88 replies to this topic

[Relic1701]

....sized hardpoints (discussion here, among other places http://mwomercs.com/...__fromsearch__1)

Edited by Relic1701, 04 April 2014 - 11:54 PM.

[aniviron]

TexAss, on 04 April 2014 - 02:58 AM, said:

Remove Ghost heat, double heat dissipation, half heat cap. BLODDY EFFIN DONE!

With a heat cap of 30 you cant fire more than 2 PPCs without shutting down. Huge alphas prevented, boating still allowed and not a problem anymore.

Yep, alphas totally prevented! Except for double gauss, double/triple AC10, and quad AC5. I can't wait to buy a BNC-3E/JM6-DD/CTF-4X! It'll be fun! Thank goodness we put that heat cap in to stop pinpoint damage, since every weapon that fires accurately generates lots of heat.

But really though, there's a reason that the heat cap was raised, and that's because energy builds are awful without a raised heat cap. It also means some really silly things, like the Awesome being unable to fire all its PPCs without shutting down, where it was a nearly heat-neutral mech in TT.

[Mcgral18]

aniviron, on 05 April 2014 - 12:53 AM, said:

Yep, alphas totally prevented! Except for double gauss, double/triple AC10, and quad AC5. I can't wait to buy a BNC-3E/JM6-DD/CTF-4X! It'll be fun! Thank goodness we put that heat cap in to stop pinpoint damage, since every weapon that fires accurately generates lots of heat.

But really though, there's a reason that the heat cap was raised, and that's because energy builds are awful without a raised heat cap. It also means some really silly things, like the Awesome being unable to fire all its PPCs without shutting down, where it was a nearly heat-neutral mech in TT.

You see though, a TT round was 10 seconds, and they fired their weapons over that period. Not all at once. As such, you can say that if they fired all 3 at once, they would indeed shut down, then cooldown and restart within those 10 seconds.
To avoid that shut down, you would chainfire fire or fire twice then the last at a point where it wouldn't shut you down.

That's an issue with MWO's heat system. Along with 1.0 dissipation (and even less for DHS) but 3x heat levels. The slow as heck dissipation just doesn't work. Even 23 DHS doesn't cool enough to make an effective laser boat for prolonged engagements, while in TT it would never have been even close to the cap. Even while running, you would have a 10 heat buffer.

[Khobai]

Ideally they need to increase weapon RoF to normalize heat. Weapons need to fire slower so heat generation and heat dissipation are syncd up better. I dont see any other way to fix whats wrong with the heat system while still keeping battletech stats on weapons.

If they dont fix heat theres gonna be major problems when clan tech is introduced. Because how can you make clan tech the same as IS tech unless you increase the heat on clan tech? And IS tech is already pushing the heat limits so having clan tech generate even more heat will be insane. For example, a clan erppc that does 50% more damage than an IS erppc is gonna have to be 20+ heat to be balanced.

Edited by Khobai, 05 April 2014 - 08:01 AM.

[kapusta11]

What Ghost heat does is buries problem even deeper making it harder to dig to the real issue which is broken heat system.

Just run the numbers and see for yourselves, lets assume we have 1.5 heat cap and 0.4 disipation per DHS, Awesome mounts 3xPPC + 20xDHS (total), thats 30 heat cap and 8 disipation per second. Now he can fire all 3 PPCs at once and cool them down just in time to fire again. Now pure energy and energy/missile mechs can be competitive. But you need to invest in additional heatsinks.

Hardpoint size restriction should be in game from the start and why it hasn't made it to the game is beyond me, it is a limiting factor just like tonnage for ballistics and heat cap for energy weapons but addresses individual crazy builds. Super heavy weapons, like AC20 and Gauss should only be allowed to be equiped in arms/side torsos of the assaults and side torso of heavies.

Edited by kapusta11, 05 April 2014 - 08:33 AM.

[Lightfoot]

Group-Fire is normal weapons firing mode used to consolidate weapons of the same type, firing at the same target. It has high accuracy per the weapon type.

Alpha-Strike is when you fire all weapons regardless of type. It's inaccurate due to variance in projectile speed.

Group-fire does not cause overheat unless the number of weapons fired overtax the heat-sinking available.

Alpha-Strike normally causes overheating. Overheating causes the mech to slow by stages down to as much as half max speed. It causes sensors to become overloaded making aiming more difficult. The mech may shutdown due to overheat.

What is wrong with Ghost Heat is that it only critically effects Energy mechs and makes them un-usable in a competitive game and in this regard size matters since Energy Assault mechs are hardest hit while Light mechs are virtually unchanged by Ghost Heat.

