9 replies to this topic

[Lordred]

Balancing weapons is not easy, the more weapons you add to the pot, the more complicated it becomes, I am not saying that I will be right, but I am wondering if my idea has any merit outside of my own mind. So I wish to share with you, my fellow Mechwarriors what I have rattling around my noggin, let us see if we can come up with a way to balance the weapon systems, and perhaps even get PGI to listen.

Point 1: Use existing fire rates for the weapons.
Point 2: Create profiles to bring weapons into doing their damage value in a 10 second period.
Point 3: Adjust damage and heat values on weapons to reflect the new data.
Point 4: Remove the increased heat threshold, but keep Heatsinks as they are.
Point 5: Reduce armor, the reason we doubled it in closed beta was Mechs were dieing too quickly.

Let us start with the most famous Autocannon as our first example.

The AC/20 is a weapon which deals 20 damage, hence the name. The damage and heat it generates is done over a 10 second period in its source materiel, so lets try to bring this into a real-time environment.

In MWO the AC/20 has a 4 second cool down and generates 6 heat, so that will give us 50 damage and 15 heat in a 10 second period, or just a flat 60 damage and 18 heat in 12 seconds. In the source materiel, the AC/20 'fires' once during a 10 second period, generating 7 heat, while dealing 20 damage.

So if the AC/20 fires every 4 seconds in MWO, and we don't want to play with the reload time, why not just reduce its damage a little, decrease the heat, and increase the ammo count?

So I propose that we make the AC/20 deal 8 damage per shot, and generate 2.8 heat per shot, while increasing its ammo per ton to 13 round. This would translate to 20 damage and 7 heat over 10 seconds.


The following chart below presents what I was thinking of for every weapon, excluding Flamers and Machine Guns for the moment.




I appreciate your input and thoughts.

Edited by Lordred, 23 June 2014 - 02:02 PM.

[Part Time]

I'll allow it.

[Koniving]

So from this..

Point 4: Remove the increased heat threshold, but keep Heatsinks as they are.

I do have a question here.

Does this mean standard TT threshold of 30, where heatsinks only adjust cooling rate over said ten second period (in 1 second slices obviously)? You can generate up to 30 heat in either a single strike or over time, once you hit 30 you shutdown. At shutdown, you cannot reboot until down to 14 heat.

Does this mean the TT advanced rule of heatsink taxing, where 30 threshold is the absolute maximum to cause shutdown, but the ratings of your heatsinks (+5, but less than thirty) is how much you can safely reach without stressing the heatsinks to the point of melting them? If you do reach the 30 threshold, you can't reboot until down to 14 heat.

Or does this mean strip the 30 base from the rising heatsink equation, where PGI's misinterpretation of x heatsinks gives you this much magical buffer in addition to cooling? (Which means 10 SHS have 10 threshold, 10 DHS have 20 threshold, 15 DHS with the 5*1.4s would be 27 threshold.)
---------------------

Point 5: Reduce armor, the reason we doubled it in closed beta was Mechs were dieing too quickly.

I'm assuming along with structure health, with a reduction back to TT values? (Atlas, 304 stock, 307 max. Hunchback 160 stock, 169 max, etc.)

Looks like most mechs would live quite a bit longer, but the Gauss Rifle (as it should be) would be king (and incredibly vulnerable).

[Lordred]

Koniving, on 23 June 2014 - 02:51 PM, said:

So from this..

Point 4: Remove the increased heat threshold, but keep Heatsinks as they are.

I do have a question here.

Spoiler

Does this mean standard TT threshold of 30, where heatsinks only adjust cooling rate over said ten second period (in 1 second slices obviously)? You can generate up to 30 heat in either a single strike or over time, once you hit 30 you shutdown. At shutdown, you cannot reboot until down to 14 heat.

Does this mean the TT advanced rule of heatsink taxing, where 30 threshold is the absolute maximum to cause shutdown, but the ratings of your heatsinks (+5, but less than thirty) is how much you can safely reach without stressing the heatsinks to the point of melting them? If you do reach the 30 threshold, you can't reboot until down to 14 heat.

Or does this mean strip the 30 base from the rising heatsink equation, where PGI's misinterpretation of x heatsinks gives you this much magical buffer in addition to cooling? (Which means 10 SHS have 10 threshold, 10 DHS have 20 threshold, 15 DHS with the 5*1.4s would be 27 threshold.)
---------------------

That is a good question, there is no 'right' answer, however if we stayed with the source material, then it would be 30 heat reached would be the shutdown goal, we can even move this flagpole up or down for balance reasons.

Koniving, on 23 June 2014 - 02:51 PM, said:

Point 5: Reduce armor, the reason we doubled it in closed beta was Mechs were dieing too quickly.

I'm assuming along with structure health, with a reduction back to TT values? (Atlas, 304 stock, 307 max. Hunchback 160 stock, 169 max, etc.)

Looks like most mechs would live quite a bit longer, but the Gauss Rifle (as it should be) would be king (and incredibly vulnerable).

