I bought a Jagermech as my first non-trial and have filled up my mechbays with them for advanced piloting masteries and limited bays. I've toyed with buying more mech bays &/or a hero mech but have resisted the urge due to the extremely low returns on cash expenditures within the MW:O pricing model. With that said I've used only Jagermechs with nearly every variety of loadout and have some perspective on guass and particularly dual gauss.
I was playing with a dual guass 4x M-Lass jager for weeks leading up to the patch and quickly found it to be the most effective Jagerloadout I'd ever used. It was leaps and bounds more useful than dual AC/20s (a build that has been specifically nerfed by a heat penalty), made suboptimal AC/5's look like a joke, had a better long range presence than UAC/5s while having enough heat to spare for more sustained M-Las fire, and AC/2s are hardly worth mentioning due to the sheer number that would need to be installed at a high weight premium to deal threatening damage which doesn't even touch the absurd ghost heat attributed to large numbers of AC/2s.
It was good. If I came around a blind corner into an injured mech later in the game I'd often engine hole my opponent with one alpha before he got a shot off, which says nothing of the significant number of gauss shots fired from ranges well beyond many other mechs ability to retaliate.
I can understand the new functionality with the caveat that I'm not sure the timings are correct in their current state. It may well be that the cooldown of the weapon should be lowered by a certain amount of the charge time or the charge time would be better off at 0.5s. As it stands the gauss user has an even greater increase in cooldown to repeat fire. I'm not sure this is a proper amount in addition to the added awkwardness of firing with a charge time.
This leads me to feel that balance changes are being made with a heavy hand and not a whole lot of perspective. Think about the Dual AC/20 builds, for example. I started using them in Jagermechs and have since abandoned them completely. If you can't participate in the long range game as a Heavy-class, relatively slow mech: you're going to have difficulty in most games. Double AC/20 builds in their respective Jagers and Catapults pretty well require modestly sized XL engines, creative armor omissions, amd limited ammo. Most of the time a mech with double AC/20s is going to be spending prescious ammo at pre-optimal ranges or have his armor well stripped before breeching a range where he becomes dangerous; nevermind the aforementioned weaknesses. With the self limiting factors of limited range, high weight, and high slot consumption was it really a build variation that required a gigantic heat penaty for double use?
Were the AC/2 heat penatlies even necessary? Was doubling down on PPC nerfs (projectile speed and heat in addition to a heat penaty for using more than two) an appropriate means of downplaying the long game? Is there a reason I can alpha two LRM 20s but not four LRM 10s without being penalized? It's as if someone with a say on how the game is balanced encountered varieties of popular builds over the course of the game and in snap decisions often decided, "That's just overpowered. We can't have that." And then went about fixing it in the quickest & dirtiest way possibe: the players got a bunch of sloppy heat penalties that, in many cases, make little sense.
In closing. The guass charge-up was not a bad way to go about toning down the long game. At least its not another stupid heat penalty. Perhaps, though, the weapon cooldown should necessarily be lowered by a portion of the charge up time (i'd suggest 0.25s to 0.5s). The gauss survived as long as it did with its pre-patch cooldown and instant fire and didn't dominate the landscape (ppcs were the long ranged platform of choice). It seems like a charge-up that, in many cases, raises the time between repeat shots to a much higher number than 4.75s and is a little excessive.
Edited by AllByAll, 11 September 2013 - 12:35 PM.
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Joseph Mallan, on 10 September 2013 - 05:54 AM, said:
