Russ Bullock, on 07 September 2014 - 08:32 PM, said:
Only 20 pages? Okay sorry I'm late to the party but I am going to jump in here:
Well lets keep in mind that many players including myself are very concerned with "average time to death". I personally wish the average lifespan was a little longer. As we have stated many times lots of our design decisions are based on a desired game where players really feel like they are driving a giant stomping mech that can take some abuse and possibly survive a mistake. A more "battle of attrition" feeling is what we and many of our players desire. This has been the basis for most design choices that steered us away from large pin point Alpha's and punching holes through mechs. So I would rather try and keep time to death at least where it is and that means not just buffing up the IS mechs to reach Clans. So the main problem with buffing IS mechs is just that everyone dies faster.
How many of your truly prefer that style of gameplay in MWO? Please I am actually asking.
Dear Russ.
What about lifespans? 100+damage alpha direwolfs barely give any "lifespan" even to assaults. they cna shred some in two alphas.
So the fix must be on the high alpha builds. kinda instant dealing 100+ damage in 1,5 seconds , 4 secs Cooldown and again is not a valid thing. They need to spread this damage over a longer time. Because lights and mediums do not survive a small "mistake". facing these opponents.
In a heavy and Assault, you do survive minor mistakes serveral times.
Ghost heat and heat is not the right system to balance, because heavies and assaults who carry all the cool guns assisted by a few energyweapons *caugh* 5xAc5+ 3CERML*caugh*. Said build suffered nearly not by those changes. The Nova on the other side, or adder, they suffered a lot, because they can not alter their builds much.
So when I would use a 4xCERML adder, I an not run cooler, because runnign cooler means -25% firepower for a single heatsink which barely imporves any heat issues. And by this you force the mech basically to very specific loadouts which lights often restricts to only a few choices. ot much fun in variety to use.
While on said Direwolf witt its 3 CERML as support to the AC's the heat change is nearly unnoticeable. And even if he would swap a CERML for a heatsink, the build rarely suffers in firepower.
if you want "battle of attrition" you need to destroy alpha strikes. But lorewise with the superlow heat AC's you will NEVER achieve this.
If you want to achieve this, alte the way how many wapons can fire. Simultaneously.
simple example:
lets say we would create wepaon groups, for small wepaos and big weapons and Supersize weapons.
small weapons count 1 point.
big wepaons count 2 points.
Supersize wepaons 3 points.
Maybe exclude flamers and MG's from this and give them 0 points.
example Small and medium lasers, AC's up to 5 are small. up to LRM 10.
Gauss + AC 20 are supersize.
rest is big weapons.
Now everyone can shoot up to "6 points of wepaons" simultaneausly.
this way, heavy AC + laser builds as mentioned above will be restricted to what they can fire simulteaneously. This would heavily reduce the alpha damage ability. But mechs still can fire Volley after Volley, meaning the real dps will not sink that harsh. finding a good weapon rotation will now be important. Or people may build "mixed" mechs. where they use a pair of CERLL for long range and probably 4 CERML for short and medium range. Because pakcign laods of medium range wepaons won't work for high pinpoint alpha. And therefore you better try to achieve a loadout that can deliver viable alphas on all ranges.
and for more "battle of attrition" reuce armor, increase internal HP. This will cause component destruction to have a lot more influence on a single emchs perfomance. Because lets be honest, most of the time you start to deistroy components in a mehc is also shortly before that section completely goes off.. When now said section instead would last wuite long and "survive" serveral component destructions, the component destruction will happen more often and mostlikely early enough to cause "attrition" on the mechs performance.
Yes you are right, buffing IS won't help the feeling of big armored mechs, everything just dies faster. But limiting the amount fo weapons being used simultaneously will also nerf the clans, because they can wield a lot more weapons and they can hardly make use of this. The IS will mostlikely stay untouched since they rarely na wield crazy amounts of wepons alltogether. But yet clans are not totally nerfed, they will have the ability to carry more wepaons for specific situations, they will just nore be able to fire them all again.
Also nice would be some quirks for the Nova now would be 16,5% less heat by energy weapons. Otherwise you create a second "prebuff-Awesomone" as soon as the Stormcrow is released.
Edited by Lily from animove, 08 September 2014 - 12:49 AM.