42 replies to this topic

[Alcom Isst]

wanderer, on 12 February 2014 - 06:32 PM, said:

As for 100-tonners with lots-o-ballistics...it won't be the Atlas. Irritatingly enough, not only does it lack a high-ballistics model, most 100-tonners that qualify don't come along for years or have too few variants to qualify, like the Thunder Hawk.

[Craig Steele]

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 09:48 PM, said:

Sorry Man... more than 22 DHS doesn't fit!!! I'm not pretending to do countinuos Alpha strikes, 3linked large lasers are just half my potential Alpha! A full alpha with 6 lasers is not possible to do in any way...

Try putting a 400 engine in, that gives you 6 for free so now you only need to fit in 4, 12 slots. Damn easy.

[dario03]

A different way would be to add weapons to the game. And I think LL could use a range increase, like to 540m. Also maybe bump up the alpha limit to 3.
Then add a new energy weapon in between the ML and LL. Something like
3 tons
1 or 2 crits (probably go with 2)
7 damage
400m range
5.5 heat
3.15 cooldown
3 or 4 alpha limit

And why would anyone take a standard engine if a XL just lost 25% of its power when a side torso is destroyed? The weight savings would let you put in a much bigger engine so that wouldn't even matter much since you would be faster at the start. Like a Atlas with a standard 300 could instead run a XL 370 for about the same weight and with 25% speed loss would only be about 4kph slower than the fresh standard 300. You lose a bit of crit space in the side torsos but you also gain more free spots for added engine heatsinks. Even with a higher percentage of speed loss the XL already gives a pretty big advantage to running it so the risk of side torso death is a pretty decent balance. Besides the clan mechs with XL engines will be able to survive one side torso destruction but they have the limitation of only running the engine they come with.

Edited by dario03, 12 February 2014 - 10:29 PM.

[ACH75]

Domoneky, on 12 February 2014 - 08:37 PM, said:

Ok let me lay out some things kiddo. Your forgetting the most important weapon to an Atlas. Team mates. The Atlas is suppose to be a nasty Mech that takes damage and dishes it out in kind but only so much. That's where team mates come in. They can add their own firepower or start blasting away at the squishy backside while the target focuses on you. Also these changes you have are utterly ridiculous and this is coming from an Atlas pilot. The builds you fight against come with serious drawbacks. the UAC 5 'Phract for instance is completely ammo dependent. Twin Gauss JagerMechs have thin armor and XL Engines. That's the beauty of it. You have to choose what you sacrifice to gain in something else. My Atlas for example is set up for fire support. 2x ERLL 1x LRM 10 with Artimis, 1x Gauss rifle, ECM, STD 325, STD Armor and Endo Steel. What did I sacrifice? Speed, short range firepower. What did I gain? Providing long range fire support to allies, Longevity, Provide ECM cover and jamming, Indirect fire weapon. With all these I still depend on my lighter more agile allies to help me fight off the quicker enemy. Your build and penalties are rightfully justified. To be free of ammo dependence requires high heat. however your ideas about changing the Atlas Hardpoints is just....silly. Your gonna have to jut learn to either Adapt to your high heat build or Adapt your Mech to be less Hot.

You're right... playing with a well organized premade Team is for sure the best option and even more funny while
crushing random PUG players!!!

Anyway I'll soon try to play some organized matches to see if this game can take my interest on a further level.

I like this game even whit his many flaws but you all can't convince me that is perfectly balanced as it is right now!!!

And another thing You should keep in mind is that this game will not have long life without more substantial enhancements... The Developers won't simply gain money forever without putting very much more efforts in order to keep alive the attention of a large "financial" community! :I

[GalaxyBluestar]

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

...and in the End... I WANT A 4 TORSO BALLISTIC HARDPOINT'S ATLAS to unleash the
fury of 4 Ultra AC5!!!!!!!!!! The ATLAS should be The KING of Damage and not just a nerfed Giant Turtle!!!

join the que for one of these
annihilator

mauler

[ACH75]

Craig Steele, on 12 February 2014 - 10:01 PM, said:

Try putting a 400 engine in, that gives you 6 for free so now you only need to fit in 4, 12 slots. Damn easy.

With a 400 STD you cannot mount 6 Large lasers The worst problem is that the heat maximum limit is simply not high enough to handle so much heat...

[ACH75]

GalaxyBluestar, on 12 February 2014 - 10:53 PM, said:

join the que for one of these annihilator mauler

...and i'd like very much to have The KODIAK and The Stone Rhino!!! Good Ghost Bear's Lecacy times...

[Craig Steele]

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 10:54 PM, said:

With a 400 STD you cannot mount 6 Large lasers The worst problem is that the heat maximum limit is simply not high enough to handle so much heat...

