SteelPaladin, on 02 September 2013 - 03:19 PM, said:
I don't entirely disagree w/their reasoning for having dissipation add to threshold. It's actually an attempt to mirror TT in the sense that you don't apply heat until after dissipation. In TT, you don't build heat and then drop like you do in MWO. Any heat that is dissipated for that turn never touches your heat scale; it's like it never happened. That's why penalties started so low on the heat scale, because ANY heat that hit the scale was heat over what your mech could handle that turn. Adding dissipation to the threshold is a halfway decent representation of that.
The problem is that they give you 30 heat for free on top of that, when bad stuff should start happening at dissipation + 5. I did some playing around with different thresholds and dissipation rates to see if I could come up w/the magic numbers that would sort things out, but it didn't work out so well. It worked out good for energy weapons and decent for missiles (the higher heat weapons), but the meta just became paired AC/20s or Gauss Rifles to still be able to lay out 30+ damage in a single trigger pull all over again.
It's practically impossible to punish simultaneous firing of low heat weapons w/the heat scale. If you tighten up hard enough on heat to restrict them, then high-heat single-shot weapons (ER PPCs in particular) can't be fired at all.
Well, here's the thing. Tabletop has you wait 10 seconds and is an average or conclusion of 10 seconds in a summary. Hence it's better to call it a summary capacity, rather than an excess. Think of it this way. It's 30 capacity, period. Take it like that for just a moment.
Now consider this. You fire 2 medium lasers for 4 heat each. The beam lasts for one second. So over one second you generated 8 heat. You have 10 standard heatsinks. During that same second you sunk 1 heat, and have 7 more to sink. It takes you 3 seconds after the laser stops to fire again. In that 3 seconds you sunk 3 more heat, leaving you with 4 total when you are ready to fire again.
We stopped our ten second turn at 4 seconds. What do you have? 8 heat - 4 = 4 left over.
So let's go back to ten seconds. Let's say you fired 6 medium lasers at 4 heat each, at the same time. Again 10 standard heatsinks.
0 seconds, fired 6 ML. 4*6 = 24 (out of 30).
1 second. Sunk 1 heat. 23.
2 seconds. Sunk 1 heat. 22.
3 seconds. Sunk 1 heat. 21.
4 seconds. Sunk 1 heat. 20.
5 seconds. Sunk 1 heat. 19.
Etc for 5 more seconds.
10 seconds. Sunk 10 heat total. Remaining heat: 14.
The problem is they didn't think it through. They made a bad assumption that many do about tabletop. They ignored the 10 second aspect.
Whether it's 1 second, 4 seconds, or 10 seconds, it's still a per second cooling rate and none of it is instant.
Those builds that can churn out 40 heat and sink it just as fast -- have you ever noticed you can't pinpoint one spot in tabletop?
It's because you can't alpha strike in tabletop using standard rules. Supposedly the 1 shot per 10 second thing is because the pilots are terrified of overheating. If you instantly sunk heat, what would you be afraid of? Nothing.
So, how can a mech fire 60 heat with a 30 heat limit and come out with 24? Quite easily in fact. It's called spacing out your shots.
Here's an example:
6 PPC stalker with a 30 heat capacity hardset. Each PPC does 10 heat. There are no goofy penalty systems. No unlocks. No B.S. cooling. 18 DHS. We'll do this MWO-style with dual-fire (as firing 3 would cause an instant shutdown).
24 summary heat in 10 seconds. Tabletop turned to real time. I can get identical results to tabletop in every attempt, so long as the first shot is placed at 0 seconds. If you watch any of NGNG's videos of MWTactics, they have the firing part of the turn first followed by movement as they realized the only way you can make a realistic real-time version of tabletop with a static system is if the turn begins with firing at the 0 second mark.
What PGI has come up with can never result in the same thing as you'd have in tabletop. If I can fire once every 4 seconds on tabletop, I'd shut down a lot more often. A build I recently made generates 34 heat every time I fire. I can do it 2 times in MWO without shutting down on Tourmaline in less than 10 seconds.
With tabletop rules but allowed to fire that much twice in 8 seconds and allotted 10 seconds total to cool down I'd still be shut down, fallen over, and my pilot would be knocked out. Any ammo I'd have would detonate on me. Chances are the mech would never stand again.