1080 replies to this topic

[Cimarb]

Tombstoner, on 08 January 2014 - 07:50 AM, said:

i do feel that TTK is still way to low and could stand tweeking up a bit.

That is the problem. We just need to compromise on a solution and PGI needs to implement that solution. Two very difficult things to make happen...

[Joseph Mallan]

Tombstoner, on 08 January 2014 - 08:20 AM, said:

That would enable snap shots with gauss. it would under cut PGI's effort in defining gauss as a sniper and let it return to being bundled with PPC's. As it is i almost never see Gauss anymore. so the next best thing is to lower other autocannon round speeds. i just with the did that with the ac-2.

If your after symmetry with very similar weapons like auto-cannons. Then gauss would need the least lead angle followed by the ac-20 then ac-10, ac-5 and the most lead time should be for the ac-2. lead time meaning slower round speeds. but its actually opposite. round speed decreases from ac-2 to ac-20. weapon ranges made sense in TT but as it is in MWO they seem bizarre. Why is the ac-20 being shoe horned into being a brawler weapon when the ac-2 can function well at all ranges.

Actually that would make it BE a sniper weapon once again. All the delay in being a sniper goes in BEFORE the trigger pull not after.

Sniping:
Wait ...
wait...
wait...
NOWSqeezeBANG!

[Cimarb]

Tombstoner, on 08 January 2014 - 08:20 AM, said:

If your after symmetry with very similar weapons like auto-cannons. Then gauss would need the least lead angle followed by the ac-20 then ac-10, ac-5 and the most lead time should be for the ac-2. lead time meaning slower round speeds. but its actually opposite. round speed decreases from ac-2 to ac-20. weapon ranges made sense in TT but as it is in MWO they seem bizarre. Why is the ac-20 being shoe horned into being a brawler weapon when the ac-2 can function well at all ranges.

Because the AC20 has the largest amount of front-loaded damage in the game, making it the outlier when it comes to damage delivery. Currently, ALL autocannons are AC20s by classification, with the difference being how that damage is delivered: from quick 2 damage hits to slow 20 damage hits, with the other versions somewhere in the middle, but every one of them doing (roughly) 20 damage every five seconds - an AC5 is the lowest at 16.67 and the AC20 the highest at 25, which makes them all classified as AC20s by definition. This discrepancy would be noticeable if it weren't for the front-loaded damage issue, which makes larger damage weapons seem "overpowered" compared to smaller ones that spread their damage like lasers and missiles do.

[Tombstoner]

Joseph Mallan, on 08 January 2014 - 08:24 AM, said:

Actually that would make it BE a sniper weapon once again. All the delay in being a sniper goes in BEFORE the trigger pull not after.

Sniping:
Wait ...
wait...
wait...
NOWSqeezeBANG!

Some of the best sniper implementations for FPS involves adding in the take a breath and pause for added stability then fire before passing out mechanic. The charge up delay in MWO could be considered an analog. i hate it cause it interferes with good usage, but something was needed due to its synergy in bundled alphas. i think the change up on the ppc would have ben a better choice. I think forcing a sniper roll or a brawler role onto a game system derived in the 80's is not reasonable.

The short rage of the ac-20 in TT was pert of its balance. stay out 9 hexes and your good. get cliped once as a light and you just lost your arm and toros. in MWO i can soak 2 of em. i'm trying to view auto cannon implementation within The context of MWO, but the price ac-20 paid during the convertion was too steep. i really think its overly nerfed relative to other balistics.

I think ac-20's should be doing 30 points of damage with a much longer max range and damage drop off. the tonage paid for 2 is 24 tons. forget heat for a moment and you can buy 3 erppcs for 21 tones. so 24 tons get you 40 damage but a short max range with damage drop off. for 21 tons you get a 30 point shot with a much greater max range and much better damage drop off. its like the game is saying if you want to brawl you must use x weapon only.

The proper way to compare weapons is to presume a flat field with 2 mechs at 4000 meters closing range, with 100% chance of hitting. that way you dont have any interactions with terrain or player skill messing up the data. you get a clean look at what your buying with your tonnage.

3 ppcs will beat 2 x ac-20 because of range and drop off. add onto that the heat cap system and your basically dead before the ac-20 are usable.

How is this balanced?

Then you can start over and repeat with the mechs starting distance closer to each other simulating the effects Terran has on engagements ranges and TTK

To summarize the game lacks a comprehensive set of cost functions. max weapon ranges are nothing like TT and shouldn't be, but if your gona change things and add damage drop off, you need to go all out and adapt TT to the needs of MWO. not this Hodge podge.

