408 replies to this topic

[Roland]

Demos, on 05 November 2013 - 07:50 AM, said:

Indeed. Due to the 1.4 "DHS" energy weapons got a bigger disadvantage regarding heat than ballistics alredy. they ARE hotter (besides the obvious increase in heat of S/M(P)L ).

Well currently, ammo was never doubled to match the doubling of armor.

And also, with most configurations, the 1.4 DHS really isn't much of a factor at all, since MOST of your heat sinks are in-engine, and they are all 2.0 heat sinks.

Lots of folks think that "true double heat sinks" are going to have some major impact on the game, and the reality is that they won't. There will be very little change to the effective efficiency of 99% of mech configurations.

[Mister Blastman]

Roland, on 05 November 2013 - 08:17 AM, said:

Well currently, ammo was never doubled to match the doubling of armor.

And also, with most configurations, the 1.4 DHS really isn't much of a factor at all, since MOST of your heat sinks are in-engine, and they are all 2.0 heat sinks.

Lots of folks think that "true double heat sinks" are going to have some major impact on the game, and the reality is that they won't. There will be very little change to the effective efficiency of 99% of mech configurations.

Ya know, what is funny is if they were to bump them all to 2.0 and then reduce the heat cap from 60+ to 30 pts like in tabletop, it'd just make the even more porked than it is now. Ballistics already dominate--reduce heat to 30 and they'll annihilate.

Broken game is... broken. It has been convergence since June of closed beta and will always be until things are de-converged somehow. The +1 pt heat to medium lasers was the worst decision they ever made. I should have thrown in the towel then when I threw a fit over it. I warned they were going down a bad path making that change as I saw what the outcome was. We've been in the outcome since ppc-ageddon and haven't left it, yet.

So until they reduce the ability to pinpoint damage to single locations, even raising DHS to 2.0 won't save lasers. SRMs going to 2.5 + mega splash will help but won't save it.

My PPC post a couple pages back in this thread is a start. Cone of fire is not. Something needs to be done.

Perhaps if they stop running on a 10 second cycle and perhaps pick a middle ground based on a common weapon system... say, the ... medium laser!



So what in the hell am I talking about?

Well, right now 1 heatsink will reduce you by 1 pt of heat over 10 seconds, for -.1 heat a second. It does its job based on a 10 second scale.

Medium lasers right now cycle completely over 4 seconds. Medium takes 1 second to fire, 3 to recharge. So what if we did this?...

We base that 1 heatsink on a 4 second scale. 1 heatsink would now reduce you by 1 pt of heat over 4 seconds, for -.25 heat a second.

After you do that, put DHS to 2.0.

-then-

You reduce the heat scale from 60 to 30. BAM! Huge change overnight. Ballistics keep on trucking but lasers will start a firing.

It would only be a starting point. You still have to deal with convergence somehow. But doing that would be the only way to begin implementing a meaningful heat change in this broken game.

[Cybermech]

I am terrrible at match.
but I can clearly see your mistakes and not taking in account the difference between a board game and a PC game.
also your general math towards averaging out ballistics and energy will never paint a good picture of the issues that are there.
pinpoint damage will always be on top regardless if there ballistic or engergy, would you call an AC2 pin point? I wouldn't...

[Mister Blastman]

Darth Bane001, on 05 November 2013 - 08:54 AM, said:

Wow a lot of nerds with way too much time on there hands.

Some of us are damn proud of being a nerd!

[Almond Brown]

mike29tw, on 04 November 2013 - 01:40 PM, said:

We don't listen? More like we disagree.

And when you disagree with someone who says NO, do you really think that ragging on about it endlessly, will change the answer?

[Joseph Mallan]

Mister Blastman, on 05 November 2013 - 09:05 AM, said:

Some of us are damn proud of being a nerd!

Not me. I'm a Gamer Geek... there is a difference.

[Almond Brown]

Roland, on 05 November 2013 - 06:04 AM, said:

If you were to suggest that double armor doesn't require double ammo, because you should only need half as many shots to kill a mech, then energy weapons should generate double the heat.

Because, hey, you only need half as many shots to kill a target, right?

With Ghost Heat, above the ML 6 Pack, most ALL of them do...

[Mister Blastman]

Joseph Mallan, on 05 November 2013 - 09:15 AM, said:

Not me. I'm a Gamer Geek... there is a difference.

Might be. Doesn't matter to me. Everyone I know calls me a nerd and I'm damn proud of it. Even my brother-in-laws 5 and 7 year old sons years ago called me one after they first met me.

Makes me smile.

[Almond Brown]

Demos, on 05 November 2013 - 07:50 AM, said:

Indeed. Due to the 1.4 "DHS" energy weapons got a bigger disadvantage regarding heat than ballistics alredy. they ARE hotter (besides the obvious increase in heat of S/M(P)L ).

Fallacy. Everything that had a Heat value prior to the DHS's introduction was affected the exact same amount. The fact that Energy weapons are hotter, by design, was not made any worse by the DHS value, no matter what it was to be set at.

