Have come to question why weapon stats is on average 2 to 3 times higher than TT values. When you look at some of the complaints (Time To Kill and Heat (and the need for Ghost Heat) It comes down to an error in adjusting TT values to be represented in Real Time FPS format.
First example being the Medium Laser
5 damage and 4 heat over 1 second with a 3 second cooldown. If you were to translate that figure into TT rules, that would make the Medium Laser do 12 damage with 10 heat during the 10 second phase.
Or the AC/20 being 20 damage and 6 heat with a 4 second cooldown makes it do 50 damage with 15 heat following the same rule.
Since the damage stats were put in place long before many of us Founders were brought in, we were never (IIRC) given a good reason for this.
It seems to me that the math is backwards and the ML should be doing 2 damage and the AC/20 doing 8 per shot and keeping the heat +/- the same (these are just examples of 2 weapon systems without redoing every weapon on the table.
Making these adjustments, it seems to me would have eliminated the need for doubling armor values from TT rules, would have increased TTK and eliminated the need for Ghost Heat, but I may be wrong.
Was there a reason for this during the Development stage that maybe we weren't made aware of?
1. Not all "per 10 seconds" values from Tabletop were balanced. A good number of TT weapons were utter garbage (rose-tinted glasses aside), and would consequently need to do more damage/less heat/whatever "per turn" in MWO than they did in TT. Heck, maybe even a few weapons might need nerfs compared to TT (potentially the Gauss Rifle, for instance, if we removed the charge-up).
2. The "per 10 seconds" statistic makes the assumption that the target and shooter both stay exposed for 10 consecutive seconds with no interruptions. This is a silly assumption to make. Most players in MWO only stick out long enough to fire one salvo, or perhaps a few shots from faster firing weapons. Tabletop's turn-based environment forces all mechs to stay exposed for an entire turn at a time, but in real-time we only need to stick out just long enough to fire our guns.
As an example, let's take two Gauss Rifle variants, each to TT specs.
Was there a reason for this during the Development stage that maybe we weren't made aware of?
Probably because only firing your weapons once every 10 seconds would make for a dull game, and if you split say the medium laser's 5 damage over 2-4 shots in that 10 second interval it just feels like throwing spitballs at the enemy.
Also with your example of the AC/20, if you have it do 8 damage per shot, then the standard 7 shots per ton of ammo becomes trivial and the weapon is pretty much a waste. You could exponentially increase the amount of ammo per ton, but you're still deviating from TT, and if you're going to do that anyway, I'd much rather my AC/20 feels like a mech-killing weapon the way it's meant to be.
1. Not all "per 10 seconds" values from Tabletop were balanced. A good number of TT weapons were utter garbage (rose-tinted glasses aside), and would consequently need to do more damage/less heat/whatever "per turn" in MWO than they did in TT.
True, not all the values were the best, or even translated well to RTFPS, but the issue is that damage and heat are doubled, even trippled over TT values and this seems to have had a cascade effect on overall balance.
FupDup, on 06 October 2014 - 01:21 PM, said:
2. The "per 10 seconds" statistic makes the assumption that the target and shooter both stay exposed for 10 consecutive seconds with no interruptions. This is a silly assumption to make. Most players in MWO only stick out long enough to fire one salvo, or perhaps a few shots from faster firing weapons. Tabletop's turn-based environment forces all mechs to stay exposed for an entire turn at a time, but in real-time we only need to stick out just long enough to fire our guns.
Which really has nothing to do with the overall damage/heat values and their translation into a RTFPS.
Nearly every weapon has a 4 second cooldown. MLs, AC20s, PPCs, Gauss, SRM6s. Long range weapons, short range weapons, big and small.
They share the same cooldown. I feel there could have been some diversity there. Long range, heavy weapons having longer cooldowns than their short range counterparts.
1. Not all "per 10 seconds" values from Tabletop were balanced. A good number of TT weapons were utter garbage (rose-tinted glasses aside), and would consequently need to do more damage/less heat/whatever "per turn" in MWO than they did in TT. Heck, maybe even a few weapons might need nerfs compared to TT (potentially the Gauss Rifle, for instance, if we removed the charge-up).
2. The "per 10 seconds" statistic makes the assumption that the target and shooter both stay exposed for 10 consecutive seconds with no interruptions. This is a silly assumption to make. Most players in MWO only stick out long enough to fire one salvo, or perhaps a few shots from faster firing weapons. Tabletop's turn-based environment forces all mechs to stay exposed for an entire turn at a time, but in real-time we only need to stick out just long enough to fire our guns.
Not to mention that the TT turn was really supposed to be more of a broad abstraction rather than a maneuver-by-maneuver log of battle.
Probably because only firing your weapons once every 10 seconds would make for a dull game, and if you split say the medium laser's 5 damage over 2-4 shots in that 10 second interval it just feels like throwing spitballs at the enemy.
So, the solution was to keep the damage values the same, double armor to increase TTK when the weapons were doing 2.5/3x more damage than they should be, and TTK is still perceived as a problem?
LauLiao, on 06 October 2014 - 01:24 PM, said:
Also with your example of the AC/20, if you have it do 8 damage per shot, then the standard 7 shots per ton of ammo becomes trivial and the weapon is pretty much a waste. You could exponentially increase the amount of ammo per ton, but you're still deviating from TT, and if you're going to do that anyway, I'd much rather my AC/20 feels like a mech-killing weapon the way it's meant to be.
Only because armor values were doubled. Had they remained the same, then 56 damage/ton is still respectable output.
Which really has nothing to do with the overall damage/heat values and their translation into a RTFPS.
The effect it has is that most of that "bonus" damage per 10 seconds gets lost. For example, let's take the AC/20. In MWO it currently does about 50 damage in 10 seconds. But how often do you actually fire it back-to-back for 10 seconds straight with zero interruptions? Probably not often. Most battles don't involve mechs being exposed that long, and even when they do, things like torso twisting defensively might take priority over going full-auto with weapon cooldowns.
So, if my sniper Shadow Hawk pokes out just long enough to get hit by a single AC/20 shell, I didn't actually receive 50 damage as you're advertising. I only received 20 damage in that time frame. But with doubled armor, that turns into the same thing as 10 damage compared to TT. So if you don't stand in the open, you might actually receive LESS damage in a 10 second period than you would in TT. However, bads who don't know about cover don't get this benefit...
TL;DR: My overall point can probably be summed up as that we should take these values with a grain of salt.
Fup:
I think you're missing the point. I used the "10 second rule" to show how if you reverse engineer MWO damage to TT values, you see where the maths with damage/heat/TTK etc become a problem. They're not translating 1-1, they're barely translating to 2-1 (often 3-1) over the same amount of time.
If you look into the TT Solaris VII ruleset, they used 2.5 second turns with the ability for certain weapons to "hotfire" ie; fire multiple times during a ten second period. Mapscale was different too, but i can't remember how much smaller each hex represented. MG's and mlas were devastating, ac20's and gauss had a real long cd....
Have come to question why weapon stats is on average 2 to 3 times higher than TT values. When you look at some of the complaints (Time To Kill and Heat (and the need for Ghost Heat) It comes down to an error in adjusting TT values to be represented in Real Time FPS format.
First example being the Medium Laser.
5 damage and 4 heat over 1 second with a 3 second cooldown. If you were to translate that figure into TT rules, that would make the Medium Laser do 12 damage with 10 heat during the 10 second phase.
Or the AC/20 being 20 damage and 6 heat with a 4 second cooldown makes it do 50 damage with 15 heat following the same rule.
Since the damage stats were put in place long before many of us Founders were brought in, we were never (IIRC) given a good reason for this.
It seems to me that the math is backwards and the ML should be doing 2 damage and the AC/20 doing 8 per shot and keeping the heat +/- the same (these are just examples of 2 weapon systems without redoing every weapon on the table.
Making these adjustments, it seems to me would have eliminated the need for doubling armor values from TT rules, would have increased TTK and eliminated the need for Ghost Heat, but I may be wrong.
Was there a reason for this during the Development stage that maybe we weren't made aware of?
"Heat Neutrality" was a deathly fear that they had. Heat neutral mechs would make 'heat a factor that doesn't matter'. They went under the assumption that if you fire everything then you will have 0 heat, because at the end of a 10 second time slice you would have zero heat (whether you fired it all at once at the beginning and probably shutdown in the process, or fired them one or two at a time with some space in between).
The irony is MWO's rising threshold system makes heat neutrality even easier to achieve while dishing out even more damage than ever possible in both tabletop and the Solaris 7 rules. If they had used tabletop's 30 threshold but used their own firing rates, we'd have 6 AC/2 mechs shutting down in 6 seconds back in the day, the 6 PPC stalker would instantly self-destruct (as well as anything with more than 4 PPCs and 4 PPCs would hurt itself badly if fired at the same time). As it is chain fired 6 PPCs are not only viable but they are viable even in Terra Therma. That shouldn't even be remotely possible.
-----------
Now, only commenting on something else here... The medium laser damage to time mentioned kinda is misleading. It's true the ML is weak compared to even an AC/2 in MWO (28 damage in 10 seconds), but 12 damage and 10 heat has me a little baffled.
This is because the Medium Laser produces 15 damage in 9 seconds (20 damage in 13 seconds). This is including the beam times in the cooldown as the cooldown doesn't begin until the beam ends.
0 seconds, fire.
1 second, laser finishes. 5 damage dealt. Begin cooldown.
2 seconds.
3 seconds.
4 seconds. Now able to fire again. Fire.
5 seconds. Laser finishes. 10 damage dealt. Begin cooldown.
6 seconds.
7 seconds.
8 seconds. Now able to fire again. Fire.
9 seconds. Beam finishes. 15 damage dealt (total mind you). Begin cooldown.
10 seconds.
11 seconds.
12 seconds. Ready to fire again.
So in 9 seconds it deals 15 damage.
I'll be drifting away from the rest of the topic and instead iterating what could have happened if they didn't assume that all Battletech is one shot per rating per use.
Spoiler
All of the following examples use a medium laser.
Now if it was kept in line with tabletop with a rough 3 shots in 10 seconds variant: (Note: ML variants in Battletech lore are between 1 and 5 shots with various beam times to do X damage in X time rating). If we were to assert a 10 second rule:
0 seconds, fire.
0.80 seconds. Firing finishes. 1.666666666666667 damage dealt. Begin cooldown (2.2 seconds)
1.8 seconds.
2.8 seconds.
3 seconds. Ready to fire. Firing.
3.80 seconds. Beam finishes. 3.333333333333333 damage dealt. Cooldown begins.
4.80 seconds.
5.80 seconds.
6 seconds. Ready to fire. Firing.
6.80 seconds. Beam finishes. 5 damage dealt. Cooldown begins.
7.80 seconds.
8.80 seconds.
9 seconds.
Now of course you can assume there's an extra second in cooling time or what not so it can fire again at 0 seconds.
If it was a 4 shot variant with a 0.5 second beam time.
0 seconds, fire.
0.50 seconds. Firing finishes. 1.25 damage dealt. Begin cooldown (2.0 seconds)
1.5 seconds.
2.5 seconds. Ready to fire. Firing.
3 seconds. 2.5 damage dealt. Begin cooldown.
4.00 seconds.
5.00 seconds. Ready to fire. Firing.
5.50 seconds. Beam finishes. 3.75 damage dealt. Cooldown begins.
6.50 seconds.
7.50 seconds. Ready to fire. Firing.
8.00 seconds. Beam finishes. 5 damage dealt. Cooldown begins.
9 seconds.
10 seconds (0 seconds), ready to fire.
Now you can use this for anything from a constant laser variant akin to original series Star Trek phasers which never stop firing until released to the Rassal Blue Beam.
