950 replies to this topic

[DemonGuard]

The goal was to address the 50 pinpoint alpha und you came up with a projectile speed reduction of the (ER-)PPC?
You are saying that this brings the PPC to an effective range of 600-800m instead of 1000m+? Last time i checked, my PPC is hardly doing any damage at 1000m+ (i don't consider doing 1 damage for 10 heat effective).

At a distance of 500m the difference between the impacts of a simultaneously fired Gauss and PPC is about 250ms with the new speed. So if you have a ping above 100ms you won't be able to spread that damage, because if your client shows the hit by a Gauss and you start twisting your torso, by the time that info is back to the server, it will already have locked in the PPC hit. The funny part is, the closer you get to that long range build, the more dangerous it becomes to get killed in your light in one alpha. Really a great solution...

Edited by DemonGuard, 08 August 2014 - 03:56 AM.

[Noth]

Kitane, on 08 August 2014 - 03:47 AM, said:

It is much easier to hit with lasers (especially light mechs), they still cost less heat and you can still chainfire them for much better heat efficiency than ER PPCs. It's a tradeoff for different tastes, builds and skill levels and it has different synergies with other weapon systems.

A good game has these tradeoffs.

Yes it is easier to score a hit with lasers, but did you know a hit could be a fraction of a point of damage? So while you may swipe that light doing some damage across the entire mech, that PPC is doing heavy damage to a single area of that mech and removing said part much more easily than the lasers.

[TitanLord]

Gotta say that I feel these sweeping changes are pretty ignorant and incompetent. Killing the ppc will solve your gauss/ppc combos though... congrats? If you're going to apply those nerfs to the PPC and make it so much harder to hit with then you at least need to lower the heat to allow for more shots to compensate.

There has to be a better solution to the gauss/ppc problem, this seems like the easy way out...

As for the CER-Large nerf... do you guys even play your own game?

[Xarian]

CERLL:
1. Base heat increase is fine.
2. Ghost heat multiplier of 12 is overly punitive. If you manage to fire 2x of these guys, it generates the same heat as firing 2x CERPPCs. This doesnt make any sense at all.
3. Ghost heat minimum of 1 CERLL is ridiculous. This alone nearly destroys the viability of the weapon. It also makes chain fire difficult; if you miss the 0.5 second window even once, you will overheat.
4. If you're going to increase beam duration to 2.0, you need to decrease the recycle by 0.5 to maintain the same damage/sec. Otherwise you're just guaranteeing that people will never use the weapon again.

PPCs
1. If you're going to decrease projectile speed, you should increase projectile size to compensate.

Honestly, I don't understand the changes. CERLLs didn't need such a severe nerf. They aren't single-handedly destroying the game right now - why make them nearly unusable?

[Mystere]

Xarian, on 08 August 2014 - 03:59 AM, said:

3. Ghost heat minimum of 1 CERLL is ridiculous. This alone nearly destroys the viability of the weapon. It also makes chain fire difficult; if you miss the 0.5 second window even once, you will overheat.

Macros are your friend. Everyone should start using them.

[Willothius]

Godimas, on 07 August 2014 - 06:39 PM, said:

The large laser changes however, are total bs. Only being able to fire one at a time, and having to wait 2 seconds before firing another.... there wont be a point to loading out more then 2 of these, because by the time the second one finishes firing, the first one will be ready to go again.

The heat penalty, unnecessarily complex as it is, only affects the 2nd laser if it fired within 0,5 seconds of the previous one fired.. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it won't affect the 2nd C-ERLL fired after 0,5 seconds, while the 1st one will still burn for 1,5 seconds..
Similarly, the 3rd and 4th successive ERLL fired will overlap with the previous ones, so basically, you can still have an (almost) continuous stream of 4 C-ERLL melting someones face without heat penalty..
..Only downside is the base heat number set to 12, as the difference between a proper shot after 0,5 s and one just too soon at 0,47 seconds is HUGE.. Weird PGI style numbers.. :S

And as someone said before, the increase in beam duration ACTUALLY makes for a better heat/second, giving you a slightly more spread of the damage done (true, that's a disadvantage, just shake, twist and turn to shrug off the dmg!), but basically you're now able to put out constant damage streams more efficiently!