Correct, so you're finally coming to understand the concept of balancing.

[ACH75]

dario03, on 12 February 2014 - 10:19 PM, said:

A different way would be to add weapons to the game. And I think LL could use a range increase, like to 540m. Also maybe bump up the alpha limit to 3. Then add a new energy weapon in between the ML and LL. Something like 3 tons 1 or 2 crits (probably go with 2) 7 damage 400m range 5.5 heat 3.15 cooldown 3 or 4 alpha limit And why would anyone take a standard engine if a XL just lost 25% of its power when a side torso is destroyed? The weight savings would let you put in a much bigger engine so that wouldn't even matter much since you would be faster at the start. Like a Atlas with a standard 300 could instead run a XL 370 for about the same weight and with 25% speed loss would only be about 4kph slower than the fresh standard 300. You lose a bit of crit space in the side torsos but you also gain more free spots for added engine heatsinks. Even with a higher percentage of speed loss the XL already gives a pretty big advantage to running it so the risk of side torso death is a pretty decent balance. Besides the clan mechs with XL engines will be able to survive one side torso destruction but they have the limitation of only running the engine they come with.

It was just an idea to discuss... for sure it must have some penalty but dying instantly losing a side torso is for me unacceptable!!!

Another idea maybe be that losing a side torso will damage the CT engine by 5 or 7 hitpoints...

[NextGame]

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

Hello Guys,

I'm very disappointed with some weapon's weight balance especially for the Lasers,

don't you think that the gap between Medium Lasers (1tons) and ER/LARGE (5tons)

is too exagerated?

My suggestion is:

3tons for LARGE Lasers

4tons for ER LARGE Lasers

4tons for LARGE PULSE Lasers

5tons PPC

6tons ER PPC

They have already enough handicaps in heat management and ghost heat!


Double Heatsinks should dissipate a little more than just 1,4, i say 1,5 and the

ones stored in the engine's sockets should dissipate 2,0 like the built in one's.

My Bore's Head demands it!!! A Big Pig like that with 6 Lasers hardpoints cannot

properly handle the heat generated by 3+3 linked LARGE Lasers even with 22 total DHS!!!


Also XL Engines need to be more balanced!!! instead of sharing the whole engine HP they should at least have 15 HP for each part and if one is destroyed it should simply scale down the total power generated by the Engine, maybe -25% less power for each torso part destroyed.

...and in the End... I WANT A 4 TORSO BALLISTIC HARDPOINT'S ATLAS to unleash the
fury of 4 Ultra AC5!!!!!!!!!! The ATLAS should be The KING of Damage and not just a nerfed Giant Turtle!!!

Didn't realise that it was international bad idea's for MechWarrior week.

No.

[Craig Steele]

NextGame, on 12 February 2014 - 11:23 PM, said:

Didn't realise that it was international bad idea's for MechWarrior week.

No.

Are you referring to the tweet on 10 v 12?

[NextGame]

Craig Steele, on 12 February 2014 - 11:27 PM, said:

Are you referring to the tweet on 10 v 12?

Hell yes, that's another stupid idea that seems to have reared its ugly head this week, a candidate for winning the Winter Olympic gold medal for bad ideas, atop the pile of gibberish about ppcs etc that are littering the forum this morning.

Edited by NextGame, 12 February 2014 - 11:32 PM.

[Craig Steele]

NextGame, on 12 February 2014 - 11:31 PM, said:

Hell yes, that's another stupid idea that seems to have reared its ugly head this week, a candidate for winning the Winter Olympic gold medal for bad ideas, atop the pile of gibberish about ppcs etc that are littering the forum this morning.

lol, I thought as much. I'll leave that content on the other thread so this one can stay on topic

[Noesis]

@OP I'm with you about improving heat dissipation as this has nerfed more managed builds and convinced more people to run Mechs in more alpha firing orientations. It is also less by comparison to TT with improved capacity by comparison. This with some increased heat values and the Ghost heat means that overall the application of managed weapons dependent on heat are less viable. It also means that Ballistics have a better arrangement with their weapons. Especially when you consider that overall rate of fire has been considerably increased and lasers now have an interesting mechanic with their beams/pulses that spreads the damage over time reducing their effectiveness.

As such energy are not useless but are under performing in comparison to other weapons. We also have issues of combining PPCs with other ballistics to get a good hybrid build here for good alpha where the offset of little heat with ballistics allows the use of multiple PPC with them.