Rassal Blue Beam is my favorite medium laser because of the lore. It's known for extra heat (4 instead of tabletop's 3), massive pinpoint damage (5 damage in a single shot in a beam that lasts "two blinks of the eye") in a brightly colored blue laser beam of death. It requires 1 second to charge before it can be fired. During which the appendage (usually an arm by canon) will vibrate violently, throwing off the medium to long range accuracy (180 meters to 270 meters reduced accuracy) while also emitting smoke. The vibration is caused by secondary and tertiary capacitors 'hyper-charging' the energy into one shot with enhanced short-range accuracy (0-90 meters) and normal small-to-medium range accuracy (90-180 meters). As if the side effects of this weapon weren't bad enough, it also causes EM Interference to the Battlemech using it. It's known to disable advanced systems such as Artemis, ECM, BAP, Seismic, and MAG (does not mention thermal). But it is also written to require 8 seconds of cooldown before it can be used again (leaving one second unaccounted for), and is considered one of the most powerful medium lasers to have ever existed in the Inner Sphere.
The mech they are mounted on only gets a stat sheet and a page. The laser itself got 3 pages in a fluff book. Never has any other laser weapon ever received more than one full page. Yet it still only does 5 damage in 10 (well actually 9.2 to 9.5 seconds).
Think about the implication there. It's been on my mind a lot.
So I'll breakdown a possible rendition of the Rassal Blue Beam. Remember that '0' seconds is the moment that the pilot tries to fire the weapon for these demonstrations.
0 seconds. The pilot starts the charge. Capacitors could be heard priming.
0.25 seconds. The arm begins to vibrate, throwing off that specific crosshair. During the charge, 0.25 heat is generated.
0.5 seconds. The pitch of the capacitors raises as the secondary one kicks in. Another 0.25 heat is generated.
0.75 seconds. Smoke begins to billow from the mech's vents as a third stage in the 'whine' starts with the third capacitor. The written fluff describes this sound as a "cry that will make any nearby infantry or civilian within approximately 90 meters drop their weapons and hold their bleeding ears." The same sound is described as "muffled and reverberated to the extent that pilots have sworn there are gremlins inside their battlemechs" to the Mechwarriors themselves. 0.25 heat is generated.
1 second. Just before the blue beam fires, another 0.25 heat is generated. The beam itself is described as 'deafeningly silent, a silence only drowned out by the capacitors winding down.' The beam spikes 3 heat. A poor cooling jacket which glows heavily is the source of the excess heat (where it would have been 1 heat charging and 2 firing instead of 1 heat charging and 3 firing).
1.2 seconds. The beam has stopped. 5 units of armor on the enemy is almost instantly destroyed.
1.2 + 8 seconds = 9.2 seconds. The Rassal Blue Beam has cooled down enough to be used again.
So there we have some weapon variants. You can easily adjust them to be within 5 second periods as well.
Part of the 10 second time slices is to allow the mechs to raise their arms, get into firing poses, etc and counter for things like being knocked over. After all most mechs don't fire unless walking or stationary for accuracy reasons (much like tanks in War Thunder). Running blatantly flares shots all over the place. Megamek even has rules available for 'double firing' any weapon, though it comes with obvious penalties for doing so.
-----------
We'd easily be able to maintain 1x armor and structure and live much longer. Though some weapons such as the AC/2 would be cherished exclusively for its range and nothing else. Their real use was against the kinds of targets we can't find in MWO. Sure Battletech favors them for the use of slower mechs against fast light mechs (AC/2s are very handy for taking down light mechs), however their real use was blowing holes in buildings while leaving your other weapons free. For dealing with enemy missile trucks, light tanks, enemy infantry and other lightly armored threats such as Clan Elementals.
I know this is a second time of mentioning it, but again I refer to War Thunder. In its matches there are AI and regular players. Picture Battletech or MWO with infantry, tanks, helicopters, aerotech fighters. Now imagine the players as mechs, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of disposable AI resources. An AS7-D-DC with its pilot driving the mech and the Command Console giving it a backup pilot (in case of things like headshot, pilot unconsciousness, etc; the second pilot/commander can take over). With both pilot and the commander alive and awake, then at any time the D-DC or any other mech with a hardfixed Command Console can give commands to the AI.
Now, Blackjacks have strong medium/small lasers that can afford them maybe 2 or 3 shots in 10 seconds, but their AC/2s are much longer ranged and meant to deal suppressive fire which using the Whirlwind/L variant is a constant 1 shot per second at 0.2 damage for the BJ-1.