[Roland]

Quote

Ya know, what is funny is if they were to bump them all to 2.0 and then reduce the heat cap from 60+ to 30 pts like in tabletop, it'd just make the even more porked than it is now. Ballistics already dominate--reduce heat to 30 and they'll annihilate.

It's always funny when people say, "In table top, you had a 30 heat cap!"

Yeah, in Tabletop, I could fire INFINITE weapons, if I had the heat sinks to dissipate it, because your heat wasn't calculated until after inclusion of the dissipation.

That is, you could fire 4 PPC's, and if you had 20 Double heat sinks, what was your heat at the end of the turn? IT WAS ZERO.

This isn't how it works in MWO. In MWO, you get all the heat, and then it dissipates over time. It's a fundamentally different system, so you can't just say, "Oh, well let's just cap heat at 30! And implement heat penalties if your heat gets high!" Because in BT, you could fire a ton of weapons and not get hot at all... but in MWO, since the heat is represented in real time rather than in discrete turns, perfectly efficient configurations would spike your heat and cause you to incur all of those heat penalties.

[Karl Streiger]

Roland, on 05 November 2013 - 11:39 AM, said:

It's always funny when people say, "In table top, you had a 30 heat cap!"

Yeah, in Tabletop, I could fire INFINITE weapons, if I had the heat sinks to dissipate it, because your heat wasn't calculated until after inclusion of the dissipation.

That is, you could fire 4 PPC's, and if you had 20 Double heat sinks, what was your heat at the end of the turn? IT WAS ZERO.

This isn't how it works in MWO. In MWO, you get all the heat, and then it dissipates over time. It's a fundamentally different system, so you can't just say, "Oh, well let's just cap heat at 30! And implement heat penalties if your heat gets high!" Because in BT, you could fire a ton of weapons and not get hot at all... but in MWO, since the heat is represented in real time rather than in discrete turns, perfectly efficient configurations would spike your heat and cause you to incur all of those heat penalties.

What you are describing would have been solved with a Solaris 7 heat system:

With 20 DHS and 4 PPCs - you are exactly able to fire a single PPC per 2.5sec turn. Firing 2 would have caused 40 heat points.
So you were not able to fire 4 PPCs in an Alpha Strike but over time of 10sec your Mech didn't run hot.

[pwnface]

Are you considering recycle time of the PPC in MWO? If you are going to shoot 4 PPC shots over 10 seconds there is no reason to have 4 of them. PGI shouldn't try to balance a computer game around a board game. Whenever people mention "In tabletop" in regards to gameplay balance it makes me want to smash my head through a wall.

[Karl Streiger]

pwnface, on 06 November 2013 - 02:12 AM, said:

Are you considering recycle time of the PPC in MWO? If you are going to shoot 4 PPC shots over 10 seconds there is no reason to have 4 of them. PGI shouldn't try to balance a computer game around a board game. Whenever people mention "In tabletop" in regards to gameplay balance it makes me want to smash my head through a wall.

And when ever i read this argument and would have smashed my head against a wall - there wouldn't been any head or wall reamining.

Have you considered that the heat dissipation is 100% tt standard even less. And have you considered that if you have heaten up your mech using only stock layout your are not able to faster those 3 PPCs in your Awesome faster than 3 shots int 10seconds?

And you know what? MWO is working perfectly balanced on this level. I would even say - that MWO in current state would be a perfect game for BattleTech before 3028 and the new developed SL tech.

[Catamount]

Roland, on 04 November 2013 - 01:35 PM, said:

No way, this just cripples all ammo based weaponry.

If you double armor, you need to double ammo. This should be obvious to everyone.

obvious to anyone who doesn't take into account the capabilities of these weapons, sure. Right now, Ballistics weapons carry 150 damage per ton, and carrying and emptying 7-10 tons from many mechs (especially Ilyas and Jagers) is child's play. In other words, emptying over a thousand damage a match out of ballistic weapons, which have no heat and the range to almost cross entire maps, is incredibly easy. Even accounting for misses, accidental and intentional (just putting down fire to keep people in cover), if I've done less than 700 damage in my UAC K2, and the match wasn't short, then I've had a bad game, and over a thousand damage isn't that hard to get. Most of the runs with the new Jester I've been seeing have a hard time consistently breaking 500.

There is just no sane world in which I should be able to carry 1000-1500 damage worth of ammo on a mere heavy mech, and plausibly empty it on the enemy, with weapons that have such range and touch so little of my heat capacity, I can mount three or four MLs as backups with no penalty (the MLs get all the heat, and their short range isn't a liability, because I have UAC 5s for long range). Some of that is the UAC5 specifically, granted. It's an almost no-heat weapon that can put out almost 7DPS, and jams means little in the mostly peek and hide sniper meta of the game. I see 2 AC10 4ML K2s doing almost as well, though, and AC2 Jagers are no less ridiculous than UAC boats. Even AC5s are hugely powerful; my Cicada 3M can break 600 damage with one (and 4MLs of course) without too much difficultly.