Overall there is nothing wrong with the tonnage requirements or build mechanics for energy weapons. And to keep at least some useful convention and baseline from TT with their build characteristics is helpful as this is an inherent balancer for Mech Configurations that is tried and tested. It is the other weapon characteristics as to how they perform when on the Mech, or how they are applied that is more of an issue with the relative differences between a TT round based game with dice throws and a simulation that use real time in MWO.

As such I do agree their is scope to reduce the heat values of some of the laser weapons to help with longevity with more managed builds. These values do not need to major changes and could ideally just be subtle ones to help with the disparity that has been changed with the interpretations to MWO. This more apparent with pulse lasers which for their weight and height generation with limited range really does not make them attractive to use. This more so apparent in a game where ranged weapons have a predominance (this again due to a change to TT comparisons and ballistics getting a range boost to x3 values instead of x2).

As such I think heat wise ER/PPCs are in a good place. But Lasers and pulses could all do with some mild heat reduction tuning, more so pulses. To some extent the idea of improving range slightly for pulses might help also but keeping a reason to have lasers with their comparatively better range.

As lasers are predominantly a useful weapon for lights and mediums this would help to raise their profile slightly which is needed imho. Lights be relatively fragile and Mediums generally needing a place on the board at all. And these Mechs certainly don't have the same alpha potential as larger Mechs nor does their build formats allows for significant multiple ranged weapons in the current meta. So the absence of performance in their better damage over time as opposed to alpha builds for these Mechs means they cannot perform as well in their more desired roles.

Overall it may be more beneficial across the board to simply increase external DHS values to 1.5 to compensate for the relatively nerfed dissipation we have in MWO. And whilst helping every build that can apply DHS, this will help to encourage heat dependent builds to at least try and run more effective managed arrangements.

To reiterate I don't see a need for a huge change here and likely only needs fine tuning to see an improvement.

[stjobe]

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

I'm very disappointed with some weapon's weight balance especially for the Lasers

There's much balance work that needs to be done, however the weight of the weapons aren't one of them.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

don't you think that the gap between Medium Lasers (1tons) and ER/LARGE (5tons)

is too exagerated?

No.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

My suggestion is:[snip]

The weight of a weapon is only one factor in the total balance of that weapon. What are your suggestions for beam duration, damage per tick (and total damage), heat per shot, range, and critical slots? I mean, just lowering the weight is just plain buffing them, not balancing them.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

They have already enough handicaps in heat management and ghost heat!

Heat management is not a handicap, it should be an integral part of the game, and frankly we need more of it. I suggest the implementation of proper BattleTech heat penalties starting at 50% heat or so.

Ghost heat is ridiculous and needs to go, on that we agree. However, I also see the need to re-design the heat system so that we CAN remove ghost heat.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

Double Heatsinks should dissipate a little more than just 1,4, i say 1,5 and the

ones stored in the engine's sockets should dissipate 2,0 like the built in one's.

All DHS should dissipate 2.0. Period. That they don't is a testament to the failure of PGI to implement a proper heat system (as is ghost heat).

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

My Bore's Head demands it!!! A Big Pig like that with 6 Lasers hardpoints cannot

properly handle the heat generated by 3+3 linked LARGE Lasers even with 22 total DHS!!!

Well, 6x8=48 heat even using TT values, so 6 LL can't be cooled even with 22 2.0 DHS. Of course the broken MWO heat system can't manage it.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

Also XL Engines need to be more balanced!!! instead of sharing the whole engine HP they should at least have 15 HP for each part and if one is destroyed it should simply scale down the total power generated by the Engine, maybe -25% less power for each torso part destroyed.

We all want crits on internal components to actually do something; in TT you'd get extra heat for each engine crit. However, that's not XL exclusive, and I don't think XL engines need special rules regarding that.

ACH75, on 12 February 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

...and in the End... I WANT A 4 TORSO BALLISTIC HARDPOINT'S ATLAS to unleash the
fury of 4 Ultra AC5!!!!!!!!!! The ATLAS should be The KING of Damage and not just a nerfed Giant Turtle!!!

Funny that you think 4xUAC/5 is the "KING of damage", but a combination of AC/20, SRMs, and MLs are not.

In my book that says something about the weapon balance of MWO, and that something isn't nice.

In the end though, it seems like you could do with a little more thought about balance and how your suggestions would impact the game not just for you but for others.

Oh, and perhaps learn a little something about the BattleTech Universe. It's a universe some of us have loved for nigh-on 30 years now, and it has certain elements that you just can't change without it becoming NOT BattleTech any more.

[The Basilisk]

I think one of the main balancing Problems is the fact that all to many rules and twists of the tabletop were ignored.

Balancing in the Battletech tabletop wasn't just made by balancing weight, heat, range and ammo consumption of the weapons.