Why on earth long range missiles are still at 1000 meter's but you can kill with direct fire at close to 2000m
add in damage drop off to lrm's after 1000m with say 50% survival at 1250m zero @ 1500m

The lack of a comprehensive set of cost function is the critical flaw with weapons. its the source of all balancing issue. add to that the almost complete lack of data and it fubars into subjective balancing by feel.

[Joseph Mallan]

Tombstoner, on 08 January 2014 - 10:33 AM, said:

*A lot of good points*

IF they say that a Gauss is a long range weapon with a pre fire charge I have no problem with the Gauss. But to call it a Sniper weapon and then have to wait for it to fire after you pull the trigger is misinformation.

[Lightfoot]

Nope, the Mechs are just too weak in the areas likely to be shot. There is nothing strange or wrong in the way damage gets applied, it's just double what the mechs can reasonably withstand. I have played all the previous MechWarrior games so I know this is accurate when comparing MWO to them.

I think a better way to think of damage spread is that all the weapons have a footprint. Some big like missiles, some small like AC's. Now if you give them all spread, you turn them into an LB-X style footprint. So if that happened light mechs would just go poof because they would always take some damage on every shot like they do now from LB-X weapons. When you increase spread you lower the need for Accuracy because the damage footprint is so much larger that you won't miss. I think that would make MWO weapons into basically just one weapon with a different graphic applied.

If you gave them all different aim points you would get something like the two reticle system MWO has now, but they added a toggle so players could turn that off, so I guess alot of players didn't like it.

[Tombstoner]

Joseph Mallan, on 08 January 2014 - 10:38 AM, said:

IF they say that a Gauss is a long range weapon with a pre fire charge I have no problem with the Gauss. But to call it a Sniper weapon and then have to wait for it to fire after you pull the trigger is misinformation.

So Its the small charge up window that you have an issue with. you need to anticipate when your going to fire... charge it and then fire. its not really any different then holding your breath. you still have the choice to fire. you just cant make snap shots. That is also why the breath mechanic is needed for games with detailed aiming systems. snap shots are imprecise, holding your breath gives you the accuracy needed to use the precision of the weapon.

The reality is all direct fire weapons in MWO have the accuracy and precision that real life snipers would snipe you for.
all that's lacking is range. A sniper weapon to my knowledge is a weapon specifically designed for maximum precision.
The definition of accuracy is how far off from your target did the round hit. precision is the area where multiple rounds hit.
you want tight groups that land on center. to do that weapons must be single shot, rifled, with heavy rounds. The muzzle velocity needed can vary but is desired to be high. higher = shorter flight times = less time to drift due to air currents and target movement. it also means more kinetic energy down range. all that combined produces the reliability needed to put one shot on target at max range. any weapon can be use to snipe, badly

A single ac-20 round should by the nature of the round being huge and fired from a very precise weapon have a much longer range then what PGI has assigned to it. In fact the ac-20 should be firing multiple small caliber rounds to justify the short max range and damage drop off. leaving the ac-2 to be a single large caliber high velocity round that would justify its superior range, damage drop off and muzzle velocity. just lower the fire rate to simulate the single action nature of what makes a sniper weapon and it solves some balance issues.

To me the roll of a sniper weapon in MWO should have been filled by the ac-2. just like it was in TT. Gauss was a great brawler weapon. low heat means you can use it unrestricted in a fight. exactly whats needed in a brawl. it's like running out of breath in a fist fight with 3 more people. If the game needs to decouple PPC and Gauss then move the charge up to the ppc. it makes more sense for ppcs to charge up. let the Gauss be a brawler and sniper weapon great at both ends of the engagement ranges and balanced by ammo and large tonnage and space needs

Over all the implementation of auto cannons is reversed from reality, so a little charge up delay is not so bad in that context.

[Riptor]

Darth Bane001, on 22 December 2013 - 04:12 PM, said:

Only burst weapons I know of are srms, ultra cannons, and pulse lasers. Why would a single cannon be a burst? Your logic is beyond reasonable.

The game is unbalanced but not breakingly so. Otherwise no one would play it. Eventually they will give us a high power laser like the assault laser but takes a ton of heat.

Shows how much you know. Autocannons were rarely single shot cannons. They fired a stream of explosive grenades at their target, their ammo was actually in casettes and not shells. Each shot would empty a whole casette of grenades in a burst.

What you think of are mech rifles, primitive cannons akin to what we have on MBTs today.

[Tombstoner]

Lightfoot, on 08 January 2014 - 03:06 PM, said:

Nope, the Mechs are just too weak in the areas likely to be shot. There is nothing strange or wrong in the way damage gets applied, it's just double what the mechs can reasonably withstand. I have played all the previous MechWarrior games so I know this is accurate when comparing MWO to them. I think a better way to think of damage spread is that all the weapons have a footprint. Some big like missiles, some small like AC's. Now if you give them all spread, you turn them into an LB-X style footprint. So if that happened light mechs would just go poof because they would always take some damage on every shot like they do now from LB-X weapons. When you increase spread you lower the need for Accuracy because the damage footprint is so much larger that you won't miss. I think that would make MWO weapons into basically just one weapon with a different graphic applied. If you gave them all different aim points you would get something like the two reticle system MWO has now, but they added a toggle so players could turn that off, so I guess alot of players didn't like it.

