383 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

Rubidiy, on 27 February 2014 - 02:03 AM, said:

I see no reason for increasing LRM speed.

If you're not using Artemis, BAP, TAG, adv.target decay, adv.sensor range, you're doing it wrong. Standing still in a slow LRM boat 800m away from your target is a wrong way to play LRM boat. If you don't put an effort into it, you don't recieve a result. That's it. If you're a noob who only locks and shoots LRMs regardless of range and target's movements, you won't hit it. Be mobile, be selective, be patient, be aware of enemy movement and you'll be able to deal a lot of damage.
Increasing LRM speed will benefit only to noobs, who cann't play LRM boat. In hands of a good pilot, they will become OP. Greatest weapon balancing blunders were made by PGI while tweaking LRMs. Now they're completely fine. Buff LRMs and pug matches will become another LRM apocalypse. Just mention, that LRMs are going to be buffed, and people will start using them.

At 800m, I can bullseye people with AC's all darn day. Zoom, clickity, blam.

LRMs, if you're outside 600m, you're generally firing hail mary shots. 800m is "good luck" at best.

It honestly doesn't take much to improve LRMs. Even boosting the initial 180-240m launch would give it a much better chance of getting a long-range shot off.

[Galenit]

gavilatius, on 26 February 2014 - 08:59 PM, said:

I still want to be able to outrun LRMS with a big enough engine.

I'm a Locust only going 167.3kph, getting hit with LRMs that I should be able to run away from

A lot of things need to be balanced first with Engines and the inrtoduction of MASC being higher on the list

You want around 433 kph speed for your locust?

Thats what you need to outrun the 120m/s (432kph) missiles we have now ...


Masc will give you twice your walking speed, there is nothing about running speed.

But if pgi decides to use runspeed for masc, 334 kph is still not enough to outrun the 120m/s (432kph) missiles ...

Edited by Galenit, 27 February 2014 - 02:29 AM.

[Navy Sixes]

As far as community discussion is concerned, the problem is that there are two distinct LRM camps:

1) People who hate LRMs, which fall into two sub- camps: new players who get clobbered by LRMs and think they are way too powerful, and "leet skellzers" who think anything with a guidance system doesn't deserve to kill them. The leets say they're balanced as they are because, unlike the new players, they are fully aware how much LRMs suck right now.

2) People who run LRMs and realize how hard it is to build a mech around them as a primary weapon system, which is the only effective way to run them, since anything else is sort of a waste of a missile slot. To get them to work as advertised, LRM builds have to haul around tons and tons of extra junk, going so far as to bring along a whole other light spotter mech! Imagine how much grief you'd hear if PGI said, "Your PPC/AC5 combo won't hit beyond 800m unless another mech near the target holds a lock...

From the above, I'm sure you can tell which camp I'm in. I'm biased. But that's kind of my point: Everyone's biased. Let's see what results from the increase in speed and go from there.

[o0Marduk0o]

LRM are strong if you can't run away or break lock, because someone is chasing you, while you have no teammates nearby/alive.
They need no LoS, they can be far away but only one (other) mech is needed to maintain the target lock.
You might kill the mech who is chasing you but in the meantime LRM rain down on you.
There is no always a hill between you and the LRM mech.

LRM are a support weapon, they were never the primary weapon to take down enemy mechs. There are counters but multiple options to negate those counters as well. You can hardly compare them with other weapons because of their nature.
If you build a mech all around LRM, then you decide yourself for a certain role.

[Rubidiy]

EarlGrey83, on 27 February 2014 - 02:13 AM, said:

I think increasing the speed of LRM is actually the only way to start balancing them.

At the moment, LRM are not hard to balance because of the many mechanics influencing them.
It´s the simple fact that LRM always hit a slow mech (due to their homing) but don´t hit fast mechs.

Speeding them up, to get a more consistent damage curve on all mechs has to be done.

Next step, real balancing.

