CoffiNail, on 04 September 2014 - 08:11 AM, said:
EZ mode Clan? Yeah, okay. PGI are doing a darn good job of balancing the Clan vs IS and still keeping the Clan flavour. I get taken out in my Clan mechs by IS as often as other Clan chassis.
Cimarb, on 04 September 2014 - 11:30 AM, said:
Yeah, the difference is skill, not technology type (Clan/IS). Once all of them are out for cbills, we will finally have a level playing field. THAT is when PGI should have started trying to balance the two tech types, IMO. Anyone that thinks Clan mechs are EZmode has either never played them or just sucks regardless of tech they are piloting...
First off, you guys focused on the least important part of my comment(s).
Secondly, I do, in fact, own both kinds of mechs and I have won and lost matches in both kinds of mechs. The fundamental difficulty with balancing the clan mechs are the low risk XL engines. As long as Clan mechs can carry twice the weapon tonnage of IS mechs without a significant loss in durability any attempts to balance them through weapons alone are going to leave the clans with crap weapons that are still smaller and cooler than their IS equivalents.
Even now, most clan weapons perform significantly worse in the field than their IS equivalents but because they're smaller and the clan mechs have half weight engines clan mechs are still awfully effective. I know my TW can run as fast as my hunchback and has a higher firepower rating than my 100 ton DDC. Of coarse the Atlas is using a standard engine and it's slow as hell.
I think they could back off on many of the weapon nerfs if they introduced a system that caused degraded performance from engine criticals less than 3; perhaps a loss of engine heat sinks or a movement penalty. They could apply the mechanics across the board.
Clan mechs tend to run with part of their engine destroyed significantly longer than IS mechs, because the rest of their engine may still be fully armoured, even with ten damage to two crit locations. As a result they would be effected disproportionally more than IS mechs. I think this would effectively provide a small nerf to all clan mechs, as they're forced to run with the more vulnerable XL engines. Perhaps, as a result, we could bring the clan weapons a little closer to their IS counterparts in terms of pin point damage potential. I mean, the laser burn times are ridiculous.
Skilled players would tend to be effected less, as they tend to know how to spread damage and avoid getting those engine crits too early in the match, and the newbs might not have their EZ-mode clan mechs anymore.
but again, the gist of my post was that PGI is not to be trusted, and it's best to set your expectations low.
And there's going to be another all asset consuming, preorder pack available for purchase before Christmas (with more clan mechs)