5
I find more and more I miss being able to toss lasers and other smaller weapons onto a mech and dust it up. It used to be a true test of pilot skill, like a dogfight who ever could keep their guns on target in the dance of death longest while keeping the opponent off balance won. But those days are long long gone.
These days nine times out of ten if you even try to engage you are no longer in a fight with your target, but with every LRM user hiding behind a hill, meaning you get to run or die to the without ECM. On the rare occasions you don't get showered with aim-assisted death from above, you find yourself in massively overcrowded maps, where everything is just a fur ball. Pretty much all of the old maps are no longer big enough for the player size we now have, meaning the chance for a light or fast medium running into their opposite number(s) and duking it out in a battle of the scouts is long since gone. If you are in range of one target on all but the newest maps, baring Alpine, you are almost certainly in range of two - three more. Which of course means the victor is no longer determined by the pilots, but by the mob.
The final nail in the coffin is the games total dedication to FLPPD. I remember Jenner fights in closed beta using small lasers that felt like real battles, like a dogfight on the ground. It took quite a bit of skill, especially back when the horribly broken knockdowns still existed, to keep your opposite off your back and still slot in enough shots to bring him down or send him home wounded. you could duck and dive between large mechs in a hit and run with reasonable certainty that you'd still be in fighting shape was you ran back out, wouldn't do much damage but it caused chaos. Sadly this to is gone, those intense dogfights died with lights being able to reliably carry much longer range weapons with much higher firepower, and the all to often occurrence for a single larger mechs Alpha to render you Effectively Dead means the game just isn't what it used to be.
Effectively Dead, something I don't see often mentioned but as an old pocket rocket jokey its something I became very familiar with. Simply put you don't need to kill a mech to "kill" a mech, a light is pretty much out of the fight (barring totally incompetent enemies) the moment that leg hits yellowish orange, since at that point it's now easily pickable with today's high alpha damage. An XL mech is pretty much done the moment it's side torso hits that same level. Of course I imagine your first response to that is.. "Duh", as this is how the games meant to function. once your armors gone you are in trouble.
The reason this has become a problem, is that its taking less and less time to hit those health thresholds as the games matured. Improved hit registration means more if not most shots actually land (a good thing), Alpha strike values have gotten higher and higher (not really a good thing in my mind), heat management tools has steadily increased the number of those Alpha's that can be shot off before a shut down. It's reached the point where a heavy mech can effectively lose a side torso with only seconds of exposure. I've seen a Jaeger's side armor vanish within moments of it peaking around a corner, at medium range to a single mech (my mech).
I can focus fire lasers with perfect heat management and above average precision all day long, but it makes little difference when front loaded damage bursts can strip medium armor in two seconds of exposure and heavy armor in only a couple weapon cycles (and that's 1v1). It's more effective for me to push the muzzle of my srm/lbx shadowhawk down the throat of enemy mechs than it is for me to carefully aim banks of lasers, doesn't really matter what kind, to shear off critical parts and kill XL's. beyond a couple gimmick builds, it's become a game more concerned about volume of fire, and especially volume of simultaneous fire, than it has about thoughtful aim. And really, why would it not when an entire mechs weapons loadout automatically finds the same point of contact as long as you fire them all at the same time.
I'm not one to fret about progress, I like that new techs have been introduced and that the game evolves. Just seems like the path the game has taken has resulted in some of it's finesse being lost. Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if FLPPD took a large blanket nerf.
Edited by Quxudica, 03 November 2014 - 04:43 AM.
