Sug, on 08 April 2014 - 02:36 PM, said:
I disagree with moderate damage. Even a 100% chance to explode on destruction is not enough of a drawback for how powerful ballistics can be.
Let's say someone has 1 ton of ammo in a side torso with 9 other slots taken up. A 1 in 10 chance of a crit hitting the ammo, with a 42ish% chance to cause a crit.
0.42 x 0.1 = 4.2% chance for a critical hit to hit the ammo slot.
The only weapons capable of destroying an ammo slot with one hit (10hp) are the AC20/10, Gauss, ER&PPCs.
So most likely you'll need to hit that ammo a second time, (0.42 x 0.1) x (0.42 x 0.1) for a 0.17% chance to get an ammo explosion.
For moderate damage.
Using the arbitrary value I chose for "moderate" in my previous post (1/10th), that sets the ammo explosion for most ballistics to right around 15. LRMs would be 19.8. SRMs and MGs would be 20. On paper that sounds weak as heck -- as much damage as a Gauss Rifle. But we need to consider how much internal HP most mechs have in each section.
As a random example, a 65 ton heavy mech has 30 internal HP in each side torso. Assuming only 1 bin is present and the bin is destroyed before his internals take direct damage, he loses half his internal HP. Since no weapon damages components without hurting internal health at the same time, you can add the damage from the normal shot to the ammo explosion damage to equal roughly 25-40 (assuming AC/10/PPC/Gauss/AC/20 hit). A Gauss or AC/20 getting the crit would blow out the side torso outright, and the PPC/AC/10 would leave it on the brink.
On mechs that cannot function without absurdly large amounts of ammo (namely LRM users), the situation would be much worse for them than the laboratory example above. Pretty much all ammo-based builds have weaknesses of their own besides explosions, such as...
A. LRM boats have relatively slow projectiles that never hit the same spot and require a lock on at the time of impact to hit. They also often need some support modules/items (i.e. TAG, Adv. Target Decay), can be trolled by ECM and AMS, eat up a lot of tonnage with the launchers, and require more ammo per weapon than any other weapon system in the game.
B. SRM boats have a hardlocked short range of 270m, spread out damage, and don't even register all of their missiles.
C. Large-scale dakka boats like the Cataphract 4X and 3 UAC/5 Jager can put out some nice damage, but they're also one-trick ponies that can be quickly disabled with focused damage to their squishy side torsos. The Jager also runs out of ammo quickly.
D. The AC/40 Jager has fairly short range and is notorious for its squishy side torsos. Boomcats have a gigantic CT and head.
E. The Catapult A1 and Jenner Oxide are known for being relatively gimped one-trick ponies that are at the mercy of hit detection/ECM (depending on their missile choices) and both have bad hitboxes (Jenner can somewhat mitigate it through high speed).
F. The new Huginn Raven hero is a laughing stock for obvious reasons (light mech without lasers, lulz)
Pretty much every truly good build in this game uses some sort of energy weapon, even if just a pair of medium lasers. Many of the good builds in fact use heavy energy to go with their ammo weapons, because they provide better burst damage (i.e. damage in a single shot) per ton than ballistics do (AC's advantage is mostly the RoF) and in the case of lasers they are far easier to hit with (not everyone is an expert marksman). Nearly all ammo-based weapons have some sort of drawback or another to them, be they Lurms or even the dreaded ACs. Yes, ACs are good, but they pay with tonnage and slots for their goodness.
As an example, an AC/10 + ammo is 15 tons and 10 slots. A PPC weighs 7 tons and takes up 3 slots -- the number of external sinks you want will vary, but if you don't have many other weapons you can just roll with your base 10 DHS. Seeing how the AC/10 is a lot heavier than the PPC, and bulkier, and shorter ranged (the projectile speed makes it impractical to actually hit out to the 3x max range),
I expect the AC/10 to be outright superior to the PPC within short to medium ranges. The PPC's advantages are lower weight and slots, fairly fast projectile speed (aiming is easier, especially at range), and it doesn't need to worry about ammo (which can matter in long fights). Even the AC/5 has a fairly similar or slightly larger investment to a PPC, so expecting it to compete against it is not unreasonable. Even the AC/
2 has a similar investment as a PPC. The smallest AC takes roughly as much out of your mech as the largest energy weapon.
ACs are nice to have, but you don't want a build with nothing but ACs because of two reasons. First and foremost, a build mixing heavy energy and heavy dakka will have more burst damage and more flexibility than a pure dakka boat (assuming equal weapon tonnage). Secondly, if you aren't a master gunner (which is a very large proportion of the population, including me) then the hitscan nature of lasers can be a lifesaver against fast targets. Mixing energy + ballistics gives you the best of both worlds between burst damage per ton and heat sustainability.
I'm saying this as somebody who refuses to touch mechs that don't have at least 2 ML or 1 LL for energy options (preferably more), based on my bad experiences in the Cat A1 and from beating up enemy energy-less builds.
Edited by FupDup, 08 April 2014 - 03:22 PM.
1
, I think using ammo explosions to give using/boating ballistics a bigger drawback is a better way to go than another Ghost Heat road. Either that or revert the ammo per ton doubling. Hard to beat that delicious pinpoint damage.
