Rebas Kradd, on 05 January 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:
The necessary drawback to AC20 boats already exists: they usually need an XL engine. If pugs were regularly able to coordinate, these and every other boat out there would be regarded as the death traps they really are.
Unfortunately, the basic mechanics of the game don't really allow enemies to exploit that vulnerability. Screen shake, LRM5 spam, blinding smoke, and the "stick together" mentality ensure that any attempts to get to an AC40 Jager will be futile as long as it doesn't wander off alone. And forget any chance of communicating or coordinating fire on a specific target.
I agree. The drawbacks are to weak - or the damage rating to high, it's the same. I don't care if my Jagermech doesnt survive 8 out of 10 matches due to XL engine explosion if I kill 2-5 enemies before going down. I fulfilled my role and I can do this on almost any match in PUG. It's rare that I die with 0 or 1 kill only. The AC40 Jagermechs role is to knock out several targets quickly and efficiently in close combat. His enemies are Missile Boats + Lights or guys like Hunchbacks that can laser away your side torso in seconds. But this is not about Jagermechs, it's about Laser weapons vs Ballistic Weapons/PPCs.
I guess the AC40 Jagermech is even more troublesome in 12man matches where people coordinate and communicate.
The question is: does MWO need weapons that deliver these amounts of damage so fastly and easily? Is it fun or is it game breaking? and I include myself as a new Jagermech pilot - it is not fun to terminate a third of the enemy team alone without too much effort, it feels wrong and makes the game more stale. Same is true for Gauss/PPC boats or LRM 60 boats. Such builds did not exist in TT as far as I know, probably for a reason. I used an Archer back in the days: 2 LRM20 launchers were considered pure terror back in the days.
I agree MWO is a FPS with some simulation aspects and not a tactical board game. But I see no reason why it couldn't stick to the roots of BT, stay within reasonable amounts of damage/weapon loads and not being turned into another Battlerfield clone.
MWO is the only FPS I play just because it is slower paced and has potential for tactics compared to those boring and hectic shooters out there where you race at 50kph (on foot) through a level you have to know by heart just to be the first to headshot a pixel sized enemy on the other side with your ultimo sniper rifle. These games have no soul at all and all this competitive talk is ********. People compete at clicking a mouse button faster than others, oh my.
Tactics though have almost nothing to do with the weapon mechanics and ratings. It's maps (conditions) and game modes (goals) that tactics have to be built around by the players. Unfortunately maps and game modes of MWO are...plain.
Still I argue that if you create an FPS game based on an existing TT game and you take over 60% of the weapon ratings from that TT game but change 40% of the other ratings pretty arbitrarily, the outcome can look like MWO.
But I doubt that many people at PGI would agree with me. They know BT very well and they have chosen different paths because they want to make something new and unique, which is ok. BT balancing wasn't done in a year, too (some argue ever). I just suggested that BT delivers a very solid base for weapon ratings that work and I just don't understand why they deviated in certain areas by multipliers x2.5 (remember AC20 in TT: 20 damage/10 secs, AC20 in MWO: 50 damage/10 secs).