I think a lot of players dint know how to use that feature. its painful to watch as there weapon fire hits 2 completely different locations cause they didn't set up the arm weapons to fire button one and torso to fire button two. possibly giving up in frustration and rage quitting.

LBX receives an increased chance to cause critical hits due to its 10 one point hits. this can be used to off set any damage foot print issues. giving burst fire to auto cannons would by necessity be offset by vastly lower crit rates then the LBX other wise it would be way to powerful.

The thing about this game is that it's reputed to be skill based and skill deserves to be rewarded, but fundamentally grouped weapons bundled into one large front loaded alpha lowers the skill needs to deliver max damage. hit scan weapons require more skill to use effectively. so I dont see anything wrong with realigning all weapons in this game to all have some form of hit scan element to there nature, other than sniper weapons. sniper weapons should be the only front loaded weapon in the game other then missiles of course.

[Khobai]

Quote

Nope, the Mechs are just too weak in the areas likely to be shot. There is nothing strange or wrong in the way damage gets applied, it's just double what the mechs can reasonably withstand.

You are correct. And the easiest solution to that would be a simple internal structure buff. PGI has already said theyre looking into it and I think most players seem to agree an internal structure buff would be beneficial to the game (increases time to kill, reduces pinpoint damage potential, makes critical hits matter more, reduces one shot kills on locusts/commandos, etc...)

However I still feel PGI needs to reevaluate how certain weapons deal damage. Namely autocannons and PPCs, because those are the weapons that allow 30+ damage alphastrikes to a single location. I believe something needs to be done to make these weapons spread th

Quote

The thing about this game is that it's reputed to be skill based and skill deserves to be rewarded, but fundamentally grouped weapons bundled into one large front loaded alpha lowers the skill needs to deliver max damage.eir damage around a little more (not as extreme of a spread as lasers, but enough of a spread to balance them)

I agree. An AC/20 would be more skill based if it fired a 4 shot burst and you had to land all 4 shots in the same location in order to do 20 damage to that location. MWO has such a low skill cap right now that I really dont see any problem with raising that skill cap slightly.

Edited by Khobai, 08 January 2014 - 04:32 PM.

[Varent]

Cimarb, on 08 January 2014 - 08:22 AM, said:

That is the problem. We just need to compromise on a solution and PGI needs to implement that solution. Two very difficult things to make happen...

I guess this is where I majorly disagree. I feel TTK is in a very good spot. If it was longer games would grow into stagnant slug matches.

[Lightfoot]

Tombstoner, on 08 January 2014 - 04:03 PM, said:

I think a lot of players dint know how to use that feature. its painful to watch as there weapon fire hits 2 completely different locations cause they didn't set up the arm weapons to fire button one and torso to fire button two. possibly giving up in frustration and rage quitting.

LBX receives an increased chance to cause critical hits due to its 10 one point hits. this can be used to off set any damage foot print issues. giving burst fire to auto cannons would by necessity be offset by vastly lower crit rates then the LBX other wise it would be way to powerful.

The thing about this game is that it's reputed to be skill based and skill deserves to be rewarded, but fundamentally grouped weapons bundled into one large front loaded alpha lowers the skill needs to deliver max damage. hit scan weapons require more skill to use effectively. so I dont see anything wrong with realigning all weapons in this game to all have some form of hit scan element to there nature, other than sniper weapons. sniper weapons should be the only front loaded weapon in the game other then missiles of course.

MechWarrior has always used Groupfire because the Mechs carry weapon arrays, not single weapons, although they might carry just one of a certain weapon. MWO is just not balancing the damage and Mech toughness correctly. That's all there is to it. PGI is trying to nerf their way to a balance, but the Mechs are just too weak for this to work and the game is starting to break apart from too many nerfs.

But suppose they did block Groupfire even further than Heat Scale does now. How would you get through firing more than 3-4 single-fired weapons when the longest recharge is 4 seconds? That kind of nerfing imposes a new non-MechWarrior gameplay style that many would flatly reject and leave MWO in a giant jumpship.

And making all the weapons into SRMs and LB-X spread damage footprints would mean they were all the same except for the graphics used. And you would never miss, which would crush Light mechs. Right now you think, "do I want the Lb-X for light mechs or the AC10 for big easy to hit stuff?" That decision is a key balance point.

