5
As the game stands right now, here are the problems with sniping, or effective use of the gauss or PPC right now.
- The PPC is now painfully slow, leading, for anyone new, is going to be impossible
- While the Gauss projectile is faster, the mechanic is crippling and is not at all intuitive
- For the gauss, the charge up is too long and the self discharge too short to attack people poptarting or running through cover, basically any situation where you only have a glimpse of the target
- The self-discharge is so fast, that it's hard to even line up a shot on a target once you're ready to commit
- because of the self discharging, you can't prepare yourself againt someone moving through cover
- Because you have to charge and shoot before you discharge, you have to open yourself up to LRMs while you negotiate the mechanic, meaning LRM's are back to being the most effective long ranged weapon
- It is not easy to switch, mentally and contextually, from guass to the normal game mechanic. I find myself precharging weapons that don't need it, and obviously firing them too soon
- While these two weapons were modified, no lesser used weapons like the AC10 or the LX-10X were augmented to compliment or supplement the weapons inventory to fill the void
- good snipers will still be good snipers, new snipers will just be destroyed by them
- when a teammate steps in front of you, it, effectively, disables your weapon if you were in the middle of operating the mechanic
- lag, with the new gauss changes, means its hard to be prepared for mechs that are hopping around (on a related note, I had to just yell at my guest for torrenting without telling me, yes, I know how to read the ports open on my firewall, wiseguy!)
- UPDATED: Sound queue is so inaudible in a firefight, it's disorrienting trying to use the weapon
- UPDATED: High-impulse damage and smoke/fire effects ruin Gauss mechanic and render chargetime useless
- UPDATED: Any medium that uses this weapon has to give up mobility while using it, rendering it more a liability than an asset
- UPDATED: Any Assault that uses this weapon has to contend with a host of other weapons using the default game mechanic, making a critical weapon a liability
- UPDATED: Weapon strikes on the bounding boxes of the terrain or buildings are now a frustrating and grave consequence we trying to possition your mech to line up a shot.
- UPDATED: I obviously need a high dollar gaming mouse if I want to use this weapon because there is no room for overshooting the target when trying to beat the discharge timer.
- UPDATED 9/07: While specialized, homogenous gauss mechs are probaby not affected by the change, what about heterogenous mechs that come with a gauss weapon, stock, and cannot fit an AC20? People with heterogenous builds are going to have a harder time keeping the Gauss in their mix of weapons and will, to them, become a liability, totally invalidating all but the most extreme of the cannonical mech designs which include the gauss
- make the AC-10 and LB-10X more effective. LB-10X slugs and increases muzzle velocity for the both would certainly help. They won't hit as hard as the Gauss, but at least there will be something for the more casual sniper
- extend the auto discharge to 5 seconds. That will allow the sniper to be better prepared for covered targets, but still combat campers. It will also give people the ability to predict discharge of an enemy and time their runs between cover
- if none of the above, have a simple fire mechanic for the Gauss where the muzzle velocity is that of the PPC, so it can still be an effective weapon in tighter situations.
About the only thing I have learned to improve upon my view point is that by assigning the weapon to my thumb button, I can more easily differentiate the mechanic. My thumb must be different enough, or at least smarter, than the rest of my fingers.
Edited by Killkie, 07 September 2013 - 02:00 PM.
