147 replies to this topic

[Maggiman]

If you start shooting them down they'd need a heavy buff which in turn would make them hilariously good noob slayers (More so than they already are).
They are so slow for balancing reasons anyway, which is precisely why you cant shoot them down. *Balancing* (Imagine mach 1 Lrms, now that would be fun)...
Logic doesn't always apply in Battletech, otherwise -every- weapons system would behave a lot different.

[c33tz]

I think I suggested this like... close to release. This definitely needs to be implemented.

All weapons should be able to destory missiles... This can easily be balances by:

(1) Having very tiny hitboxes on missiles to make it near impossble to destroy ALL incoming missiles... but hopefully you can shred a few to spare the dmg

(2) Increasing lrm dmg to compensate the ability for any mech (other than with ECM, or AMS) to have SOME ability to defend themselves against it ... (this also gives a little more use to having a machine gun or two ... but missile HP should be adjusted so that its not TOO over powered against them)


... make this happen please... from what I can see, people who voted "no" appear to have limited to no valid excuse and just don't want the game to change out of their comfort zone and be required to show a little more skill while playing.

[Wolfways]

c33tz, on 11 August 2014 - 04:23 PM, said:

... make this happen please... from what I can see, people who voted "no" appear to have limited to no valid excuse and just don't want the game to change out of their comfort zone and be required to show a little more skill while playing.

AMS. That's what it's for.

LRM's do not need nerfed even further.

[Kjudoon]

Wolfways, on 11 August 2014 - 06:23 PM, said:

AMS. That's what it's for.

LRM's do not need nerfed even further.

AMS needs two huge changes.

1. Only target missiles aimed at it.
2. Solid objects block them and can damage mechs in the way of the missiles. I mean come ON! They shoot through the ground?

That'd balance them out. I'd even be happy to see an AMS toggle so you can turn it on and off.

Edited by Kjudoon, 11 August 2014 - 06:28 PM.

[Solis Obscuri]

Why the **** would I want to ghost heat myself firing lasers in the air when I could just carry a dinky little AMS unit (or better still, just walk slowly behind cover while the giant glowing clouds slowly drift across the battlefield in my direction)?

[Nickredace]

I personally think that being able to shoot down some LRMs with a laser should be possible. Now I've seen what people have said before, but think of it this way. A missile detonates on contact, and is quite fragile, the Lasers in the BattleTech universe are quite large and deal quite a large amount of heat and damage. So Logically firing a laser at the missile should be able to destroy them. If I'm correct I also Believe some lasers are used by the military to shoot down missiles already.

Treat the laser as if it where terrain, small lasers-small terrain=destroys a few missiles, Medium Lasers-Medium Terran Destroying a normal amount, etc.

[DarkBazerker]

I would rather shoot lurms down with lbx10 and machine guns.

[kosmos1214]

Enzane, on 13 November 2013 - 04:50 PM, said:

Every time you inject logic into a fantasy game God Kills a Urban Mech...

no not an urbie

c33tz, on 11 August 2014 - 04:23 PM, said:

I think I suggested this like... close to release. This definitely needs to be implemented.

All weapons should be able to destory missiles... This can easily be balances by:

(1) Having very tiny hitboxes on missiles to make it near impossble to destroy ALL incoming missiles... but hopefully you can shred a few to spare the dmg

(2) Increasing lrm dmg to compensate the ability for any mech (other than with ECM, or AMS) to have SOME ability to defend themselves against it ... (this also gives a little more use to having a machine gun or two ... but missile HP should be adjusted so that its not TOO over powered against them)


... make this happen please... from what I can see, people who voted "no" appear to have limited to no valid excuse and just don't want the game to change out of their comfort zone and be required to show a little more skill while playing.

in all honesty i like the idea implementation might be a bit hard to balance

[Nightmare1]

Khobai, on 09 September 2013 - 11:02 AM, said:

Have you ever tried to shoot down a missile with a handgun?

Marvin does it:



Overall, I think that you should be able to shoot them down. It would be difficult to do, but a direct hit should from your weapons should deal damage. Missiles already have a certain amount of health and AMS rounds deal a certain amount of damage. Last I checked, it took two or three bullets from the AMS to kill an LRM.

Now, firing other weaponry would deal damage, in the same fashion as to a BattleMech, to the missiles in question. If the damage dealt was greater than the health of the missile, then the missile should be destroyed. Of course, the issue then becomes one of, "Do I want to waste this ammo?" or "Can I afford to spike my heat this much?"

[xXButcherBlackXx]

I just want to reiterate that this mechanic isn't going to break LRMs. It would be last ditch effort, if you find yourself out of cover, to repel some damage and would be less effective than just using AMS (1 vs. 1).

I don't see frantic posts railing against the blight of AMS, so I don't see why LRM boats feel so threatened by players having more choices.

Edited by xXButcherBlackXx, 06 September 2014 - 04:56 PM.

[kosmos1214]

neather do i that why i suport this

[Robomomo2000]

MnDragon, on 09 September 2013 - 01:15 PM, said:

The AMS system is loosely based on the Phalanx CIWS (Close-in Weapon System) which first saw use on Navy vessels in the late 70s. This system fires 20mm rounds at about 4,500 rounds per minute using a 5 barrel, pneumatic driven delivery system. It uses Radar and FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red) to detect missiles at 9,000m and will prioritize the first 6 targets to engage at about 3,600m. TL;DR: can you fire any weapon at 4,500 rounds per minute?? The average flight time of an LRM is about 2-4 seconds depending on how far away it is. It would require you as a human, to find said cluster of targets, aim at one pinpoint in that target fire you weapon, allow for recycle, pick new target, fire again...repeat until impact all within 2-4 secs. You MIGHT if you are super skilled shoot two missiles IF you were able to see the missiles as soon as they left the tubes and if you had a weapon that could reach out to say 900m and had a recycle time of about 1 sec. The best candidates for this feat would be the AC2, AC5 and UAC5 all balistics, all subject to aim drop so you would have to also be able to quickly calculate that. That is why IMHO, we should NOT be able to shoot down missiles with our weapons and that is why the AMS system is automated.

