stjobe, on 10 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:
No, single location has zero to do with it - all direct-fire weapons except LBX had that, and of course MWO's lasers and MG shows that you don't have to go that way if you don't want to.
MG - damage spread through cone of fire and continuous-fire mechanic
lasers - damage spread through beam duration
missiles, LBX - damage spread through projectile clustering
ACs, PPCs, Gauss - no spread whatsoever, neither by duration nor clustering.
This is why ACs and PPCs dominate the game and needs to become burst-fire.
Look, dude, I'm not trying to be argumentative...your name isn't "Sandpit," so I don't just arbitrarily take the opposite side of what you're saying. Keep in mind that in Tabletop, there were balances put into the game for whatever you're using....ultimately, it kind of just boils down to the loadout. I'm not even going to go into some of the BIZARRE loadouts for some of the canon mechs. But, the balance came from Energy weapons being effective but having high heat production. Missiles could do the same job, more or less, and put out less heat...but were ammo dependant. Autocannons...they did a better job of direct damage than lasers and put out less heat than Missiles...but were even more ammo dependant. But...here's what I've got, at least from my tabletop experience:
MGs: On TT, it's not a "cone of fire" effect...it's 1,2 or 3 points of damage to a single location (light, normal or heavy MGs). Here...oddly enough, it's a "hitscan" weapon like lasers. Yeah, I know, it's counter-intuitive, but that's the way the mechanic works. They nerfed it so it doesn't have the same percentage to get crits as anything else...which effectively killed my Jager.
Lasers: X damage to a single location if it hits on tabletop. Granted, you just roll dice to see if you hit and then roll again to see where you hit. Here, you've got to try to hold the laze to do the damage to a single location....pulse lasers are easier to do that with than regular ones...but, oddly enough, that kind of equates to the whole +2 to hit from tabletop, so all good there.
Missiles: Each one has a fairly easy to understand potential damage...LRM20 can do a potential of 20 damage...SRM6 can do a potential of 12. But...it's that Potential thing that screws you. If you hit, then you have to roll on the cluster chart to see how many hit. THEN you have to put them into 5 point blocks and see where they hit. I've done 4 LRM20 builds where all I really manage to do at long range is simply sandpaper all their armor off until they get close. It happens.
Autocannons: ACs...no matter how you interpret them, do their potential damage to a single location if they hit. An AC20, whether it's one big bullet or a lot of little ones, do 20 points of damage to a single location if it hits. Interpret that however you want...but it's not a gatling gun or rapidly spitting bullets. If I roll Center Torso, it does 20 to the Center Torso. Kind of hard to equate that to a video game without having a single, large bullet.
Specialty Autocannons: The LBX is, at least mechanically, a LRM10 sort of deal. Roll to hit. Roll on the cluster chart, apply each and every hit independently. Again..the sandpaper effect. If and/or when they come out with RACs, now.....there's no misinterpreting that one. It's a gatling gun. Every round does 2 or 5 points of damage if it hits. And it fires fast. That's sort of the point. If PGI ever introduces the RAC into the game...everything will change.
But, I definitely agree with you that as far as the novels were concerned, there was a lot of confusion between them and tabletop. The crux of the matter is, at least as far as tabletop mechanics were concerned, an AC does X damage to a single location if you hit. If they change that in MW:O, then they are effectively changing the base mechanics of the game. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is debatable. It'd sure change that jumpsniper meta that's all over the place, that's for sure.
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