So hold your horses and do some math, complainers, this "huge nerfbat swing" is actually not THAT big*:
-Longer burn time = more dmg spread.
-Less heat/second = More continuous dmg output.
-Heat penalty = on one hand, no prob, 'cause the beam is longer and you can still have 3 or 4 beams firing together, overlapping.
-Heat penalty base number to 12 = quite excessive, and unnecessary!

Sounds like a proper tune-up, just takes some more skill now I guess, but the base heat penalty number is way too high. Also, I'm very curious if PGI was actually aware of the implications of their changes, cause it doesn't really sound like they knew that they increased heat efficiency

*Unless i'm completely wrong on the 0,5 seconds mechanics, in which case PGI is even dumber in their programming than I thought and you indeed only need to carry 2 at most..

[EDIT] Forgot one thing: The overall dps goes down if they don't correct for the longer beam duration in recycle time! That's also one that might add up to the nerf.. We'll see what it does..

Edited by Willothius, 08 August 2014 - 04:12 AM.

[JHackworth]

The way to balance Clan vs IS is via econometrics and something like a tonnage/battle value system, 500 IS tons vs 700 Clan tons, etc.

A simple formulation of that can be found here:
http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__3616299

and a more sophisticated one here:
Read this to learn how to balance mechs based on usage statistics.


This jerking-around overtuning business just looks bad EVEN if you devs are convinced it's perfect. The PPC-Gauss combo is already a skill shot--you just took the entire combination possibility away. I wouldn't be too distressed by a slight desync but a slow PPC 'projectile' means there is no longer a long range sniper energy weapon on the field. ERLL doesn't count because of beam duration and now it counts even less because that Kit-Fox exposed for 2 seconds is a dead Kit-Fox.

The thing that bothers me most is how all this is couched in terms of what was 'intended'. That's just bull-kaka. Unless you've spelled out the vision for every weapon in the MW:O, we assume the intended behavior is close to lore. Your imaginary intentions for each weapon is just a rationalization and an insulting one at that.

Keep Clan weapons relatively OP; just put fewer mechs on the battlefield to balance.

Edited by JHackworth, 08 August 2014 - 05:32 AM.

[Noth]

JHackworth, on 08 August 2014 - 04:04 AM, said:

Keep Clan weapons relatively OP; just put fewer mechs on the battlefield to balance.

That is kind of what the 10v12 was supposed to do. But screw that, lets just nerf before we test such.

[Nash]

The changes are....interesting.

I understand that you want to balance the different weapon stats even if my personal opinion is that there should be more a comparison to the lore of BT. So that PPCs and Gaus are more effective but quiet rare. So they should be only for special mechs because of the weight and so on...but hey...that's only my personal opinion. ^^

Anyway, I can accept the changes for the PPC and I think most people will adapt to it but the change to the clan ER-LL is defenitly a wrong direction imho. You may be wondering why I think so.

Now as we all know the clans are mostly build on range. Not only because they prefer a non-close-combat fight in the lore because they think it's dishonorable but also because their weapon fitting is more created for range. So if you change the heat build more with the clan ER-LL you push most clan mechs toward a close-combat-fight (brawl to name it.. ^^ ) and so imho they will have less chances to stand vs the IS mechs. If you btw want than try a build at the matchmaking with a 12vs10 setup it's getting more and more difficult for the clan mechs.

You might now say...hey the clans have LRMs which work on close range while the IS LRMs don't. Yes that might be true in some way but do you really think that might help the Clan mechs if they only have 1 mech which have the possibility for ECM? Of course the clans have a modul to lose lock of the mech as soon they are out of line of sight but hey...as slow as they are...ok I stop already ^^

Anyway. I think it is ok if you raise the beam duration and the base value heat...but if you change the minimum heat penalty you are making in my opinion a big mistake.