I say that a laser (Medium at least) should be able to take out a missile in a split second shot, I mean there not that armored or big, you should be able to streak the laser across the cluster's path destroying about half in the time depending of the cluster's size.

Ballistic weapons are out of the question though, as well as flamers.

Edited by Robomomo2000, 07 September 2014 - 12:57 PM.

[xXButcherBlackXx]

Robomomo2000, on 07 September 2014 - 12:55 PM, said:

...Ballistic weapons are out of the question though, as well as flamers.

I'm with you on flamers. There's no way a flamer could heat a missile fast enough when it's .5 seconds from hitting you in the face. On the other hand ballistics, like guass or ac20, should have a bowling ball effect obliterating any missile in it's trajectory(..or at least the first one).

Edited by xXButcherBlackXx, 07 September 2014 - 06:19 PM.

[xXButcherBlackXx]

Vandul, on 01 August 2014 - 06:16 AM, said:

Got any data thats not anecdotal?

Kjudoon, on 01 August 2014 - 07:15 AM, said:

Okay. Do this and LRMs get 1.5dmg then like they used to. Then fine.



Please explain why, since 3 patches ago, I am usually the last guy standing, running exclusively LRM or LRM centric builds and losing 90% of my matches then.

I was being sarcastic with the 90% figure, but it's been my experience that the side with more LRM boats are more likely to win. The best I could do to come up with a more accurate figure would be to play a set number of matches and record Win/Loss along with which team had more boats. I'm confident that the results will not be surprising.

To answer you Kjudoon, It could be that:

A.) Your team isn't spotting for you effectively(i.e. they suck)
B.) You're the only person on the team with LRMs
C.) The other team has more LRMs
D.) The other team utilized coverage well (ECM or terrain)
E.) You could train a bit more (...sorry, it's a possibility.)

Edited by xXButcherBlackXx, 07 September 2014 - 06:46 PM.

[Augustus Martelus II]

DONTOR, on 09 September 2013 - 11:13 AM, said:

I would think that AMS or Machineguns only, would be able to take out missles.

or lucky shots

[xXButcherBlackXx]

Thunder Child, on 01 August 2014 - 11:05 PM, said:

I'm all for LRMs being intercepted by weapon fire. Buuuuuut.... Conversely, I want to be able to throw a cloud of missiles in front of myself to protect me from direct fire. Considering that PPCs and ACs front load all of their damage into one round (an exception for Clan ACs, but they would react the same, but per shell), it seems only fair that a single missile would intercept a single round. PPCs should be stopped by MGun fire too. In fact, MGuns should stop EVERYTHING, except Lasers of course, because Lasers are a continuous beam. All front loaded damage per round weapons could be intercepted in a one for one basis.

Thus, Machineguns take over the world.

Edit: By the way, I am dead serious, because that is the ONLY way that this could work, with the current game Mechanics. So unless you are proposing a COMPLETE rebuild of the game engine from the ground up (which would delay CW for at least another SOON™), I don't see any feasible way to make this work.

Your slippery slope is completely off the mark. No one is suggesting that machine guns should be able to block front loading weapons like ac20/ppc/etc. Making the proposed change to LRMs doesn't necessitate those other changes you describe.

I think it would look and feel silly for a PPC or ballistic rounds to completely stop when hitting a missile. Therefore, I'm for reduced damage per impacted missile. If people want this applied to SRMs/Streaks then no problem. Some damage will be reduced, but you're still likely to get hit with most of the damage from incoming fire.

[VixNix]

If you want to take the time and expense (in ammo and/or heat) to try and shoot down the incoming missiles why not...

AMS isn't the only way it should be able to happen.

[kosmos1214]

well might as well bump

[Twilight Fenrir]

This is the strangest discussion I have ever seen.... I cannot fathom why there are so many people saying it's impossible to shoot down the missles by hand... They're comparatively VERY slow for missles. They are in great big clusters, too... Whenever I'm in my mech with 4 machine guns, and I've got LRM's bearing down on me, I still point up into the air and fire away... You can't tell me it's physically impossible for me to hit a few of them by spraying enough bullets into the tightly knit cluster.

Lasers have such a long fire time, it's easy to sweep them across the cluster of missles as well... especially with enough of them... Now, the argument COULD be made, that the lasers may not impart enough energy to the missle in the milisecond of time you might catch it for, and that I'd accept... but missles could have HP just like everything else. Give them 1-2 HP each.

No, we're not gonna shoot down the entire swarm, but when we're getting hammered by 4 mechs chalk full of LRM's, it would take the edge off the impotent rage if we could at least TRY to save our bacon XD And it is wholly conceivable to reduce an incoming single salvo to something to be shrugged off, if you happen to be carrying a boat of machine guns.

People shoot birds with shotguns all the time. It's not about accuracy. If you sling enough lead, you can't miss at least SOME of the missles.

[Twilight Fenrir]

Kjudoon, on 11 August 2014 - 06:27 PM, said:

AMS needs two huge changes.

1. Only target missiles aimed at it.
2. Solid objects block them and can damage mechs in the way of the missiles. I mean come ON! They shoot through the ground?

That'd balance them out. I'd even be happy to see an AMS toggle so you can turn it on and off.

There... is an AMS toggle.... tab down like you're selecting your weapon groups, and highlight the AMS, and hit the right ctrl key, AMS = Off