While the BJ-1 features 30mm belt-fed constant fire AC/2s, the BJ-1DC weilds an unfortunately unnamed pair of magazine fed burst-fire 40mm AC/2s which 'burst' a total of 8 shots to get 2 damage (each shot being 0.25 damage). The exact nature of the burst isn't stated, so we can assume 4 shots to a burst dealing 1 damage, 2 bursts to a magazine (cassette) before it has to reload.
Different styles of weapons catering to different playstyles, within matching classifications of weapons. To me this only seems like it would have been the intelligent way to go as different people have different ways they would want to play and this allows a developer to cater to much more of them. Not to mention pinpoint damage wouldn't be much of an issue. Combine it with 30 threshold, and what's the most you can see?
30 damage from an RAC/5 or shut-down inducing 3 PPC strike? Only 10 more damage than a single AC/20. And with AC/20s following suit, twin AC/20 isn't gonna be that nasty. No need for ghost heat or anti-boating. That missile boat with 6 LRM-5s? Same threat as one with 2 LRM-15s but with better firing control. That mech with 6 LRM-15s? Glass canon with 63 armor (instead of 126). And that 6 SRM-6 rig? Once every 10 seconds and 24 heat (80%), well into highly possible explosion risk territory and possible shutdown. Though it can safely chain fire spurts of 12 damage to 36 damage at any one firing (well within the windows of ghost heat without even needing ghost heat).
But... Oh well.
FupDup, on 06 October 2014 - 01:29 PM, said:
The effect it has is that most of that "bonus" damage per 10 seconds gets lost. For example, let's take the AC/20. In MWO it currently does about 50 damage in 10 seconds.
The AC/20 in MWO does 60 damage in 8 seconds. Not 50 in 10.
0 seconds fire 20 damage. (20)
4 seconds fire 20 damage. (40)
8 seconds fire 20 damage. (60)
12 seconds (can fire for another 20). (80)
16 seconds (100)
20 seconds (120)
24 seconds (140)
And that's 1 ton of ammo in MWO.
It'd stop have 16 seconds for 100 damage if it was MWO's firing rate with TT's "uses per rating."
And if that was the Chemjet Gun (biggest IS AC/20 in Battletech at 185mm) that'd be 20 shots (per use per rating) for 1 ton of ammo, each shot doing 5 damage.
(Said AC/20 belongs to a tank btw. Hunchback has the biggest one on a mech that I've found for the IS at 180mm which was a 5 shot, with 4 damage per shot, and 25 shots per ton [5 uses, fitting with BT's rating/use/turn system]. Leading me back into what I posted about in the spoiler before.)
Spoiler
The Clans have them up to 203mm, but the bigger the gun is the longer they have to go without being able to fire again between uses. If the 203mm is a 2 shot weapon for example, it might be able to fire once every 5 seconds for 10 damage. Makes an important difference compared to say the King Crab's 12 shot 120mm Deathgiver AC/20s, which might have two bursts per cassette (closing the claws while reloading to protect the guns) of 6 shots [10 damage]. Or it could have 4 bursts per cassette of 3 shots (5 damage). Or compare to an Atlas D's 100mm belt-fed Deathgiver variant, which spits out 16 shots at a solid even rate with no reloading pauses beyond the between shot rate.
So picture this. The Ebon Jaguar has a single shot doing 10 damage and has to wait 5 seconds to fire again without the risk of a jam. Or 2.5 seconds with the risk of a jam by firing in ultra mode.
"Bthoom!" Oh yeah that sucker hits hard. But now that wait...
Meanwhile the Atlas D is steadily pumping out shots. One shot every 0.625 seconds. Bam, bam, bam, bam,, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam (etc). Never relenting unless the pilot eases off the trigger.
"Heat Neutrality" was a deathly fear that they had. Heat neutral mechs (which is easier now than they would have been if they stuck with TT's system yet had their own firing rates).
Now, only commenting on something else here...
Medium Laser produces 15 damage in 9 seconds.
0 seconds, fire.