Always funny to read such things... you can hit light mechs with LRMs IF you keep your TAG at them. If your aim is good and light mech remains in the open, you'll hit it. Consider the ammount of damage, which light mechs recieve from one LRM cloud of 40-60 lrms, and you will be able to notice that it's a good balance. LRMs are a choise of teamplay. If you have light mech with TAG in your team, you can hit almost anything.
If you look at situation from both points of view, then you will have a chance to be more or less objective. Now it's just a frustration.

[Joseph Mallan]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 26 February 2014 - 11:45 AM, said:

Can't balance LRM's right now. It's not possible.

At all.

Too many different systems effect them.

To balance LRM's you need to turn off:

UAV
Artemis
TAG
ECM
AMS
Adv Target Decay
NARC

While those items are effecting LRM's, you cannot balance them.

Oh and don't forget Adv. AMS and Chaff which are going to add to the turmoil.

Then turn off those things, and balance them in one at a time. A job worth doing is worth doing right.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 27 February 2014 - 03:23 AM.

[Rubidiy]

wanderer, on 27 February 2014 - 02:14 AM, said:

At 800m, I can bullseye people with AC's all darn day. Zoom, clickity, blam.

LRMs, if you're outside 600m, you're generally firing hail mary shots. 800m is "good luck" at best.

It honestly doesn't take much to improve LRMs. Even boosting the initial 180-240m launch would give it a much better chance of getting a long-range shot off.

Haven't understood your point.
What does it have to do with nooby gameplay of standing far away from enemies and shooting LRMs by teammates' lock on? If you speed up LRMs, chances, that they will hit slow targets, that don't have any good cover in vicinity of 200m will grow. Thus the balance will be broken. Balance is: "stand still far away - fail. Stay close, move a lot to keep minimal distance - wreck mechs". LRMs have a very convenient trajectory atm. Speed 'em up considerably, and I can imagine, how easy it will become to hit targets without any effort. That's a bad balance.

Edited by Rubidiy, 27 February 2014 - 03:48 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Rubidiy, on 27 February 2014 - 03:33 AM, said:

Haven't understood your point.
What does it have to do with nooby gameplay of standing far away from enemies and shooting LRMs by teammates' lock on? If you speed up LRMs, chances, that they will hit slow targets, that don't have any good cover in vicinity of 200m will grow. Thus the balance will be broken. Balance is: "stand still far away - fail. Stay close, move a lot to keep minimal distance - wreck mechs". LRMs have a very convenoent trajectory atm. Speed 'em up considerably, and I can imagine, how easy it will become to hit targets without any effort. That's a bad balance.

So You are saying LRMs should not be as easy to hit a target at 800M as it is for me to hit a target with an AC10 at that range? Cause hitting a Mech at 800M ain't all that hard to do with ballistics and Energy..

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 27 February 2014 - 03:36 AM.

[wanderer]

You -do- know that originally, LRMs in this game only had a range of 630m, right? They got a range extension back in closed beta to the current 1000m, but the missile speed was basically made for a weapon that had...well, 63% of the current travel distance. That is, the LRM was supposed to spend X amount of time from launcher to target. With the range change, it's now taking longer.

Boosting the initial launch speed helps close the travel time gap that opened up when they extended LRM ranges. It also gives the LRM a speedy "sweet spot" at 181m->239m, which mirrors the same sweet spot the LRM has in TT (basically, 7 hexes is "short" while 6 or less incurs a min-range penalty).

[Noesis]

Public Test Server? (Just saying)

[Willard Phule]

Noesis, on 27 February 2014 - 05:10 AM, said:

Public Test Server? (Just saying)

Nah. Too much effort to open up the test server, set up a forum to get feedback and then ignore everything you get. They can just as easily ignore us now, without having to open up the test server.

[Joseph Mallan]

wanderer, on 27 February 2014 - 04:03 AM, said:

You -do- know that originally, LRMs in this game only had a range of 630m, right? They got a range extension back in closed beta to the current 1000m, but the missile speed was basically made for a weapon that had...well, 63% of the current travel distance. That is, the LRM was supposed to spend X amount of time from launcher to target. With the range change, it's now taking longer.

