79 replies to this topic

[Joseph Mallan]

Ordellus, on 19 February 2014 - 02:25 AM, said:

If i'm understanding this correctly it not only limits the weapons that can be set into the same group.... but also limits the amount of damage a group of a certain type may do regardless of the weapons grouped.

And I have to say I like it.

Not I. I have several mechs on TT that can throw 50+ damage. My fav throws 75, All long range as well.

I don't like convergence,, but since we have double armor, being hit with a 30 point Alpha feels like being hit with a Gauss. That I have been facing for the better part of 28 years! AC40. Same effective pop as a TT AC20, So again, I don't complain to much because the LEVEL of damage is something I am used to. The amount we Alpha right now is fine. The targeting computer accuracy is Borked.

[Willard Phule]

Joseph Mallan, on 19 February 2014 - 02:38 AM, said:

Not I. I have several mechs on TT that can throw 50+ damage. My fav throws 75, All long range as well.

I don't like convergence,, but since we have double armor, being hit with a 30 point Alpha feels like being hit with a Gauss. That I have been facing for the better part of 28 years! AC40. Same effective pop as a TT AC20, So again, I don't complain to much because the LEVEL of damage is something I am used to. The amount we Alpha right now is fine. The targeting computer accuracy is Borked.

You don't even have to throw 50 points to be nasty if you're using Clantech and have a targeting computer. 2 CLarge Pulses and CGauss will go internal on all but the heaviest of Assaults' legs at ranges they can only begin to be able to engage at.

The whole ability to use Called Shots changes they dynamic completely. Which is, after all, kind of what we've got going on with MW:O. Since whatever we're firing goes to our crosshairs, we're pretty much using called shots.

[East Indy]

DV McKenna, on 19 February 2014 - 02:21 AM, said:

Believe me i have tried it, im a jump sniper by trade since MW4. Charge time weapons are not optimal for jump sniping.
Which is why they aren't used.

True - like it or not, PGI successfully raised the Gauss' skill floor and moved it to a different gameplay category. There's one potential "fudge" to these rules making Gauss affect Direct-Fire Instant category, but I think it's a safe bet that almost all players are simply not capable of pinpoint with a mix of Gauss and other weapons.

Moreover, dual Gauss not only has deep vulnerabilities when rushed, it wouldn't be easy to field with a 55-ish weigh limit average.

Willard Phule, on 19 February 2014 - 04:07 AM, said:

The whole ability to use Called Shots changes they dynamic completely. Which is, after all, kind of what we've got going on with MW:O. Since whatever we're firing goes to our crosshairs, we're pretty much using called shots.

You're right and in a way Joe is right. The problem with Joe's last sentence is that it doesn't look like convergence can be fixed, ever, so if pacing has to be enforced, it can be more consistent and clear than heat scale.

Edited by East Indy, 19 February 2014 - 05:58 AM.

[Anton Shiningstar]

Willard Phule, on 19 February 2014 - 04:07 AM, said:

You don't even have to throw 50 points to be nasty if you're using Clantech and have a targeting computer. 2 CLarge Pulses and CGauss will go internal on all but the heaviest of Assaults' legs at ranges they can only begin to be able to engage at.

The whole ability to use Called Shots changes they dynamic completely. Which is, after all, kind of what we've got going on with MW:O. Since whatever we're firing goes to our crosshairs, we're pretty much using called shots.

Yeah I can see this. Right now we get all teh perks of a Clan Targeting Computer without having to pay for it right now. It will be interesting to see how a CTC will improve our already ego inflating Convergence.

[Barantor]

Jaeger Gonzo, on 18 February 2014 - 05:11 PM, said:

search for Homelessbill targeting computer idea

[East Indy]

Barantor, on 19 February 2014 - 07:31 AM, said:

Same name, very different proposals. Bill's dynamic CoF required additional development even before reconciling all the problems inherent in the engine's physics. Hard limits can be derived from code already in the game and working reliably for months.

[stjobe]

So how about forced chain-fire then? As in, you can't fire more than one weapon at a time - unless you hit the "alpha" button, which is non-pinpoint and puts all your weapons on an extended cooldown.