1 second, laser finishes. 5 damage dealt. Begin cooldown.
2 seconds.
3 seconds.
4 seconds. Now able to fire again. Fire.
5 seconds. Laser finishes. 10 damage dealt. Begin cooldown.
6 seconds.
7 seconds.
8 seconds. Now able to fire again. Fire.
9 seconds. Beam finishes. 15 damage dealt (total mind you). Begin cooldown.
10 seconds.
11 seconds.
12 seconds. Ready to fire again.
So in 9 seconds it deals 15 damage.
The AC/20 in MWO does 60 damage in 8 seconds. Not 50 in 10.
0 seconds fire 20 damage.
4 seconds fire 20 damage.
8 seconds fire 20 damage.
12 seconds (can fire for another 20).
So, the TL;DR version is that the problem is even worse than my sketch-on-cocktail-napkin maths described?
This chart is for damage of all weapons in the game over 10 seconds. If we even just brought them down to DOUBLE TT damage and Heat, it would result in a damage decrease on EVERY weapon.
The AC/20 in MWO does 60 damage in 8 seconds. Not 50 in 10.
0 seconds fire 20 damage.
4 seconds fire 20 damage.
8 seconds fire 20 damage.
12 seconds (can fire for another 20).
My point still stands at the end of the day though. I won't take 60 damage from an AC/20 if I don't stay exposed for 10 consecutive seconds.
My point still stands at the end of the day though. I won't take 60 damage from an AC/20 if I don't stay exposed for 10 consecutive seconds.
That's kind of a fallacious point though.
The point we're (or at least I am) trying to explain is that the potential output of the weapons far exceeds what Battletech (The game that this game is based off of) intends, by a mile.
They're saying "Here's the core rules, and we're going to transpose them to RTFPS... wait, how come it didn't work?"
Well, because you've doubled the armor, reduced effectiveness of DHS, kludged in a wonky heat scale, made up an arbitrary RoF, and allowed for PPFLD, when all you needed to do was double-check your math about heat/damage, because I'm pretty sure you got it backwards.
PGI made a critical error and changed multiple things at the same time i presume without realizing it..... I hope. because if it was a deliberate attempt at balancing multiple things with one factor at a time....it was a catastrophic failure.
When you increase rates of fire from 1/10 s to 1/4 seconds you must lower damage and heat at the same time. if you don't you completely alter the relationship between all weapons in ways that are unintended. in this case you killed mech survivability. a ppc damage/ heat must be scaled down then play tested for the feel of it and then changed after review.
A multi factor change to a system is uncontrolled. its basically really bad science / development and or engineering.... you just flat out do not do it EVER if you know what your doing. The results are not quantifiable in terms of the factor changes.
The point we're (or at least I am) trying to explain is that the potential output of the weapons far exceeds what Battletech (The game that this game is based off of) intends, by a mile.
They're saying "Here's the core rules, and we're going to transpose them to RTFPS... wait, how come it didn't work?"
Well, because you've doubled the armor, reduced effectiveness of DHS, kludged in a wonky heat scale, made up an arbitrary RoF, and allowed for PPFLD, when all you needed to do was double-check your math about heat/damage, because I'm pretty sure you got it backwards.
Note that I'm not saying we should completely ignore the "per turn" values, but I am saying that they should be taken with a grain of salt. They aren't the end-all, be-all of weapon balancing.
As the biggest example, let's look at the AC/2. It's currently doing 2.78 DPS instead of its Tabletop value of 0.2. That's a difference of 13.9 times! Surely that should make the AC/2 into a godlike rapecannon of mass destruction! ...But it doesn't. The AC/2 in MWO is pure garbage, and barely even sees usage in the Steering Wheel Underhive. That 13.9x DPS sounds big on paper until we remember that its TT counterpart was so poopy in the first place. In this specific case, this is caused by the fact that multipliers tend to benefit the larger numbers more than the smaller numbers ("rich get richer, poor get poorer").
Most weapons aren't as bad off, however, but that's besides the point. Using the per turn values as a starting point is fine, but there are a number of cases where they shouldn't be the destination...
3