Boosting the initial launch speed helps close the travel time gap that opened up when they extended LRM ranges. It also gives the LRM a speedy "sweet spot" at 181m->239m, which mirrors the same sweet spot the LRM has in TT (basically, 7 hexes is "short" while 6 or less incurs a min-range penalty).

I do know that, I would be fine if things went back to that, but we work with the cards we are dealt, an ask for better while we learn.

[Willard Phule]

You know what, there's an even easier solution to everything.

Make EVERY weapon do only 1 point of damage and give EVERY weapon a maximum range of 10 feet. THEN triple the armor and internal structure on everything.

Now, noone dies before time runs out...everyone's Elo remains the same because there is no win/loss...noone cries that someone killed them but shouldn't have...the game dies, PGI loses the license to the game...someone better prepared to develop it picks it up...a better game comes out. We all win. Except PGI...but, frankly, I find it difficult to care about them any more than they care about the community that is supporting them.

Edited by Willard Phule, 27 February 2014 - 06:08 AM.

[Thorqemada]

I looked into my damage and aside of the bad accuracy the Artemis-LRM also does only 1,16 damage per hit.
My old mixed LRM stats (Artemis and non Artemis LRM) only show 1 damage per hit.
At 22 to 24% accuracy which means only 3 or 4 Missiles of a LRM15 do hit and damage...

I had the Impression LRM damage should be 1,5 or so?

[Nicholas Carlyle]

Joseph Mallan, on 27 February 2014 - 03:22 AM, said:

Then turn off those things, and balance them in one at a time. A job worth doing is worth doing right.

Totally agree.

As for Sandpit's "OMG WHY DO SOME PEOPLE SAY LRM'S SUCK AND SOME PEOPLE SAY THEY ARE AWESOME" question..

Do you pay ANY attention at all?

It's not even just an ELO bracket thing. As the matchmaker likes to mix up all kinds of ELO levels.

LRM's PREY on bad players. Even if you have a DDC with ECM, if you stand right out in the open, and get TAGed and don't bother to move, you are going to get burned.

LRM indirect fire is also ONLY good against bad players. These are the players who get the missile warning alarm, and don't do anything about it.

So when you see posts complaining about LRM's, it's always by bad, uninformed players, who won't take the time to learn the mechanics of LRM's.

The people who say LRM's are amazing, tend to be people who have had 2 or 3 games where they did 600+ damage, but aren't good enough at the game to realize why (hint, they were up against derps).

There is also a group who gets a lock, fires missiles indirectly and has no idea that most of the time they are doing no damage, but still think LRM's are no skill and easy to use.

Then there is the third group. We are what I like to call "The Informed".

We realize that with a confluence of events, that LRM's CAN be great.

If I have a 3 LRM 15 Highlander, and I drop against a group with no AMS, no ECM and they don't use cover. I'm going to utterlly destroy them. Keeping in mind that I could've destroyed them with any weapon. But LRM's will work in this case.

But then there is the situation where I drop in that same mech, and the opposing team has 2 ECM, a smattering of AMS, but thankfully still not amazing at using cover. I'll do some damage, might steal a kill. Definitely not optimal. And the more AMS and ECM involved the worse it gets. And lord willing it isn't a city map.

Then there are the matches where I drop...and ECM and AMS don't matter, because the team knows how to use cover, and realize quickly I'm an LRM boat. Which leads to that terrible sub 100 damage while I try to keep people out of my deadzone, while trying to get good locks, which never materialize.

So when I take that information and put it into a blender I realize. LRM's are great against new players. Meh against average players, especially depending on map/counters in play. And worthless against good players with an understanding of LRM mechanics.

That means LRM's are not in a good place.

[Noesis]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 27 February 2014 - 06:48 AM, said:

As for Sandpit's "OMG WHY DO SOME PEOPLE SAY LRM'S SUCK AND SOME PEOPLE SAY THEY ARE AWESOME" question..

