5 replies to this topic

[Erebus Alpha]

Follow my train of deductive reasoning here:
You click the fire trigger on the gauss, and these ludicrously powerful capacitors begin charging up to electromagnetically hurl a 200-pound pile of awesome out of the barrel, and thoroughly ruin the day of whoever happens to be on the receiving end. These handwavium electromagnets and capacitors can even do this while generating almost no statistically significant heat. The barrel and the projectile would also have to be made out of unobtanium, because the barrels of modern coilguns and railguns tend to burst into vapor from the heat and friction of firing.
So we fire it. Things are good. Things die.
Then the Gauss rifle decides to take a little nap, during which it can't be bothered to actually charge or fire again. Maybe those handwavium coilgun guts need to recharge their plot-juice or something?
Autocannons have to clear the chamber, because there's an empty shell casing that has to be removed before things can happen - but this isn't the case with an electromagnetic coilgun. You can have multiple projectiles in the same barrel, ready to launch in rapid succession. In fact, you don't even have to wait for the first one to completely leave the barrel - you could theoretically have multiple projectiles being accelerated down the barrel simultaneously, assuming you can cycle the electromagnets fast enough.
So if the gauss rifle has a charge-up BEFORE it fires, what other operation aside from another charge-up could possibly be preventing the gauss rifle from firing? The only thing I can come up with is naptime.
Proposal: Add heat, make the charge-up a little longer, and REMOVE the cooldown completely. The series' random magical gun is a real immersion breaker, and really never fit in any Mechwarrior game or Battletech intellectual property.
Then buff all the existing weapons to the level of the UAC-5 and the improved & rebalanced Gauss.

Edited by ABFalcon, 12 September 2013 - 02:12 AM.

[627]

You fluff is all nice'n'fine but you forgot that this charge up is a balancing mechanic. Maybe it's not the best, but it's definitely not the worst and with the huge speed buff, you can actually snipe better with it.

Don't forget, this is a long range, high punch, no heat weapon. Now it has one drawback.

Edited by 627, 12 September 2013 - 02:27 AM.

[Naja]

Sure, or, and hear me out on this, we could ignore real world physics which clearly don't mesh well with BT universe nyway, and try to design weapons with some form of balance, and not realism in mind,

[Escef]

My thoughts:

• Reduce the recycle rate by the amount of time it takes to charge the rifle.
  
• Allow the charge to be held, but have slowly increasing heat build up the longer the charge is held.
  
• Make it so that the rifle does not explode if it is not charged or charging.

Heat for holding a charge has precedent with in-universe fluff if one looks at the PPC Capacitor. By paying heat to hold the charge it makes it harder to abuse in conjunction with heat-pig PPCs. The reduction in recycle rate brings the Gauss's DPS back to where it was. And the not exploding if not charging or charged is just intuitive.

[Erebus Alpha]

Indeed, it never made sense to me why the Gauss Rifle is magically made of explodium.
  
You know a gun is broken when any of the following criteria are true:
  
1: One (or more) of the numerical values that dictate how the weapon behaves falls FAR outside of the normal curve of operation
2: The numerical deviations which make the weapon unique asymmetrically skew its effectiveness
3: Completely bizarre mechanics are present which do not occur elsewhere, in order to artificially nerf the weapon.
  
Let's see how many of these the Gauss Rifle suffers from:
  
Damage-per-heat exceeds that of every other weapon in the game, by a huge margin
Projectile speed exceeds that of every other weapon in the game, by a huge margin
Obscenely low weapon health per critical, lower than every other weapon in the game, by a huge margin
No tangible disadvantage to its high alpha and long range that is not also present in ballistic weapons (heavy & ammo dependent)
Explodes and does damage to the mech when destroyed
Must be 'charged up' before firing
  
It fulfills all three criteria. It even fulfills two of them multiple times over.
  
The Gauss makes less sense than a bucket of puppies rolling around in a ventilation shaft at a fake opera. That being said, I would support infinite charge time, heat buildup per second while charged, and explode-only-if-charged - just because it would make the weapon less utterly irritating to use. In order to begin to actually balance the Gauss, it needs to have damage per heat slightly exceeding autocannons' median damage-per-heat. And when I say slightly, I mean by ~5 percentage points or so.
  
A perfectly balanced Gauss would actually NOT require charge-up, low health, or weapon explosion, and would see no statistically significant deviation in use from any other weapon in player builds.
  
The reason we can't just strip the bizarre, one-off mechanics out is because of the alpha-metagame: Until low-alpha weapons fire rapidly and are heat-efficient enough to curbstomp assaults just as effectively as high-alpha builds, the Gauss Rifle will remain ludicrously and laughably unbalanced.
  
Coincidentally, unbalanced is also a synonym for clunky and unintuitive, which are also fitting adjectives to describe the Gauss Rifle.
  
Finally, to quote myself:
  

ABFalcon, on 12 September 2013 - 02:06 AM, said:

The series' random magical gun is a real immersion breaker, and really never fit in any Mechwarrior game or Battletech intellectual property.

...Which also needs a fix.

Edited by ABFalcon, 14 September 2013 - 10:05 PM.

[Naja]

ABFalcon, on 14 September 2013 - 10:04 PM, said:

1: One (or more) of the numerical values that dictate how the weapon behaves falls FAR outside of the normal curve of operation
2: The numerical deviations which make the weapon unique asymmetrically skew its effectiveness
3: Completely bizarre mechanics are present which do not occur elsewhere, in order to artificially nerf the weapon.

1. The weapon is exceedingly better (or worse) than all other weapons in a particular area
2. It's benefits/drawbacks are not balanced
3. Weird mechanics introduced in attempt to balance a single weapon

Right?