Whoa, put down those torches and pitchforks and let me explain:

We have a problem with pin-point accuracy, perfect convergence, and excessive alpha-striking. Basically the most effective build is one that combines as heavy a pin-point alpha as possible, and delivers that alpha as often as possible.

The system I had in mind would allow you to either:
1. Chain-fire your weapons, or
2. Alpha your weapons.

If you chain-fired, you'd be cycling through all your weapons in 1-5 seconds. If you used the alpha button, an extra couple of seconds would be added to your cooldown to discourage alpha striking. Also, a cone of fire would be added for the alpha to simulate that you're more interested in just throwing damage down-range than take your time to place your shots. An alpha strike should be for those "oh shit" moments, not the normal way of dealing damage.

What would such a system achieve? It would:
1. Actively prevent pin-point massive damage (no more than 20 damage could be delivered instantly).
2. Spread damage out (since there would be 0.5-1.0 seconds between weapon firings).
3. Remove the need for Ghost Heat (mount all the PPCs you want, alpha them if you can).
4. Lower the tendency to alpha strike continuously, since you'd be able to deliver more damage by chain-firing
5. Raise the TTK by spreading damage out both in time and space, leading to all kinds of positive effects.
6. Force you to expose your front to the enemy if you want to put enough damage on him to do anything.

That's why the cone of fire on the alpha is important, otherwise it would just be alpha-wait-alpha-wait all over again, but if you could only get pin-point accuracy with individual weapons and not with alphas, that wouldn't happen.

Okay, grab those torches and pitchforks and go to town. It's just an idea

Edited by stjobe, 19 February 2014 - 08:10 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Willard Phule, on 19 February 2014 - 04:07 AM, said:

You don't even have to throw 50 points to be nasty if you're using Clantech and have a targeting computer. 2 CLarge Pulses and CGauss will go internal on all but the heaviest of Assaults' legs at ranges they can only begin to be able to engage at.

The whole ability to use Called Shots changes they dynamic completely. Which is, after all, kind of what we've got going on with MW:O. Since whatever we're firing goes to our crosshairs, we're pretty much using called shots.

Yeah... I know. I was just pointing that Most of the folks I gamed with liked power play. It took a very good friend (Lobsterback) to show me how fun Stock could be... Though it was so because I got more time to ham it up around the table.

[East Indy]

Quote

If you chain-fired, you'd be cycling through all your weapons in 1-5 seconds. If you used the alpha button, an extra couple of seconds would be added to your cooldown to discourage alpha striking. Also, a cone of fire would be added for the alpha to simulate that you're more interested in just throwing damage down-range than take your time to place your shots. An alpha strike should be for those "oh shit" moments, not the normal way of dealing damage.

No need for pitchforks! I don't know why people get up in arms over ideas. Anyway:

My first concern would be the severity of a penalty to discourage pre-heat-scale alphas, since the peek/JJ tactic entailed a pretty low rate of fire. (That would be some interesting data, looking at meta snipers over several thousand games.)

My second would be how chain-fire affected canon builds like the swayback, since total number of weapons would exceed individual cooldown. If forced to split salvos, players would probably accept their armament broken up into groups -- which brings us back to damage limits.

I agree in principle, though. Firing everything only makes sense from a balance/pacing standpoint when you're not guaranteed to zero in on one spot.

Edited by East Indy, 19 February 2014 - 08:27 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

stjobe, on 19 February 2014 - 08:09 AM, said:

An alpha strike should be for those "oh shit" moments, not the normal way of dealing damage.

30 years of Alpha here. i don' feel i should chance cause some folks don't like it. I always had he theory that having more weapons than I could effectively fire was a waste of tonnage. Range had a affect on this, and many 3025 builds I went with a Long or Short range range method. But by and large When you were in THAT range, I could hammer you with my full payload over and over.

Oh, and East... StJobe gives good debate, Whether I agree or disagree with him I still listen. He has many great ideas.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 19 February 2014 - 08:35 AM.