Which is surprising really for Captain Subjective who you would have thought understood the value of opinions being equal but that limited anecdotal evidence does not demonstrate a holistic and factual representation or some would say more objective opinion about MWO game play. Something he has argued and supported in previous repeated posting elsewhere.

Maybe he has changed his opinions? As is his right I guess. Maybe he will change them again next week after all subjective opinion can be dynamic and need not show consistency.

---

It is an interesting perspective about mixed views however so rightly you do need to consider this kind of posting in context. Hence the reason that numerous posts could reflect differing interests or differing points even if of a similar subject.

Also however there is the consideration that mixed views do sometime reflect that something "may" be overall well balanced as their is equal support for and against something with opinion.

The idea then that objective and representative data then really the only tool to formulate confident conclusions with. However, this in the main is only really the privilege of PGI/IGP to be aware of. But considering it is them that then formulate decisions based on these factors maybe not so much an issue. The idea perhaps of justifying why things are as they exist with substantive data useful to explain decisions or conclusions on these issues however.

Otherwise we will continue to perhaps get mixed flagged conditions from the player base in these forums with various views. Some issues more obvious than others perhaps and some with variable following but still all remaining mostly in the domain of opinion.

Edited by Noesis, 27 February 2014 - 07:16 AM.

[Noesis]

btw, LRMs could do with a small boost in speed to be a more confident "choice" in the current Meta. IMHO.

[Willard Phule]

I still have a huge problem with the fact that currently, lights CAN and DO outrun LRMs.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have actually seen modern MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket Systems) fire. And although they were just practice rounds (oddly enough, it's a telephone pole with a rocket engine), they were STILL faster than a 20-30 ton, 10 meter tall humanoid robot could theoretically travel (way faster than 160kph).

Sure, if they speed up LRMs, lights are going to take a beating. But, why are they taking the beating? Because "scouting" means using the terrain to provide you with cover and concealment while you find the enemy and lock them down....not barreling across the open space full bore, where everyone can see you. The light pilots will have to learn to play their role better or suffer for it because the way it is now, they get away with just rushing in and dancing about everyone's feet.

Edited by Willard Phule, 27 February 2014 - 07:44 AM.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

Willard Phule, on 27 February 2014 - 07:44 AM, said:

I still have a huge problem with the fact that currently, lights CAN and DO outrun LRMs.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have actually seen modern MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket Systems) fire. And although they were just practice rounds (oddly enough, it's a telephone pole with a rocket engine), they were STILL faster than a 20-30 ton, 10 meter tall humanoid robot could theoretically travel (way faster than 160kph).

Sure, if they speed up LRMs, lights are going to take a beating. But, why are they taking the beating? Because "scouting" means using the terrain to provide you with cover and concealment while you find the enemy and lock them down....not barreling across the open space full bore, where everyone can see you. The light pilots will have to learn to play their role better or suffer for it because the way it is now, they get away with just rushing in and dancing about everyone's feet.

LRM's need a TOTAL rework. Paul has said he was going to do that multiple times, only to follow-up with changing their trajectories and speed.

He has admitted the current system doesn't work properly, but won't take the time to fix it.

And to do that he has to take a look at EVERY item that effects LRM's, of which there are WAY too many.

[Willard Phule]

Nicholas Carlyle, on 27 February 2014 - 07:54 AM, said:

LRM's need a TOTAL rework. Paul has said he was going to do that multiple times, only to follow-up with changing their trajectories and speed.

He has admitted the current system doesn't work properly, but won't take the time to fix it.

And to do that he has to take a look at EVERY item that effects LRM's, of which there are WAY too many.

Fix the speed first. See what happens. AMS not working, tweak it. See what happens. Artemis making it too powerful? Tweak it, see what happens. It's a trial and error thing, like everything else.

I think they just don't want to mess with something because of the feedback they'll get.