As a yardstick yes, but this would require testing, the only way to see how it would work is to try it.

[Groutknoll]

Would gauss keep it's current charge up? or change back to a cooldown weapon?

The weapon/armor changes would reduce the high alpha pin-point damage but skilled players would still be able to destroy mechs quickly. It should take the skilled players the same number of shots to destroy a location, less skilled would take more shots due to not being able to hit the same location consistently.

So use Kon's proposed heatsink change with this?
Also how would Kon's max armor proposal work with armor being halved?

[Nothing Whatsoever]

Groutknoll, on 24 June 2014 - 04:21 PM, said:

Would gauss keep it's current charge up? or change back to a cooldown weapon?

I don't think it would need that anymore with damage normalized over 10 seconds.

Quote

The weapon/armor changes would reduce the high alpha pin-point damage but skilled players would still be able to destroy mechs quickly. It should take the skilled players the same number of shots to destroy a location, less skilled would take more shots due to not being able to hit the same location consistently.

So use Kon's proposed heatsink change with this?

I'd like to expand a bit here if I may.

Heatsinks were only supposed to modify dissipation over 10 seconds. So 28 SHS could sink 28 heat over 10 seconds. So for example, a stock AWS-8Q would be able to fire three PPCs one 10 second turn and generate an extra 2 heat.

Why that matters is that extra heat would give penalties (there's even a Heat Scale table that goes up to 50 heat I've seen, I can look for it later):

Spoiler

So if the Awesome is stationary and has line of sight on a target, it can fire its three PPCs for a while before having to worry about damage to the mech and mech warrior. A common pattern was 3-2-3 for example.

So as Lordred showed, if weapon damage was properly normalized, weapons would have much lower DPS and would be suited more to original armor values.

Since, I seemed to have a similar line of thinking, I thought I'd share some of what I've been looking over recently:

Spoiler

Here is a different but similar approach to spreading damage over 10 seconds. Weapons would still be lethal, but adjusted closer to TT armor values. And the way I've thought of TT ammo is that is showing the number of clips or magazines available to a particular weapon, such a an LRM 20 have a total of 6 loads in TT means 120 missiles are fired, so a similar principle should be applied to ballistics weapons.

Spoiler

And to go further, damage do not need to be one big lump, Lasers can still have a beam time and so on; so with the table above, Lasers could have the ROF split with say a ~.7 to .8 beam and a cooldown of the difference ~2.2 to 2.3.

And Ballistic weapons could also be set up to fire more streams of rounds that what I was looking at above.

And since missile weapons have a wide spread they could be the spread FLD kings instead of current pinpoint weapons, especially if they can use a modified SSRM bone targeting system that can target a mech and still have some of a salvo miss.

Here is a worksheet snip where I was comparing 28 SHS against three PPCs firing every five seconds at 5 damage.

SHS basically remain unchanged from how they work in MWO before Heat Containment, Cool Run, the 2x Elite and so on, but can manage heat generated from weapons if weapons would get normalized over the 10 second window.

Spoiler

This last table is a worksheet I was using to help me visualize how damage could be broken down over 10 seconds, I just show examples of IS weapons, but the same can easily be done for Clan weapons.

Spoiler

Quote

Also how would Kon's max armor proposal work with armor being halved?

There might be some tweaking needed with weapons normalized, such as simply having different armor maxes for different chassis, so that a Thunderbolt would have more armor than a Jager, and an Awesome would carry more than a Victor, but the idea can certainly still work.

[Lordred]

Thanks Preator, the reason I came up with the numbers I did would be to keep the amount of things PGI would need to change to a minimum, as it stands they would only need to tweak heat and damage values, nothing else.

Though I would be completely for a full re-write of firing times, however I think your tables rely on the lasers have a pulse fire rather then a burn time? My table incorporates the current recharge and duration time for all weapons, and to answer a question from earlier, this also includes the Gauss rifle charge up time as well. If we remove the charge time, we would also need to lower its damage a little more.

[Karl Streiger]

As usually i like this approach.

Afaik you did use the "theoretical" damage of the BattleTech weapons. But i would like to see a system that uses the modified damage values with consideration of the hit probability at ranges. So long range (heavy weapons) deal more damage in comparison with the short range weapons.

http://www.heavymeta...com/bv_calc.htm
for example with the MLAS vs LLAS

• weapon type energy
  
• damage per shot 5
  
• scroll down till you see: The total of all the average damages is 30.833
  
• damage per shot 8
  
• short range 5
  
• medium range 10
  
• long range 15
  
• scroll down till you see: The total of all the average damages is 82.222

Because its fitting - keep the damage in 10sec for the large laser at 8.2 dmg but reduce the base damage for the MLAS to 3.1

You can easily take those calculations into your spreadsheet and calculate proper values (and yes the value IS - ERPPC would be 15.2 and for the classical PPC 11.7 (with min range in the calculation, but you don't need a min range in game afterwards)

[Lordred]

Anyone else have any constructive input?

[Lordred]

Small bump to see if anyone has anything more to add. Then dooming to be buried.