[Fut]

Roland, on 18 February 2014 - 03:52 PM, said:

Honestly, I'm not sure that's really true.

The fundamental basis for the weapons design in battletech is most definitely that SOME weapons are designed specifically for large, front loaded damage.. The AC20 and Gauss rifle come to mind.

And I think that the system actually can deal with those weapons fine.. what tends to break the whole model is the fact that you can take an arbitrary number of weapons, tape them all together, and create single "uber-weapons".

For instance, we can look through the history of balancing in MWO, and see how this specific issue has resulted in a multitude of balance changes which many people agree are bad. For instance, the medium laser was nerfed very early on back in closed beta... why was it nerfed? In small numbers, its original stats weren't too strong. What made it very strong was that you could boat a huge number of them on the Hunchback 4P. In that case, even though they had a burn time, the fact that you could stack NINE of them together made it such that you could still create a super strong weapon.. far stronger than was really intended for 9 tons of weaponry.

Or the PPC.. No one really complained about single PPC's.. ever. It wasn't until people started using 4 of them (or more) and started cranking out single hits that punched through your mech with 40 points all at once.

Or the AC20... A powerful weapon, but even so, the complaints tend to center around mechs which are combining the ac20 with another weapon... whether that be another AC20, or PPC"s, or whatever.

I think you are making a mistake in thinking that the answer is to simply make everything into DOT weapons like lasers... because you are failing to take into account that the one really different thing between mechwarrior (in all incarnations to date) and battletech is this fact that all your weapons magically combine to form super weapons... thus breaking all of the original weapons balance, as well as the armor model. Basically, the ability to combine weapons fire means you need to totally revamp the entire system.

One way to do this is to try to force players to land MORE shots to accomplish the same task... Ghost heat was a misguided attempt to do this. Paul's idea was that if you created ghost heat for firing 4 PPC's, that players would fire those weapons in two groups. But what he failed to account for was that folks would just combine DIFFERENT weapons to achieve exactly the same goal.. because that is how you win mechwarrior, and as long as you can accomplish that goal in ANY way, then that is what people will do. No one had some great love for PPC's... they just happened to use them in those configurations because they were the most effective. When that changed, they just moved to the next most effective setup. The fundamental game didn't change.

The OP's suggestion here actually seems like it would BETTER address that same issue... Because it'd really put a hard limit on how many weapons you could group on a firing group. It would much more directly, and transparently, force you to stagger your fire, and thus force you to land more shots... giving your target more opportunity to twist and soak damage, etc.

And at the same time, it doesn't force you to make weird changes to weapons, and try to make them all into DOT weapons like lasers.. because really, that change will be terrible... because it will just mean that lasers, with no ammo requirements and instant-hit capabilities, become totally dominant, just like they were in MW4.

The OP's suggestion would achieve the same things that you want to achieve... in that it will prevent single, large point damage shots... but it'll do it by limiting a mech's ability to fire more than a certain amount of weaponry.

What I like about such a suggestion though is that it doesn't harm a good player's ability to crank out a ton of damage onto a target... as long as they are good enough to keep landing shots on that same location.

Ultimately, it would be a simpler, more transparent, and much less easily sidestepped system for achieving what Ghost Heat tried to do... And hopefully, it would help eliminate the need to go around and continually gimp whatever weapon current fits into the large-alpha-strike duct-tape configuration.. I mean, that's why they nerfed the AC10, which really was a totally ridiculous move given how that weapon really wasn't even that good.

Damn. This was a great explanation of the problems currently facing MWO.
Everybody needs to read this, and really think about what you're saying.

[stjobe]

East Indy, on 19 February 2014 - 08:27 AM, said:

My first concern would be the severity of a penalty to discourage pre-heat-scale alphas, since the peek/JJ tactic entailed a pretty low rate of fire. (That would be some interesting data, looking at meta snipers over several thousand games.)

As I said, a number of seconds should be added to the alpha cooldown, but more importantly alphaing should incur a cone of fire - you can alpha, but the damage will be spread out. No more pop-tarting 40-50 point alphas to one location.

