50 replies to this topic

[Screech]

TheMightyServo, on 08 August 2013 - 06:37 PM, said:

Same as with mariomanz28, on the Jag I do left arm left mouse, right arm right mouse, 2 ACs each, and now I overheat in a couple of seconds, with no real damage done to the enemy. Used to be it took a while to do damage and it wasn't that great, but at least the dakka dakka part was fun.

Alpha all 4, staggering in 2's gets way too hot now.

[TheMightyServo]

Screech, on 08 August 2013 - 06:42 PM, said:

Alpha all 4, staggering in 2's gets way too hot now.

Point being it shouldn't. It does the same damage, does the same thing.

Firing 2 and 2 actually acts as a little bit of a distraction, provides sustained fire on a target to indicate its location for teammates, and is FUN, because talking guns are a good time.

It's frustrating to see fun elements of the game eliminated.

[SolCrusher]

AC2s are useless pieces of junk.

[TOGSolid]

TheMightyServo, on 08 August 2013 - 06:46 PM, said:

Point being it shouldn't. It does the same damage, does the same thing.

Firing 2 and 2 actually acts as a little bit of a distraction, provides sustained fire on a target to indicate its location for teammates, and is FUN, because talking guns are a good time.

It's frustrating to see fun elements of the game eliminated.

For no reason either because chaining the AC/2s lead to inferior performance since your shots are getting strung out. Anyone who believes that chaining the AC/2s was some huge problem and made them better really should of been banned from posting in any of the balance forums.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

SolCrusher, on 23 August 2013 - 09:05 PM, said:

AC2s are useless pieces of junk.

Had one AC2 on my Jager yesterday, and sprayed it continuously along with an AC20 to get 3 assaults to back off from coming into the volcano in Terra Therma...its psychological effect, even with just one, is very useful, where one mech can get 3 mechs to run the other way. I wouldn't rely on it for competitive play, but it's fun in PUGs.

[SolCrusher]

What I got from a support ticket on it, as I played AC2 Jagers almost every night more than half my drops I'm completely bored out of my mind not hearing dakka dakka dakka. So I turned in a request asking about the AC2 and refunding my Overlord package. As far as AC2 are concerned and this is paraphrased:

They are working as intended. AC2 have a limit of firing 3 within .5 seconds which shouldn't invalidate and mech builds but it should limit their alpha strikes. The reason heat seems so extreme with these builds is because players seem to want to turn auto-cannons into machine guns.

[Zusch]

Sounds like the old support tactics to sell a bug as a feature. In my opinion they programmed the heat penalty the easy way:
one Variable to store the time since last fired weapon to check if next fire is in 0,5 s frame (assumed as alpha)
and one to store the amount of fired weapon of a group during alpha time frame. Lets look what happens if you stagger 2 weapons with a cooldown = 1,1 s:

Time Time var Weaponcount var
0 500 ms 1 first weapon fired
500 ms 0 ms 0
600 ms 500 ms 1 second weapon fired
1000 ms 0 ms 0
1200 ms500 ms 1 first weapon fired again
In this case the code works as intended. The Weaponcount variable is cleared when the 500 ms alpha timeframe is over.
Lets look what happens with an AC/2 staggering (0,5s Cooldown)
Time Time var Weaponcount var
0 500 ms 1 first weapon fired
249 ms 251 ms
250 ms 500 ms 2 second weapon fired
499 ms 251 ms
500 ms 500 ms 3 first weapon is fired (assumed as 3rd in alpha strike)
749 ms 251 ms
750 ms 500 ms 4 secord weapon fired (assumed as 4th in alpha strike)
.
.
.
and so on.
As we can see the weaponcount variable is never cleared and the amount of fired weapons accumulate so on the 19th shot the heat peanlty is calculated
as if you fire 19(!) ac/2 as alpha and your mech shuts down. To make things worse this not only happend when staggering.
Even normal alpha firing did not work anymore when weapons got out of sync. So they tried to fix this by increasing the cooldown to 520 ms.
But this only works as long as the out of sync time is lower then 20 ms. To do better they need a time Counter for each weapon to find out when each weapon is timed out of the 0,5 s Alpha time frame. But this is a little bit more complex to implement.
So you can say the wanted to stop stagger firing ac's and macros but now you need a macro that prevents you from firing the next weapon before the 0,5 s alpha frame is over (no on can manage this manually during fight when the enemy mech stands before you, especially if you single fire left and right arm to prevent hitting your teammates.
And looking on balancing this makes no sense too. You can fire 18 times a ac2 before shutdown which does 36 damage max if all shots hit taking 4,5 seconds whithin you self can be hit. Using 4 ER PPC you do 40 Damage at once with much less heat and you can hide immediately after you shoot.
So finally ac/2s a now useless because using more then one of them can blow you up. Can anybody tell me what to do with my jager-dd with 6 ballistic slots? Installing 6 machine guns and opening an atlas tickeling spa????

Edited by Zusch, 03 September 2013 - 05:49 AM.

[AndyHill]

I'm just so glad PGI finally got rid of the FOTM menace that was one AC/2 blasting away with fast fire enabled.

[D1al T0ne]

I'm having great success with Dual AC/2 and Dual AC/5. The AC/2's fire fast enough to keep them from being able to line up shots, while the AC/5's are keeping the DPS up. I tried Quad AC/5, but I found that hostiles had no problems returning fire and they didn't seem to feel as threatened.

The main benefit of the AC/2 has nothing to do with their damage, but with their rate of fire. There's something terrifying about hearing "DING DING DING DING DING DING" on your armor. It's basically an "Oh ****, I'm getting hit a lot!!" gun. I don't know how many mechs, assault mechs even, that I've had try to turn around and run away from that combo... which of course now I'm shooting them in the back.

[Zusch]

@AndyHill: OMG. You are right! Fastfiring a AC/2 gives you a cool down of 494 ms. So you can blast even a single AC/2 mech within seconds. But I am sure that is a feature, too. A suicide weapon feature... really cool!

Edited by Zusch, 03 September 2013 - 06:39 AM.

[Zusch]

@D1al T0ne: You are right. But sometimes it is better when they feel not threatened. Chainfiring 2 UAC/5 sounds like being hit by a AC/2 and some decide to stand this... until they discover severe loss of armor.. :-) But your build is an option. Nevertheless you can not use all the Jager-DD ballistic Slots due to weight and so a 6 ballistic mech is nearly useless...

Edited by Zusch, 03 September 2013 - 06:47 AM.