-- A very important point ( that certainly never will find its way into a MW - Game ) is that IS - Mechs aren't customizable without the support of a fullblown military base. ( engine and key komponents)
The only elements that could be changed are like weapons. ( MPulse for MLaser, ER for normal large and smaler for larger missle launchers )

-- Next and a very, very important point in TT is the availability and costs of equipment.
Maintenance and Ammunition costs were introduced in MWO in its closed BETA but the .... how should is put it ..... inaptitude, incompetence and unwillingness to create SANE Mech builds of many so called hardcore players created a shitstorm and PGI removed this mighty and very very important balancing tool. ( LRMs should be a mighty and very very powerful long range weapon, NOT SUPPORT. The only reason to tune down their use is ammo costs and ammo availability. Spending more than a ton of LRM ammunition in a game should beggar you. Gauss the same. Very powerfull but ridiculus hard to get and very, very expensive)

Your role in MWO is that of an indipendent Mechwarrior ( yea still not implemented ) either affilated with a merc corps or with a house military unit. Your purpose in this game is to get the cash flowing and get more out of a combat then you need for repairs and rearming.
And thats the balancing point.

MONEY Not realmoney ingame C-Bills you have to generate through playing missions.

All that fiddeling with heat and weapons could be circumvented by saying as it is and as it should be.
You want more BANG ? Give me more BUGS.

Edited by The Basilisk, 13 February 2014 - 01:41 AM.

[Willard Phule]

Something that hasn't been mentioned here is the subject of slot limitations on hardpoints.

MW3 was set up similar to tabletop when it came to customization of 'mechs.
MW4 introduced the concept of "Hardpoints," but each one had a certain number of slots allocated to it.
MW:O kept the hardpoint system but allows you to put whatever will fit in the location

Is there a problem with the 2 Gauss Jager build? Put slot limitations for the hard points into it so you can only fit 1 Gauss.

Is there a problem with the 4 ERPPC Stalker? Put slot limitations on a couple of the energy hardpoints.

Someone mentioned that "they need to put something between the ML and LL" earlier (sorry, it's early and I barely remember context...let alone names...before I finish my coffee). There is. As well as there being an ER Large Laser, there's also ER Mediums and ER Smalls....and, correct me if I'm wrong, they're all part of "Losttech" from the memory core found by the Gray Death Legion (so was the ERPPC, I think).

Even though we already have "Foundtech" available right now, one would hope that the rest of that would be released sometime prior to the Clans.

[Mycrus]

Iz all about the TT

[ACH75]

stjobe, on 13 February 2014 - 12:53 AM, said:

Funny that you think 4xUAC/5 is the "KING of damage", but a combination of AC/20, SRMs, and MLs are not.

I like to think at ATLAS like a semovent heavy fire turret

A CTF with triple Ultra AC/5 (if not jams) will have a DPS of 60 over 3 seconds, that means that it can blast an atlas side torso
in no time and finish him very quickly! and worse if it shoots you in the back! Is this not overpowered?

In my opinion those insane Builds like Twinn Gauss, Twinn AC/20, Triple AC/5 simply ruins the pug experience and needs
to be forbidden! ...if not let's add my 4 Ultra AC/5 ATLAS to the wish list so i can properly deal with those motherf...rs!

[The Basilisk]

Willard Phule, on 13 February 2014 - 03:35 AM, said:

Something that hasn't been mentioned here is the subject of slot limitations on hardpoints.

MW3 was set up similar to tabletop when it came to customization of 'mechs.
MW4 introduced the concept of "Hardpoints," but each one had a certain number of slots allocated to it.
MW:O kept the hardpoint system but allows you to put whatever will fit in the location

Is there a problem with the 2 Gauss Jager build? Put slot limitations for the hard points into it so you can only fit 1 Gauss.

Is there a problem with the 4 ERPPC Stalker? Put slot limitations on a couple of the energy hardpoints.

Someone mentioned that "they need to put something between the ML and LL" earlier (sorry, it's early and I barely remember context...let alone names...before I finish my coffee). There is. As well as there being an ER Large Laser, there's also ER Mediums and ER Smalls....and, correct me if I'm wrong, they're all part of "Losttech" from the memory core found by the Gray Death Legion (so was the ERPPC, I think).

Even though we already have "Foundtech" available right now, one would hope that the rest of that would be released sometime prior to the Clans.

Basically you are right.
The Clans build upon Starleague high tech.
What we got now is a partialy regain of this StarLeague Tech
ATM there are even some SL - Tech pieces in game that should not be there. ( XL - Engines weren't generaly available only certain engine ratings)
ER Variants of lower rating lasers did not come until the end of the Steiner - Davion Civil war period. Thats far in the future the current games point of view. The Clan invasion has started last may.