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[RapidFire7]

LASER BALANCE

Here's my suggestion for making lasers worth taking out on the field in place of PPCs and AC5's:

Lasers are the only weapon that do damage over a time period of, say, 1 second. This alone causes it to be omitted by the Meta.

Let's go back to the 90's - here's a video of some MW2 gameplay:


Admittedly this probably isn't the best example but it'll do. Notice how the lasers take time to travel through the air, do instant damage and reload quickly?

Now let's take a look at MW4:


The Large Lasers on the Timber Wolf (it's NOT a Mad Cat) do instant damage and travel instantly through the air.

In MWO, I believe that looking at the past releases of the Mechwarrior Franchise hold keys to solving the ongoing balance issues in MWO.

The primary choice of anyone who is up to date with balance issues will choose LRM's, PPC's, Gauss Rifles and AC5's/UAC5's (the AC2 range nerf rendered it inferior to the AC5). Lasers get overlooked except in the case of brawling, in which Medium Lasers take preference over Small Lasers (better range, similar damage and not as much Ghost Heat penalty).

Currently, LRM's and AC's will overpower Medium Lasers at ranges of 300 to 500 metres, and AC's will usually overpower Medium Lasers in close combat battles.

In order to buff lasers to make them competitive, the beam duration needs to be cut to either 1/2 or 2/3 of the current beam duration and the recharging time needs to be quicker. DPS needs to be looked at just like the recent AC DPS changes were done.

Small Lasers need to outperform other weapons at close ranges, just like Medium Lasers need to outperform other weapons at medium range.

In the case of the Medium Laser, the problem is that many weapons can outperform it at medium range (300-500 metres) and Ghost Heat further discourages any sensible pilot to bring out an energy boat into competitive play. Which conveniently brings me to my next point...

GHOST HEAT

Ghost Heat has remained one of the single-biggest problems in this game since it was introduced to penalize people boating stuff, like energy weapons. At that point in time, weapon balance was out and PGI decided to fix the problem by introducing a boating penalty, rather than balancing the weapons out.

In the last patch, PGI finally gave in and silently admitted their error by fixing the AC DPS rate and pulling the 2, 5, 10 and 20 AC's in line with each other. Yes, this was an excellent idea by PGI, but there is still more stuff to be brought in line with each other.

BUT - if PGI is finally balancing out weapons, doesn't that make Ghost Heat obsolete? Outdated? Because, lo and behold, the very reason why it was introduced in the first place would be solved so there wouldn't be a reason for Ghost Heat to have a place in the game at all now.

Ghost Heat is the perfect symbol for "Short Cut" - kinda like painting over some rust instead of treating it with CRC or WD-40 (or whatever else, I don't live in America so I have no idea what you guys use over there).

I'm sure I have said this before in another post, but Ghost Heat has no logic to it at all, so I would like to propose an alternative solution for heat buildup/cooldown.

(This is based on the assumption that currently, no matter what weapon you fire, it will have the same heat buildup amount - for example, a PPC will always build up 10% heat, no matter what environment you are in).

Here's my logic - a pot full of hot water will take less time to boil than a pot full of cold water. The default temperature of the structure of a Mech will be hotter in hot weather and colder in cold weather, making a difference to the amount of heat a weapon generates.

Therefore, weapons should be more sensitive to heat buildup on hotter maps (for example, a PPC builds up 14% heat on Terra Therma) and is cooler on a colder map (PPC builds up 7% heat on Alpine Peaks). At the same time, the Mech's cooling efficiency is also affected by the temperature of the environment, so it is harder for Mech's with a lower cooling efficiency to de-heat on a hotter map and it is harder for a mech to overheat on a cold map.

Let's imagine a Large Laser boat in Terra Therma. An alpha of 6 Large Lasers would generate 60 heat (normally 7 x 6 would equal 42 but because it is a hot environment, but under my proposed theory, it would be more like 10 x 6). Now I would think that this is getting a better deal than Ghost Heat gives, but at the same time, this Laser boat will have a difficult time cooling down.

Please leave your feedback and constructive criticism below as I think this is very important at the moment. Besides, who wants to take their Warhawk Prime out for a stroll? 4x ER PPC? Even with advanced Clan Double Heat sinks, I'm not so sure about that.

[Omi_]

I'm pretty sure hot mechs do already run hotter on hot maps.

I had written out a longer post, but I'm going to abstain out of fear of not knowing what I'm talking about. I will however say that small lasers are way, way underpowered.