East Indy, on 19 February 2014 - 08:27 AM, said:

My second would be how chain-fire affected canon builds like the swayback, since total number of weapons would exceed individual cooldown. If forced to split salvos, players would probably accept their armament broken up into groups -- which brings us back to damage limits.

One idea I almost wrote into my above post is to adjust how chain-fire works so that it will fire the next weapon in the chain 0.5 seconds after the previous no matter if the beam is done or not; this would mean that the swayback would go through all its nine lasers in 4.5 seconds - still 1.5 seconds longer than the ML cooldown, but not as severe as the current system which would have it take 9 seconds.

Joseph Mallan, on 19 February 2014 - 08:32 AM, said:

30 years of Alpha here. i don' feel i should chance cause some folks don't like it.

But you can still alpha, Joe - just not as often or as accurately. And by-the-by, your "30 years of Alpha" took place over 10 seconds - it may well have been chain-fire for all any of us knows.

Joseph Mallan, on 19 February 2014 - 08:32 AM, said:

I always had he theory that having more weapons than I could effectively fire was a waste of tonnage. Range had a affect on this, and many 3025 builds I went with a Long or Short range range method. But by and large When you were in THAT range, I could hammer you with my full payload over and over.

BattleTech is kind of built on the foundation that you have more weapons than you strictly need, or indeed can fire safely at once. Just look at some of those stock builds - they fire everything and they spend the next few turns doing sweet F-A.

Range, as you say, was one part of that; since you couldn't tailor your 'mech to what engagement you were having, it'd better be able to fight somewhat effectively in every kind of engagement - which meant LRMs, ACs, and short-range weaponry in a classic mix.

Joseph Mallan, on 19 February 2014 - 08:32 AM, said:

Oh, and East... StJobe gives good debate, Whether I agree or disagree with him I still listen. He has many great ideas.

Thank you for those kind words Joe, I greatly enjoy butting heads with you as well - and it's not all that often that we disagree completely!

Edited by stjobe, 19 February 2014 - 09:33 AM.

[East Indy]

Weird, those last three quoted posts aren't mine.

Quote

One idea I almost wrote into my above post is to adjust how chain-fire works so that it will fire the next weapon in the chain 0.5 seconds after the previous no matter if the beam is done or not; this would mean that the swayback would go through all its nine lasers in 4.5 seconds - still 1.5 seconds longer than the ML cooldown, but not as severe as the current system which would have it take 9 seconds.

Hmm -- I don't think players are entitled to fire everything at once, but players might balk when they appear to have "extra" weapons, even considering the swayback is uniquely excessive. The biggest challenge to your concept is the perception of an "endless queue." I mean, you can make exceptions to smaller weapons, although that leads you back to . . . firing-group limits.

Edited by East Indy, 19 February 2014 - 09:13 AM.

[Redshift2k5]

The more I read these kinds of threads, the more I want burst-fire ballistics.

PPCs have a perilously high heat already, and are only really an issue when linked with other, much cooler-running, pinpoint damage sources

[stjobe]

East Indy, on 19 February 2014 - 09:13 AM, said:

Weird, those last three quoted posts aren't mine.

My bad; copy-paste error It's fixed now.

East Indy, on 19 February 2014 - 09:13 AM, said:

Hmm -- I don't think players are entitled to fire everything at once, but players might balk when they appear to have "extra" weapons, even considering the swayback is uniquely excessive. The biggest challenge to your concept is the perception of an "endless queue." I mean, you can make exceptions to smaller weapons, although that leads you back to . . . firing-group limits.

Well, the thing is that the individual weapon cooldowns are wholly a MWO invention; in TT all weapons had a 10-second "cooldown", so there's nothing saying a ML should have a 3-second cooldown (in addition to a 1-second beam time) - these values could all be tweaked.

And then there's the other end of the scale to consider; a single ERPPC SDR-5D; how often should he be able to fire? Or a 1xML, 4xMG Locust?

It's complex and there's lots of variants to consider in between the nine-ML swayback and the single-ML Locust, but I don't see these things as insurmountable problems for the general idea; either chain-fire with accuracy, or alpha with less accuracy and a cooldown penalty.