Right now, ballistics are so utterly broken, I'm not even sure halving ammo would go far enough. Less ammo and more heat (except on the AC2) maybe. And fine if PGI wants to keep them broken, and/or the majority of the users want it that way. If that's the game we want, then so be it. I'll just continue to exploit the hell out of it and be happy. If I'm to be honest about the weapons I most rely on, though, they're ridiculously OP.


Edit: and before anyone cries "but they can do that in TT, and armor values in MWO were doubled!". I don't care what these weapons could or couldn't do in TT, or what was considered a lot of damage in TT, or what the armor values were in TT. This isn't TT. In MWO, a thousand damage, let alone 1500, is a HUGE amount of output, several times the average output per mech that's required to end a match especially when the weapons work in perfect synergy with laser backups to boost that even further due to their total lack of heat output, so don't tell me half of several times what's needed to end a match "isn't enough ammo". If these weapons produced heat and couldn't basically just be "turned on" and never turned off in every shootout, maybe we wouldn't be dumping 1000-1500 damage worth of ammo a match and still running out.

Edited by Catamount, 06 November 2013 - 03:20 AM.

[Galenit]

Catamount, on 06 November 2013 - 02:57 AM, said:

Right now, ballistics are so utterly broken, I'm not even sure halving ammo would go far enough. Less ammo and more heat (except on the AC2) maybe.

- Reduce ballistics range to 2x like energy has, to bring them more in line with the other weapon ranges
(only erppc and gauss will do noticeable pinpoint damage at 1000m then and the erll and ac2 are the sprayandpray for this range. Put lrm in the mix and you have 5 long range weapons of different style and use. The ac5, uac5, ac10 and lbx10 will then be in the longmidrange and midranges very usefull and the ac20 will be the close range (pinpoint) punch like srms)


-Maybe reduce ammo to tt values for ballistics, this needs observation and tweeking over time.
(To balance their pinpoiont damage against the spread of lasers and missiles)


- Give ammo a chance of 35% for explosion, needs observation and tweeking over time.
(that counts for missiles too, their is no risk in taking ammo. Is their anyone using case?)


- Let them have their high rof and dps as advantage
. (Making them the superior burst weapons)

Edited by Galenit, 06 November 2013 - 05:50 AM.

[Catamount]

Maybe instead of random explosion chances just make heat a bigger concern on all but the AC2 (which runs hot enough), but otherwise yeah, those suggestions would go a long ways.

Ballistics would still have high burst DPS at up to mid ranges, but heat would mean it wouldn't be a complete death hose, while reducing ammo would combine with the heat output to make total damage output in a match less absurd. The AC2 would be unaffected by the heat, but needing more ammo tonnage would mean triple AC2 boats with their never-ending ~12DPS would need more ammo, so would carry fewer heatsinks and/or a smaller engine, and not be so overpowered.

Such is how I predict it working anyways. PGI could then keep high-heat lasers and PPCs, which would still manage less damage in boats in closer-in fights, and still be range limited except for the ERLL (which can only be mounted limitedly and still only does about 2DPS in the best of times), while the PPC keeps its own high range and snapshot ability, but low overall relative damage potential.

Edited by Catamount, 06 November 2013 - 05:02 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

pwnface, on 06 November 2013 - 02:12 AM, said:

Are you considering recycle time of the PPC in MWO? If you are going to shoot 4 PPC shots over 10 seconds there is no reason to have 4 of them. PGI shouldn't try to balance a computer game around a board game. Whenever people mention "In tabletop" in regards to gameplay balance it makes me want to smash my head through a wall.

HellStar says hello!

Also if you are going to make a Video game around a TT game you should try to emulate as much of the ORIGINAL as you can.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 06 November 2013 - 05:34 AM.

[Galenit]

Catamount, on 06 November 2013 - 04:59 AM, said:

Maybe instead of random explosion chances just make heat a bigger concern on all but the AC2 (which runs hot enough), but otherwise yeah, those suggestions would go a long ways.

After armor is gone and a random crit occurs and the randomness let hit the ammo with that crit and enough damage from the crit then it can explode with a chance of 35%.

10% after armor is gone and with random critchance and randomly choosing what components in that part are hit (witch can be buffed up by other items) are little low. They are that small, that nearly noone uses cases ...


But ammo explosions based on heat as part of heatscalepenaltys would be nice too.

Edited by Galenit, 06 November 2013 - 05:34 AM.

[Catamount]

I don't know, I kind of just want to limit the ballistic never-ending-deathose, not blow up the mechs

Edited by Catamount, 06 November 2013 - 06:31 AM.

[Karl Streiger]

Catamount, on 06 November 2013 - 06:30 AM, said:

I don't know, I kind of just want to limit the ballistic never-ending-deathose, not blow up the mechs

Than you have to place your hand where it hurts - kill there ammunition suppliers - bribe there quartermasters and place penny coins were the fuse is.

For good impact on game on immersion you don't have to reduce DPS for ACs or missiles you have to cut there standing power. A MEch with 4 AC 5 featuring 4 tons of ammunition is still deadly - for the first seconds in combat - but thats it - extreme frontloading of damage. But when you waste a shot it will come back later and hurt you.