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Turn based games never had to worry about this second issue before, a person's actual reaction time wasn't important, and in PvE mechwarrior games this has never had any complaints, but now that we are dealing with PvP the targets of those hits need to have time for torso twists, cover utilization, or some other skill based chance to mitigate some of the damage.
Instead of addressing the issue with each weapon individually, why not look at group fire as a whole as the major culprit. First, remove ghost heat, regular heat in some cases (PPC), and return the gauss to normal firing. Then, we could make chain fire the standard way to use weapons, large weapons requiring a one second stagger and small weapons requiring a half second stagger. The 'Awesome' PPC boat would once again be what it says it is. Alpha strikes could still be used, but maybe give them a long enough cooldown that people can't just alpha every shot.
I've never used awesomes or stalkers because of the heat nerf, but I feel bad for people who do, because even in a medium when I see one of those two I know I'll be able to rip them to shreds as they shut down repeatedly trying to fend me off and I'll get a high score that match (And I'm not the best player by any stretch).
This might not be everyone's favorite way to address weapon balance, and you way have a much better way to introduce weapon stagger without breaking your favorite ac2 build or whatever, but it's an idea I haven't seen mentioned. There does need to be some sort of stagger though, even for light weapons. I hate coming up on a laser boat hunchback just to get cored in 2 hits. That isn't fun. And Besides, you can't tell me you wouldn't like to see some of the other changes they've made for this same result reversed back to the way things were.
Edited by sagittarian479, 24 September 2013 - 04:44 AM.
