Nightmare1, on 05 October 2014 - 10:40 AM, said:
Ah, convergence and cone of fire...the topics agitators turn to after their whiny clamoring for nerfs successfully results in the ruination of JJs, PPCs, and, possibly soon, Clans.
Ah, the usual mindless replies, which do nothing to convince anyone who doesn't agree with you already, much less move the discussion forwards.
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Seriously, I never thought I would see actual discussion about implementing something as ridiculous as cone of fire or convergence. It's already difficult enough to put all your shots into a single component; we don't need to add pure randomness into the mix as well. This is MechWarrior Online, not Table Top, so quit trying to turn it into TT.
"I dunno how that guy got elected. I don't know ANYBODY who voted for him" is not a counter argument. For that matter, neither is accusing people of wanting things they don't want.
Not even *I* want the TT in video game format, and it seems that I'm the only active poster who gave enough of a flip to actually go read the TT combat system rules themselves and see if all the FUD tossed at them was true... and it wasn't and isn't.
http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__3768529
and :
http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__3785703
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...And for all those who say, "Saying 'No!' doesn't solve the problem!", I say, "What problem?" Seriously, pinpoint damage is not an issue. Learn to torso twist and maneuver and don't charge down a DireWhale's throat, and you won't get components blown off.
You are apparently ignorant of the problem. You actually have to have been around since the closed beta or near to it to understand. Given that I'm lazy, I'll quote myself from elsewhere:
pht said:
There's a serious no-fun gameplay catch-22 with perfect convergence for everything fired, even under the "nearly perfect" situation above - the weapons damage numbers are far higher than the armor/internal structure/internal components were built to absorb. Perfect concentration with stock numbers on both ends results in the target *nearly instantly vaporizing* which would be far less of a "reward for skill" than it would be the equivalent of "I hit the WIN! button first."
How bad is it? to use my example from the OP in this thread, you can have 92 damage hitting a MAXIMUM of 62 armor (that's if you have ZERO rear ct armor) backed by 31 points of internal structure. This is from a daishi build that's not obscenely min-maxed - but that's not as bad as it can really get. Using the same Daishi, you can have 106 damage, if you still want to have a long ranged weapon for 27,750,000 c-bills; if you want more damage and you don't mind a heat-nap you can do 119 for 27,630,000 c-bills... and this is with 3050 era standard clan tech. The IS tech is just as dangerous considering it's cost - an easy *heat neutral* build of a pillager plg-3z can output 66 damage for 22,090,000 - or you can do a heat neutral std engine zombie build devastator DVS-1D that does 62 for 9,544,000 c-bills.
So why not just bump up the armor and internal numbers and keep the perfect concentration of weapons fire? MWO has already tried this. The result was gross weapons imbalances between those weapons that can still manage to penetrate the higher numbers and those weapons that can't. It favors the ppcs/gauss/ac20/Large lasers while it cripples the smaller weapons and makes the smallest damaging weapons almost pointless.
MWO happened to double the external armor numbers. That didn't stop the 'mechs from vaporizing. So they doubled the internal structure numbers. 'Mechs started to stop vaporizing. BTW, MW4 as mektek modded it also tried the same thing with the assault 'mechs, except it was just more armor, not more internals (and the damage/armor/structure numbers were already more than double stock in that game before MT modded it) - with the same results to balance. So in MWO there was a rate of fire bump for smaller weapons to attempt to pull them off of the shelf.
Not only were the smaller damaging weapons hurt, the light class of 'mechs were hurt as well, for the simple reason that light 'mechs have a very hard time carrying the larger less-effected weapons. Light mechs rely on multiple small damaging weapons. Thus a sort of "double imperative" to make the lighter weapons more attractive again.
But it was (and still is) more involved than that - as every new weapon was introduced, pgi has had to re-balance not only the new weapon just to get it into the game, they've had to *reconsider the entire weapons spectrum* with an eye towards possibly having to rebalance them in light of the new weapon. This is also where the combat mechanic we call "ghost heat" (which magically damages your 'mech instead of just your cooling system) came from; this is where gauss timers came from; this is where the limit on the number of gauss that can be fired at once came from - it's where "the build of the patch" routine came from... it has resulted in the pre-eminent battlefield role being far and away "who does the most damage to the fewest armor sections in the least time." The choice to bump up armor/structure numbers vs damage numbers as a "fix" will continue to bear sour fruit for the foreseeable future. This happened in mw4, it's happened in mwo, and it will continue on.
PGI could have gone the route of putting the entire 'mech's armor/internal structure numbers into a single pool and just subtract damage from that, but who wants to hit an arm with obscene damage and not have it fall off? If they set damage percentages for x component/structure destruction, that's just going back to the same old routine as we have already, with the same problems.
They could also try and make it harder to get the perfect concentration hits, but all that would do is reward the patient and otherwise higher skilled players. It would not only reward those players, but it would make it FAR harder for people to progress *up* into that skilled player set, meaning as soon as you broke into that ELO bracket, you would be getting crushed repeatedly. Speaking of which, things like ELO, which by design break up the community, are more necessary with the way MWO is because the damage concentration as it stands rewards those who know how to get it reliably in combat.
That's why spread-damage has come up and continues to do so, even from people who know nothing about the TT BT game. Properly done, spread damge is a better way of resolving damage to battlemechs. You don't have to have constant weapons and 'mech tweaking, resulting in the "build of the patch" routine that can and does ruin the results of all your hard grind; you don't have to have crazy barely-justifiable mechanics like "ghost heat" where the devs have to attempt to hide the maths from the playerbase for it to work as intended, you don't have to limit the pre-eminent battlefield role to "most damage to a single section in the least time possible" ... you don't have to limit the role of gauss and other big hard hitting weapons below what they were intended for and than try to come up with a justification for doing so. Light and medium 'mechs could actually fulfill their combat roles outside of trying to get into the "damage warfare" pillar just as a matter of mere survival. Heavies could actually *be* fast moving raiders, instead of second-class to assault 'mechs in the damage game.
The nerfs you have a problem with are a
direct and necesary result of PGI's deciding to not have the battlemechs part of the combat aiming happen in MWO.
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