143 replies to this topic

[Escef]

Void2258, on 19 January 2015 - 04:02 PM, said:

Get a trackball. /endthread

You realize that you're responding to a post from 16 months ago? This thread was dormant for 11 months until VinJade necro'd it.

[JadeTimberwolf]

I wouldn't mind the charge being removed, however for balancing factors add the current charge time to the cooldown time of the gauss

[Void2258]

Escef, on 19 January 2015 - 04:10 PM, said:

You realize that you're responding to a post from 16 months ago? This thread was dormant for 11 months until VinJade necro'd it.

I just read the last post. It deserved a /endthread. So technically you necroed it

[destroika]

Escef, on 19 January 2015 - 03:51 PM, said:

There are six blocks surrounding your targeting reticule, they represent the ready status of your weapon groups. If the group is ready than the corresponding block is the same color as the HUD. If nothing in the group is ready than the block is dark red. If some weapons in the group are ready than the block is half dark red. If the group is a charging Gauss rifle the block is yellow, and the block turns green when the Gauss is ready to fire. Assign your Gauss to all of your unused weapon groups and it becomes more difficult to miss.

I, for one, find it difficult to see the little box among all smoke and a screen shake registering a 10 on the richter scale while all my focus is on trying to just fire under the red triangle, if I have one, the muzzle flash, or simply by screen and cockpit reference while estimating movement and trying to shield my core between shots. Typically, that's the most crucial time I need gauss queues. All the help I can get in that situation would be much appreciated.

Edited by destroika, 19 January 2015 - 06:46 PM.

[Escef]

destroika, on 19 January 2015 - 06:45 PM, said:

I, for one, find it difficult to see the little box among all smoke and a screen shake ...

That's why you assign the Gauss to all of your unused weapon groups. One green box near your crosshairs can be missed easily, 3 or4 not so much. Try it in the testing grounds if you don't want to experiment in a live match.

[Savage Sweets]

xXButcherBlackXx, on 09 September 2013 - 10:31 AM, said:

...make firing two clicks; one to charge and the second to fire.

I would much prefer (given the current firing mechanism) that they change it to this. It hurts the finger to continuously need to hold the trigger after a while.

[Nightmare1]

The window is way too short, making Gauss an unreliable weapon. Add in the fact that it explodes when critted, regardless of whether or not it is charged, and you find yourself with a two-edged sword that has a tendency to cut more towards the user than the foe.

[Tarl Cabot]

Savage Sweets, on 23 January 2015 - 11:32 AM, said:

I would much prefer (given the current firing mechanism) that they change it to this. It hurts the finger to continuously need to hold the trigger after a while.

Most definitely go for a double pull trigger

Nightmare1, on 15 February 2015 - 11:26 AM, said:

The window is way too short, making Gauss an unreliable weapon. Add in the fact that it explodes when critted, regardless of whether or not it is charged, and you find yourself with a two-edged sword that has a tendency to cut more towards the user than the foe.

With the current mechanism it should be reverted back to default settings. Why should it have less health and be more likely to crit than a ammo bin, as it is a weapon of war and not some hacked add-on done during the Dark Ages?

[Idealsuspect]

Necro topic....

Gauss is really good now,
If people don't like charge or something well you have AC-10 or lasers...
Different weapons also different way to use it ...
I don't want a gauss easy to use as a point-click lasers witheasy pinpoint and damage hitreg like a AC.

If this simulator is too hard for ya well go play gundam games or hawken action mecha games ^^.

[VinJade]

"If this simulator is too hard for ya well go play gundam games or hawken action mecha games ^^"

so in other words those that want the GR to act like it does in the tt game or as seen in other PC games alike should just suck it up or play a different game?

boy aren't you full of yourself... lol

[GreyGhost]

Wolfways, on 08 September 2013 - 02:31 PM, said:

I voted the old gauss back but not because i'm against the charge (there's no point as i highly doubt PGI would change it back) but because i'd prefer if the weapon just fired after the charge was complete.
Having to lift my finger off the button makes my mouse move slightly making it harder to hit distant targets accurately. The charge actually made no difference at short range for me.

I designed a gauss release mouse macro, on my 12 button mouse. I put the gauss on group 6, and I run a macro where button X is Press6 wait completetime...release6, If pressed and ignored the button will charge and hold until the gauss auto un-charges.

But then I have button Y as release6 only, with no press. This allows me to fire my guass with a press instead of a release.