Mechs you won't see working/competing in MWO due to Ghost Heat and DHS 1.4 are: Black Knight, Stone Rhino, Novacat, Supernova, AWS-8Q and AWS-9M, and a lot more since most Battlemechs are Energy-oriented due to the enhanced sci-fi nature of lasers and PPCs, etc. You know, Giant Robot shoots ray-guns in 31st century.

Finally, Ghost Heat eliminates the need for Mechlab beyond a few upgrades since most Energy loadouts are not allowed, but make up the majority of tweaks you can make with Mechlab. Those tweaks create the need to buy new Mechs also, so players do not need most new mechs, only those with cavernous Ballistic hardpoint ability.

One more thing. When I say "compete" I mean you are playing like you must win no matter what. For your Unit or Clan, etc. So you take a mech you know will give you that chance.

Edited by Lightfoot, 05 April 2014 - 08:25 AM.

[Davers]

R5D4, on 04 April 2014 - 07:52 PM, said:

So here's an idea that I have sort of heard floated around but isn't exactly TT canon so I'm not sure how it would go over; remove ghost heat and instead create a mechanic where the size of your engine (relative to the size of the mech) means that you have X amount of energy for to expend on your weapons for X duration of time before the capacitors (buffers) are emptied. The effect would be that while you still have power to walk you have no power for your weapon systems while your engine recharges the capacitors again.

The effect would be similar to ghost heat in that it would limit peoples ability to boat weapon types (Gauss, Lasers, PPCs, Missiles, etc...) because the trade off would be that inorder to power those weapons for sustained fire you need a bigger engine, but putting in a bigger engine means you have less weight available to boat weapons. You can go ahead and use a smaller engine with those weapons but you will be draining your capacitors faster (if you fire a lot of them too often) and as such unable to alpha strike as often (or at all) without losing power to your weapons.

Basically I see the following advantages to this system:
1) It limits users being able to boat weapons (bigger engine to boat means you can't boat as much)

2) It is a mechanic that can be user controlled and can be displayed to/understood by the user in the hud in the form of a power utilization curve (with a line representing the current buffer limit).

3) It encourages skill based management of both heat AND power

4) It fits with the BattleTech universe (Blood of Kerensky Vol 2- Blood Legacy when Phelan is facing Vlad in the mech with dual gauss that can't fire both weapons without running short of power and needing time to recharge)

5) It is very scalable and flexible for the dev team to tweak and balance (punch in new variables to tweak buffer size vs mech size = recharge time)

6) It can still work with canon loadouts (I think) so a 3 PPC Awesome can exist without being punished for having more than 2 PPC's

7) It's different from Heat scale which means heat can still be balanced independently of power and vice versa


Anyway thought I'd throw it out there and see what people see as the negatives of this mechanic.

Mechs already upsize their engines for better turn rates and heat sink space. Do we want to make mechs with lower engine caps even worse?

[Foxfire]

Three options that I see:

Remove ghost heat and add stream style weaponry for each weapon type.
Remove ghost heat and add limitations to hard points.
OR

Remove ghost heat and deal with people boating PPC's.

[no one]

I'm all for removing ghost heat and I've put in a lot of thought into the matter of a replacement heat system.

https://docs.google....Z0E&usp=sharing

http://mwomercs.com/...aid-of-no-heat/

I should probably update the graph and add more visuals. They're a little out of date since people convinced me to use higher dissipation rates than I was working with originally.

[aniviron]

Mcgral18, on 05 April 2014 - 07:00 AM, said:

You see though, a TT round was 10 seconds, and they fired their weapons over that period. Not all at once. As such, you can say that if they fired all 3 at once, they would indeed shut down, then cooldown and restart within those 10 seconds.
To avoid that shut down, you would chainfire fire or fire twice then the last at a point where it wouldn't shut you down.

That's an issue with MWO's heat system. Along with 1.0 dissipation (and even less for DHS) but 3x heat levels. The slow as heck dissipation just doesn't work. Even 23 DHS doesn't cool enough to make an effective laser boat for prolonged engagements, while in TT it would never have been even close to the cap. Even while running, you would have a 10 heat buffer.

I know that the TT time per turn was 10 seconds; but the fact remains that this is still a unique punishment for energy weapons and nothing else. While TT also intended that all four of those AC5s shot once each and alone over ten seconds, in this game you can easily shoot 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4... for as long as you want.

I'm in favor of a lower heat cap and higher dissipation, I think it would overall help the game. But if the heat cap is going to be set at a hard 30, then the shutdown mechanics we have now are absolutely unacceptable. The only way I would support a heat cap of 30 is if we had a Mechwarrior 2-style heat shutdown/override system where you get about ten seconds of being overridden to cool off before bad things happen (unless you go too high over the cap) and going over has no immediate consequences except the requirement that you have to hit override within 3 seconds of Betty telling you there are problems.