I am just concerned that gameplay is breaking down due to a lack of possible diversity options caused by too many nerfs and too much homoginization. You want the weapon types to remain strategic and tactically different.

Edited by Lightfoot, 08 January 2014 - 08:48 PM.

[Sandpit]

Lightfoot, on 08 January 2014 - 08:46 PM, said:

I am just concerned that gameplay is breaking down due to a lack of possible diversity options caused by too many nerfs and too much homoginization. You want the weapon types to remain strategic and tactically different.

Truer words....

[YueFei]

Varent, on 08 January 2014 - 04:39 PM, said:

I guess this is where I majorly disagree. I feel TTK is in a very good spot. If it was longer games would grow into stagnant slug matches.

I don't think so, since health doesn't regenerate in this game. Increasing health by even a small amount can help prevent insta-gibs or crippling burst damage, without dragging things on. For example, a 20% increase to health would let a mech survive one more solid hit, which increases TTK by a few seconds if you derp around in the open like a {Dezgra}. You still have to dive for cover if you wanna save yourself, this just lets you survive one more burst of damage before losing a shoulder or dying.

I must also once again re-iterate that I think hitbox changes would help a lot. Some mechs are quite durable and spread damage well, like Shadowhawks and Victors. Other mechs, like the Awesome, die pretty quickly.

Maybe another thing they can do is give the non-JJ capable mech variants a faster acceleration/deceleration, so they can make better horizontal use of cover compared to JJ-equipped mechs, and spread damage better across their torso/arms (JJ-equipped mechs can make short hops to get some shots to hit their legs instead of the torso that the enemy was aiming for).

[Target Noodle]

Joseph Mallan, on 22 December 2013 - 02:33 PM, said:

Only thing that makes 'em game breaking is they are converging. Loosen that up and they will be fine.

I second this as a solution. Currently I don't notice a lack of convergence unless a mech is face hugging. Would be nice to see PPCs mounted on opposite arms criss cross as they fly out.

[YueFei]

Lightfoot, on 08 January 2014 - 08:46 PM, said:

And making all the weapons into SRMs and LB-X spread damage footprints would mean they were all the same except for the graphics used. And you would never miss, which would crush Light mechs. Right now you think, "do I want the Lb-X for light mechs or the AC10 for big easy to hit stuff?" That decision is a key balance point.

I gotta disagree with this, I've been driving Jenners for a while now, and while sandpaper weapons like LBX, lasers, and missiles will eventually kill me, they don't inspire the same kind of fear that single-hit weapons do. Those other weapons wear me down gradually, but it gives me time to assess the damage I'm taking, and time to disengage (after tossing a few shots of my own too). The instant-hit weapons can kill me in a single hit, and whether I get hit or not isn't something I can control, since I can't reactively see the projectile and dodge it, only jink violently and hope the other guy misses. Most of the time people miss, but there are crack shots (or lucky shots) who've killed or crippled me in a single shot. Taking a hit like that is catastrophic.

[Sandpit]

YueFei, on 08 January 2014 - 09:58 PM, said:

there are crack shots (or lucky shots) who've killed or crippled me in a single shot. Taking a hit like that is catastrophic.

Shouldn't crack shots and skilled players be rewarded for their skill though?

[Varent]

using an example just from what most people complain about, the ac20 jager. This mech has an alpha that will not outright cripple any mech with the exception of some lights and even then only if the hit is very lucky. That said I would not call that overpowering in any way. If you get caught out in the open or go around an unprotected corner you deserve to die. Period.

[YueFei]

Sandpit, on 08 January 2014 - 10:20 PM, said:

Shouldn't crack shots and skilled players be rewarded for their skill though?

I didn't say they shouldn't be rewarded, I was disagreeing with the notion that sandpaper weapons like LBX and lasers are better at killing Light mechs compared to precision weapons. I'm not frightened by LBX and lasers when I'm in my Jenner. Not that those weapons won't eventually kill me, it just gives me time to re-assess and bail if I have to. What I *am* scared of is PPCs, ACs, and Gauss.

Why is everyone here so damn touchy? As if they assume there is an argument lurking in every sentence someone makes.

Edited by YueFei, 08 January 2014 - 10:49 PM.

[Varent]

YueFei, on 08 January 2014 - 10:47 PM, said:

I didn't say they shouldn't be rewarded, I was disagreeing with the notion that sandpaper weapons like LBX and lasers are better at killing Light mechs compared to precision weapons. I'm not frightened by LBX and lasers when I'm in my Jenner. Not that those weapons won't eventually kill me, it just gives me time to re-assess and bail if I have to. What I *am* scared of is PPCs, ACs, and Gauss.

Why is everyone here so damn touchy? As if they assume there is an argument lurking in every sentence someone makes.

Why shouldn't lights fear large scale alpha? Isnt that part of being light pilot.