But I still don't LIKE it and rarely use the gauss.

[Vermaxx]

Gauss was broken. I have something like 190k mech xp on my Catapult K2, and I've converted a couple times. I STILL have 190k, from the heyday of various builds. Mostly gauss.

Gauss WAS broken. It now has the lowest item HP in the game, virtually guaranteeing that it will be crit once your armor is open. It also explodes when crit, like it is supposed to. The size of the weapon is now a factor - a major factor. It costs a fortune to install. You flat out cannot charge more than two at a time, the game is hard coded to stop you. Quirks really encourage (force) you to take certain weapons on certain mechs, and almost nothing has gauss quirks.

I think the HP is too low, but taking into account the "fragility" of such a weapon, having a lowER-than-other-weapons HP is fair. Having the internal explosion is fair. Limiting their quirks is fair. Limiting a player to two gauss per volley is fair.

Gauss charge is an outdated mechanic that never made sense for a "sniper" weapon, and is now hugely nonsensical given all their other downsides. I do not have a single mech with gauss installed right now, not one. I own 22 mechs, 13 of which have some kind of ballistic slot.

I freely admit I used to defend gauss bitterly, and I was wrong. Gauss is now one of a very few weapons that actually require real work to use. It got "balanced" out of common appearance. That isn't balance, that is a nerf for the sake of nerfing.

Edit: sorry, my K2 is now up to 200k mech xp. It hasn't carried gauss regularly in a year though.

Edited by Vermaxx, 27 February 2015 - 04:58 AM.

[BetaVirus]

If this has been said already great, if not then eat my words and if you dont like it tough.

• A gauss rifle does not overheat
  
• It does not gen heat except for normal wire resistance and that is of no significance.
  
• Required a Charge time before fire. More in line with the current game function
  
• The capacitors once charged remain so, until discharged. unlike the current game function
  
• The Gauss does not explode unless it is holding a charge. even then it is not explosion persay, but i will go with boom when charged.
  
• Range for a real gauss is over several miles for the size of a mech

i can find more but i don't care since PGI is not going to allow for real stats anyway.

Edited by BetaVirus, 27 February 2015 - 10:15 AM.

[Lightfoot]

Okay....... "No I want the old Gauss back.", wins by a whopping margin.

So... how about it? The players have spoken. The result is overwhelming. Only 18 percent find the current Gauss Rifle Charge-Up to be functional.

At the very least the Charge-up mechanic should not be affecting mechs with only one Gauss Rifle mounted since this is never a problem with balance. However, having the Charge-up applied to Mechs who can only carry one Gauss Rifle is ruining game balance because it so heavily favors the few mechs that can carry two Gauss Rifles, and there is no question that this is true. See Jagermech, Dire Wolf, more, and Gauss usage. The Charge-Up mechanic is so burdensome it demands that 2xGauss be used to be competitive and you only have to play a few matches to see this is how the Gauss is used 90 percent of the time. 2xGauss. That's not balance.

So, next patch maybe we get a Gauss fix of some type? It would go well with the Zeus, mmm very well.

Just give the Gauss Rifle a longer recharge, 5-6 seconds, and drop the charge-up if just one is mounted. Or make it so 2 can't be fired at once. That would fit Battle Tech better than the Charge-Up.


.

Edited by Lightfoot, 10 March 2015 - 09:45 AM.

[cSand]

how bout the longer you hold it, the chance of it randomly blowing up gets higher, lol

[Twilight Fenrir]

I want Gauss the way it used to be... I don't like the charging mechanic, it's a hinderance when the sh** hits the fan, and you're fighting for your life.

If there MUST be a charge mechanic, I'd like the 'charged' and 'discharged' sounds to be much louder, so you can play by ear, as it were. The current volume level gets lost in a firefight. Something more difinitive would be helpfull, like a 'beep' for charged, and a short 'waah' for discharged.

Also, if there must be a charge mechanic, the Gauss Rifle should only be explosive when it's charged! It only explodes because of the energy stored in the capacitors. If the capacitors aren't full, it shouldn't explode!

In the Battletech Novels, Natasha Kerensky explained to Phelan Kell, that gauss rifles required so much power, only one could be fired at a time. Furthermore, you couldn't fire any other high-energy weapons at the same time. So, PPC + Gauss wasn't possible. And you CERTAINLY couldn't fire two gauss at once.

I would be perfectly happy with a similar arrangement, so long as gauss lost ita charge mechanic.