[R5D4]

Davers, on 05 April 2014 - 10:55 AM, said:

Mechs already upsize their engines for better turn rates and heat sink space. Do we want to make mechs with lower engine caps even worse?

Could you please provide an example of a Mech with a lower engine cap you feel would be negatively effected by this kind of change?

[Nicholas Carlyle]

This community has given PGI about 50 different ways to make things better, that would remove the need for Ghost Heat.

It's Paul's baby though, so nothing will happen.

It's funny, when a large part of the population here thinks something is messed up, whether it's ECM, Ghost Heat, Convergence etc. we do an amazing job troubleshooting the problem and offering solutions.

Even if I don't always agree with every solution, I can say without fail, a large majority of the time, what the community comes up with is heads and above what PGI does.

Which is sad.

[Davers]

R5D4, on 05 April 2014 - 12:47 PM, said:

Could you please provide an example of a Mech with a lower engine cap you feel would be negatively effected by this kind of change?

Raven 2x

[GoManGo]

GhostHeat right or wrong its like everything else in MWO that is Screwed up just=

[Dock Steward]

GoManGo, on 05 April 2014 - 01:32 PM, said:

GhostHeat right or wrong its like everything else in MWO that is Screwed up just=

You mean like how we as a community "Dealt With" the LRM speed increase? Oh that's right, we didn't deal with. We whined hard and they changed it.

[TexAce]

aniviron, on 05 April 2014 - 12:53 AM, said:

Yep, alphas totally prevented! Except for double gauss, double/triple AC10, and quad AC5. I can't wait to buy a BNC-3E/JM6-DD/CTF-4X! It'll be fun! Thank goodness we put that heat cap in to stop pinpoint damage, since every weapon that fires accurately generates lots of heat.

But really though, there's a reason that the heat cap was raised, and that's because energy builds are awful without a raised heat cap. It also means some really silly things, like the Awesome being unable to fire all its PPCs without shutting down, where it was a nearly heat-neutral mech in TT.

No one complains about quad ac5s or triple 10s or double gauss builds though.
I'm sure no one complained about 4LLs either, it was just added to heatscale because it would have been obvious if only the ppc were in the ghost heat mechanic.

All this ghost heat is just a cover up for failing to balance the PPC anyway and thats why it needs to be removed.

[aniviron]

TexAss, on 05 April 2014 - 02:52 PM, said:

No one complains about quad ac5s or triple 10s or double gauss builds though.
I'm sure no one complained about 4LLs either, it was just added to heatscale because it would have been obvious if only the ppc were in the ghost heat mechanic.

All this ghost heat is just a cover up for failing to balance the PPC anyway and thats why it needs to be removed.

Though there haven't been a lot of complaints, (Well, there have been, but not about any of these specific builds in particular; just search the gameplay balance forum for 'autocannon' if you want a specific list of complaints that have been leveled against them in the last six months) all of those builds are significantly more powerful than a triple PPC build or a quad llas build; I just don't like that this punishment arbitrarily makes every single energy-heavy loadout much worse, while doing nothing to curb the power of ballistic-heavy builds that are already significantly better than the energy builds anyway. It just gets more obscene when you have a mech like the BNC-3E which can do quad AC5 with room to spare for some backup weapons.

You won't find me defending ghost heat; again, I feel like there has to be a better way to balance out the heat mechanics than screwing over every energy-dependent variant more than they already are.

Edited by aniviron, 05 April 2014 - 04:19 PM.

[R5D4]

Davers, on 05 April 2014 - 01:28 PM, said:

Raven 2x

Okay, so looking at MechSpecs.com I'm not seeing a lot of builds for the Raven 2x that would be all that negatively effected. Maybe the double ER Large build but honestly without doing some more thinking on this (what the thresholds are) I can't say for sure.

[Davers]

R5D4, on 05 April 2014 - 05:22 PM, said:

Okay, so looking at MechSpecs.com I'm not seeing a lot of builds for the Raven 2x that would be all that negatively effected. Maybe the double ER Large build but honestly without doing some more thinking on this (what the thresholds are) I can't say for sure.

Well, the Awesome comes with a 240 engine. How will it handle the whole 'capacitor' thing? And if 240 can handle 3 PPCs, then what is the point of limits? Every assault mech but the Stalker has a larger engine than that stock.

[R5D4]

Davers, on 05 April 2014 - 05:37 PM, said:

Well, the Awesome comes with a 240 engine. How will it handle the whole 'capacitor' thing? And if 240 can handle 3 PPCs, then what is the point of limits? Every assault mech but the Stalker has a larger engine than that stock.

Ah...fair point. I concede to that one.
Still I wonder if something couldn't be done with capacitors but maybe just not tied to engines.

More thought is required.