But hey...who am I that I am complaining...I will wait until the changes are in and go for the testing even if I think that it's the wrong change.

cheers

[Kitane]

Noth, on 08 August 2014 - 03:51 AM, said:

Yes it is easier to score a hit with lasers, but did you know a hit could be a fraction of a point of damage? So while you may swipe that light doing some damage across the entire mech, that PPC is doing heavy damage to a single area of that mech and removing said part much more easily than the lasers.

That's the point. Having a choice between a weapon that can always reliable place at least some of its damage where you want with perfect convergence, and an all-or-nothing weapon with slow projectile speed, that's difficult to use against small fast elusive targets and loses convergence every time you have to lead the target.

[Shadow of Intent]

Peiper, on 07 August 2014 - 06:48 PM, said:

You guys at PGI are ignoring the fix. This was brought to my attention via the latest Ekman interview on NGNG. While they didn't actually talk about convergence, which is at the core of Homeless Bill's plan, it would make the game far more battletech, and take care of your stupid ghost heat mechanics at the same time. Nerfing weapons is not the answer to your problem. Your problem is in the foundation of how weapons work, especially in concert with each other. READ the following article to know what I'm talking about.

http://www.qqmercs.com/?p=2780

Homeless Bill is a genius.

But for now I'll just wait and see how this pans out. I won't hold my breath on this changing anything but generating more h(e)at(e)...

[Quaamik]

Another nerf to the PPCs?

Oh yes, the top competitive players tested it. You mean the ones who don't use LRMs at all, and use ballistics heavily, and PPCs only as snipers? Did you ever think that catering to a group that prefers weapons that are absolutely dominant in the mid to short range would automatically nerf long range weapons?

You've made Gauss a long range weapon not suitable for brawling. Your heat scales and ghost heat made PPCs not suitable for brawling. Now your trying to shorten the effective range of the PPC to force them into range of brawlers.

Already the ACs can hit as far out as most PPCs fired by the average player. This nerf wasn't needed.

As for the CELaser, firing 2 gets ghost heat? Ridiculous.

[Prezimonto]

Noth, on 07 August 2014 - 07:33 PM, said:

CERLLs are not meta.

No, but they are very effective in PUG queue.

[CyclonerM]

2 seconds.,. 2!! Seriously?

[Noth]

Kitane, on 08 August 2014 - 04:11 AM, said:

That's the point. Having a choice between a weapon that can always reliable place at least some of its damage where you want with perfect convergence, and an all-or-nothing weapon with slow projectile speed, that's difficult to use against small fast elusive targets and loses convergence every time you have to lead the target.

In this the CERPPC is still better than the CERLL by a large margin. The gap between the two is even larger now, lending even less reason to take the CERLL.

[Desdain]

Remember in the winter of 2013 when PPCs were slow? Nobody used them.

[Noth]

Prezimonto, on 08 August 2014 - 04:15 AM, said:

No, but they are very effective in PUG queue.

So are LRMs, but that doesn't mean they should be nerfed, reworked yes, but not straight up nerfed.

[Steadfast]

Well. Back than they where also hot as hell that did not help either. Slow wasnt the only reason they where not in use.

[Noth]

Steadfast, on 08 August 2014 - 04:21 AM, said:

Well. Back than they where also hot as hell that did not help either. Slow wasnt the only reason they where not in use.

The heat back then is about what we have now (and no ghost heat). There were more issues with hit reg back then though.

Edited by Noth, 08 August 2014 - 04:28 AM.

[Jungle Rhino]

Wow. This is just getting ridiculous. We have got a real time simulation running here yet we are still getting lumbered with completely arbitrary game mechanics. Ghost heat is nothing short of 'unit caps' which you see in other poorly balanced game systems like rome2. You need to address the root cause. Playing pop-a-mole with the net bat on whatever the most popular weapon is will never work as the next most popular just takes over.