Edited by Twilight Fenrir, 10 March 2015 - 10:58 AM.

[Lightfoot]

There is no Charge-Up in Battle Tech's version of the Gauss Rifle. It recharges the capacitors during the recycle and holds the charge until fired. Same as an AC20 reloads a new shell during it's recycle and holds it until fired. The de-sync charge-up was not made for a Battle Tech game. It's more like a hot-fix that never got fixed. Please at least give us a fix designed for a MechWarrior game.

For MWO I think the best one is that either you can't fire 2 Gauss Rifles at once (some players wouldn't like that) or that the desync/charge-up doesn't apply if just one Gauss is mounted (everyone would be happy with this, I think).

[Daemonhunter]

IMO the charge-up feature of the gauss is necessary for game balance, and I have no problems with it. The ability to hold the charge for a long period would severely limit the efficacy of that balancing factor, because it would give pilots a lot more leeway to fire off snap-shots (albeit with the minor added inconvenience of holding a button down until you glimpse a target) and, as others have mentioned, makes it easier to time gauss shots to coincide with hits from other weapons (namely PPCs) for massive FLPPD* strikes. Such mechanics also favour players with low pings. I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this proposition if it weren't for the prevalence of dual-gauss builds, which seem to be somewhat more common than single-gauss setups.

If you add a heat penalty for holding the charge, it had better be a substantial one. The weapon generates virtually no heat to begin with, so I don't think anyone's going notice 1-2 points of heat buildup per second. If you're taking the heat penalty route, I think the heat build-up should grow rapidly (e.g. doubling every second), otherwise it would take ages to reach overheat point (unless you're spamming other weapons at the same time). Potentially there should also be a decent ghost heat penalty for holding a charge while firing other weapons.

As has been suggested by others, a change I wouldn't mind seeing (or actually hearing) is a decent audible indicator of charge status, e.g. a louder/more distinctive charge sound which changes to a different tone when ready to fire and changes again when the hold time expires, and/or a clearer visual indicator than the tiny green square in the HUD.

An optional audible indicator of cooldown status would also be useful for all weapons (e.g. a brief blip sound when the cooldown period ends; different classes of weapons could have different tone pitches) - I find it distracting having to keep an eye on the cooldown bars on the bottom right corner of the screen, I'd rather keep my eyes on the enemy and let my ears tell me when my guns are ready to fire.

* for the uninitiated, FLPPD = front-loaded pinpoint-precision damage

TL;DR
Leave gauss alone; longer hold times could make it OP again. Give it better audible/visible status indicators instead.

[Lightfoot]

PGI's stated purpose of the desync was to separate the Gauss from PPCs, not prevent players from using it. Right now it does prevent most MWO players from using it as intended by Battle Tech which is, except for a few mech variants, in a single mount configuration. That's my main complaint. That 90 percent of Gauss use is the 2xGauss plus maybe PPCs or a medium laser array for back-up. So the Charge-Up actually causes the problem it was aimed to reduce, 2xgauss boating.

Okay, so a year, almost two years later we all know it failed. Almost no one uses a single Gauss anymore with a mixed load-out due to the complexity of running it with a variety of normal functioning weapons. Most Battle Tech mechs can't carry 2xGauss, so more unbalancing and this also discourages sales of new mechs if they can't carry 2xGauss. Bad for sales.

Now there is nothing OP about a single Gauss Rifle. It pays for the low heat and range by weighing 15 tons and only doing 15 damage. If players were to mount one with their lasers it would actually lower DPS and TTKs and it could keep the current recycle/charging time of about 5 seconds or not.

And why do I want a single Gauss Rifle to function more or less normally? Because it is a key element of Battle Tech balance between long range and short range and comes standard with so many mechs. It is just not fair to players to block it's use with an overreaching, apocryphal, nerf to it's normal firing. So optimize it or drop the de-sync entirely if just one is mounted. This would actually discourage the 2xGauss boat with it's un-deflectable 30 damage pin-point coring that really annoys players the most! Having their mech obliterated or crippled in one shot from an opponent they probably don't even see!

The Gauss de-sync/charge-up does not work as a nerf. It causes the main Gauss balance problem.

Edited by Lightfoot, 11 March 2015 - 09:27 AM.

[Argann]

Yes, and with no penalty, or bring back the old gauss.

Also, increase the range of the weapon.

Edited by Argann, 11 March 2015 - 01:57 PM.