end its a priority in the field so it need to be hunt down. and thats fun.
In order to make LRM highly effective it need to stand away from the pack so it can make other mech run from cover.
and makes them a great target
or haveing 1 strong brawler base + 2 group with a sniper + daka guarding an LRM its a devastating strategy.
but lrms where just fine before why did they nerf it ? or was it too strong ? coreing some one wasnt easy

do i need to scrap these strategies and just go mindless daka ?

[Waritec]

I'm not fan of LRM, but trying it yesterday on treb. 2xlrm10 with artemis did almost nothing to centurion. I fired 5-6 volleys within 400 m with straight LOS to the target, and it received only slightly yellow armor. I try to kill critical damaged Cataphract with orange CT from 500-350m. 4 valleys with straight LOS did almost nothing. And when I met a team with AMS, it became absolutely useless. On the bright side, my brawling Hunch now can openly fight under constant missile barrage for some time, without worry, that it can cripple me.
(google translate)

Edited by Waritec, 31 July 2013 - 11:14 PM.

[Cest7]

Has anyone seen the Artemis LRM flightpath since the patch?

It used to spiral all cool-like but now I can't really tell a difference.

[Leggin Ho]

Missles doing damage is not a problem and this "reset" is because of the fact Missle boats can sit in the back and never expose themselves and just rain damge down. If they made it so that you actually had to have line of site from your missle mech less people would complain since the missle mechs would actually have to move and engage instead of sending one little mech with tag or just as the radar scout for the rest of the team.

[Fuerchtegott]

Leggin Ho, on 02 August 2013 - 04:06 PM, said:

Missles doing damage is not a problem and this "reset" is because of the fact Missle boats can sit in the back and never expose themselves and just rain damge down. If they made it so that you actually had to have line of site from your missle mech less people would complain since the missle mechs would actually have to move and engage instead of sending one little mech with tag or just as the radar scout for the rest of the team.

So we can take scouts and tag and narc completly out of the game?
And you see no problem in a lrm boat, firing at a target 840 meters away, holding line of sight for 7 seconds (120 m/s lrm speed)? While every other weapon, even the largest lasers, just need to expose themselve for 2,5 seconds?
And I forgot to mention tonnage and slots for launchers and ammunition.
That there are two players at least needed for a "hiding" lrm boat doesn't matter,I guess, would be fine when a lrm 20 does less damage than one large laser, which would most times even do some nice pinpoint dmg.
Yeah, those lame lrm fans here have nothing to complain about.

Good you told us, thank you very much Sir.

[Nebelfeuer]

There is some trhuthg in Leggin Ho ´s words and that is part of the reason I personally prefered the old flightpath that rewarded skillfull targeting instead of hanging back and reliing on spotters - nonetheless there need to be differend rules for indirect(spotterbased) and direct fire. The current spread for indirect fire is absolutely ok and does comparably low damage spread over a wide area. That does not negate the neseccety for a well working performance in direct LOS mode where Artemis is supposed to give a good advantage and LRMs need to be able to compete with direct firing weapons.

Artemis currently does reduce the spread while missles are in the air but looses most of this advantage before the impact.
We need the flightbehaviour pre JULY 15th or better IMHO pre Flightpathchange for direct fire with Artemis support.

[Leggin Ho]

So I assume you enjoy playing against 1 spotter while there are 5 -7 stalkers sitting in the back not moving with what 100 - 120 lrm salvo's or the UAV's giving your position away, yet folks are in another thread complaining about the seismic sensor's having too much range. Some restriction is in order esp as the scout is usually at max range for tag and running at 120+ kph so you try to hit that enough to kill it to force some movement out of the other 7 players on the other team. A lot of the balance issue would go away if we had a meta game to use rules to enforce using more than 2 or 3 chasis all running the same weapons, and that goes for snipers, brawlers and Missle Ho's. Till then we'll continue to be the dog chasing our tail as far as balance goes with what we see in this game.

[Fuerchtegott]

I agree, that is a problem.
And in my opinion we have both usefull statements in our postings.
And we play from very different locations, so my view on hitting lights is probably even worse.
The metagame could fix many problems, but the devs love fixing as it seems, so they'll refuse to fix the metagame and chose a visious circle to fix the hell out of minor problems. A kind of a fixing addiction, maybe canadas healthsystem can help them. :-)
Have you actually seen many 6-7 lrmboat groups since the last patch? I didn't. I drove a fun centurion lrm build a couple of rounds and it sucked.

The point where I disagree is your line of sight argument, at least if it means to hold the los for the whole duration.
The cent I mentioned above uses artemis, so I tend to fire in between 200-500 meters range, at nice 100 km/h speed, and even then, most matches ended after 700-900 launched misssiles with around 150 dmg. Considering that lrm dmg can't be compared to pinpoint dmg, there is a huge problem right now with lrms.

From both our points of view as it seems.

[Leggin Ho]

No I don't expect LRM mechs to stand and hold the entire time, but to at least have to expose themselves to get a lock would be great. But once again, until there are some rules to help balance it out, it's be a cycle of fix this and fix that in a cycle.

[DeaconW]

I have to agree with this. It is like Artermis is turned off or something because SRM's are also less effective now.