[WarZ]

A mechanic I've endorsed for a while is "power requirement" for weapons.

Example:
- An engine generates 100 power / second.
- A ppc requires 50 power to fire.
- Therefore the most you could fire at one time is 2 ppc's. As they would max your 100 p/s.
- AC20 could require 60 power / second. Now you can only fire 1 at a time.

They would have to work up the precise and balanced numbers for all th weapons, but using this mechanic they now have a layer of PRECISE control over how total and different types of weapons could be fired.

Its VERY simple. It would work great once balanced numbers are in. It gives the devs a layer for further control and tweaking in terms of player builds. Still offers the players the ability to boat if they want.

ALSO, importantly it gets rid of the need for the ghost heat system. It is no longer necessary with this mechanic. Plus the power mechanic gives a far superior level of control for balancing.

Inspiration comes from the battletech novels themselves. The clan guass rifle requires so much power to fire that during battles you could only fire it by itself. No other weapons could be fired at the same time because the power it required was so high.

[Joseph Mallan]

East Indy, on 19 February 2014 - 09:13 AM, said:

Weird, those last three quoted posts aren't mine.


Hmm -- I don't think players are entitled to fire everything at once, but players might balk when they appear to have "extra" weapons, even considering the swayback is uniquely excessive. The biggest challenge to your concept is the perception of an "endless queue." I mean, you can make exceptions to smaller weapons, although that leads you back to . . . firing-group limits.

Really? If I have 7 weapons I definitely want to be able to fire them Like I said I always reconfigured my Mechs to be able to Alpha Fire all game. Had a guy once tell me he loved to run hot. He did it an then jumped of to get to cool down. We clashed a few times in a FLHS (Friendly Local Hobby Store) My cool running Centurion-AL kicked the crap out of his hot running Shadow Hawk and Griffin! I had a painful sustainable Alpha, so while he had to cool off, I kept up the pressure.

[Almond Brown]

I have to ask why would set a hard limit on damage and weapon type per grouping and then penalize (add an arbitrary + to the group CD) a player who successfully meets, but can never exceed, the set Hard limit?

What is it that you didn't like about your own proposal, that apparently after the fact, you tacked on yet another negative?

[East Indy]

Almond Brown, on 19 February 2014 - 10:10 AM, said:

I have to ask why would set a hard limit on damage and weapon type per grouping and then penalize (add an arbitrary + to the group CD) a player who successfully meets, but can never exceed, the set Hard limit?

That's the point. If the GCD isn't there, you can just split a massive pinpoint alpha among groups and push the buttons simultaneously.

Joseph Mallan, on 19 February 2014 - 09:55 AM, said:

Really? If I have 7 weapons I definitely want to be able to fire them Like I said I always reconfigured my Mechs to be able to Alpha Fire all game.

I love ya, Joe, but what you want isn't so great for the game.

stjobe, on 19 February 2014 - 09:43 AM, said:

Well, the thing is that the individual weapon cooldowns are wholly a MWO invention; in TT all weapons had a 10-second "cooldown", so there's nothing saying a ML should have a 3-second cooldown (in addition to a 1-second beam time) - these values could all be tweaked.

They could, although I'd concede that in general PGI did a fine job with weapon cooldowns. I'd hate to make fundamental changes to weapons themselves if I was already applying meta rules.

Quote

It's complex and there's lots of variants to consider in between the nine-ML swayback and the single-ML Locust, but I don't see these things as insurmountable problems for the general idea; either chain-fire with accuracy, or alpha with less accuracy and a cooldown penalty.

Yeah, I just fear a long firing sequence might feel weird and disrupt the game more than FG limits. Ultimately, though, we're both after the same thing.

[focuspark]

Khobai, on 18 February 2014 - 01:16 PM, said:

This is even worse than ghost heat.

If it were more simple, like grouped weapons cannot deliver more than 25 pts of damage, otherwise they must be chained - it would be a lot simpler. But then you'd see a lot of PPC + Gauss setups.