84 replies to this topic

[Glythe]

Azoic23, on 28 October 2014 - 03:31 AM, said:

Actually I have good word that Paul actually wanted to add a boatload of ghost heat to guass for firing 2 at once. Something like 20x ghostheat and people told him it was stupid. I tend to agree with that sentiment. I am sorry if you can't handle dual gauss and feel like they need further nerfs. Any dual guass build except for perhaps the Direwolf is extremely commited to just using those two weapons and have loads of weaknesses.

So let's talk about that direwolf. Until there is an IS mech that can use double Gauss there won't be anything in the game that will compare to that level of firepower. And then it still won't compete because the Direwolf will always have extra tonnage/crit space from clan tech.

Double Gauss is just better in pretty much every way compared to every other double ballistic combination. Quite clearly that means it needs a nerf. Let's throw out the explosion as that mechanic never really stopped anyone from using it. Keep the charge and change the game so that firing one Gauss rifle means no ghost heat but firing more than one means stupid levels of heat..... so that it's nice and nerfed like EVERY other big alpha combo weapon.

Edited by Glythe, 28 October 2014 - 07:38 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Glythe, on 28 October 2014 - 07:36 AM, said:

So let's talk about that direwolf. Until there is an IS mech that can use double Gauss there won't be anything in the game that will compare to that level of firepower. And then it still won't compete because the Direwolf will always have extra tonnage/crit space from clan tech.

Double Gauss is just better in pretty much every way compared to every other double ballistic combination. Quite clearly that means it needs a nerf. Let's throw out the explosion as that mechanic never really stopped anyone from using it. Keep the charge and change the game so that firing one Gauss rifle means no ghost heat but firing more than one means stupid levels of heat..... so that it's nice and nerfed like EVERY other big alpha combo weapon.

I'm guessing that the King Crab will be our first dual gauss IS assault. It won't have the loadout potential of the Direwolf, but I do think it will have the potential to be more quicker and manuverable than the Direwolf.

Getting hit with a dual gauss stinks, but at least it has the charge mechanic that does make you think about your shot and causes missed opportunities for a shot when you target moves behind cover before the weapon is fully charged.

Ghost heat just seems like an odd addition to a weapon that really doesn't generate heat. Plus, dual gauss mechs can still get that deadly first shot off anyway (ghost heat or not).

I don't know if it needs much changing. I'm pretty sure I want to leave it where it is.

[Bhael Fire]

Their baseline stance is that 30 points of pinpoint alpha damage is acceptable. Therefore dual Gauss fits within that criteria.

Dual AC/20, on the other hand, is 40 points of pinpoint alpha damage...that exceeds that criteria and therefore receives a heat penalty when used in such a manner.

Then factor in that Gauss rifles already have a balancing mechanic that makes them a little harder to use than AC/20's (i.e. charge up time) and it immediately becomes apparent that the notion of adding ghost heat to them would be asinine.

[Ultimax]

Glythe, on 28 October 2014 - 07:36 AM, said:

So let's talk about that direwolf. Until there is an IS mech that can use double Gauss there won't be anything in the game that will compare to that level of firepower. And then it still won't compete because the Direwolf will always have extra tonnage/crit space from clan tech.

We're getting the King Crab soon.

ENDO + STD 300 for an extra 4.5 tons is better than CXL 300 when you are an Assault mech.


It will have little less firepower, but it will be harder to kill, and will need less heatsinks because it uses less heat intensive IS energy weapons.

[ollo]

Brody319, on 28 October 2014 - 12:05 AM, said:

Its a science fiction game, its so removed from the damn board game already, so why not give gauss lots of heat? have them generate 10 heat, with ghost heat kicking in if a mech fires more than 1 at a time. Then they can remove the 2 gauss limit because firing 3 would generate +30 heat at once. Like the direstar, tons of damage at once, but you are running so damn hot you might as well be a one shot wonder.

Oh, oh, wait, i got a better idea! Why not make a gauss randomly shoot backwards because the electronics messed up plus and minus!?! Or even better, have it **** up targeting every 5th shot so it automatically fires at a teammate!?!?! Or, or, this is absolute best, if you have more than 1 gauss on the mech, they'll just explode in your face when you don't keep a time distance of multiples of exactly 5.0 to 5.3 sec. between firing them!!!!!!!

[Joseph Mallan]

Elizander, on 26 October 2014 - 09:54 AM, said:

AC/20 x2 = Ghost Heat.
Gauss Rifle x2 = No Ghost Heat?

The Gauss has it right. Get rid of 2xAC20 Ghost heat!

[Violent Nick]

Lily from animove, on 28 October 2014 - 02:37 AM, said:

and then we start to complain about HPG where no athmosphere is giving it heat without having air ressistance. But yes taking into account that a Gauss is gameplaywise an AC 15 with ac 2 range, it is kinda too cool and epic for what it is.

Yeah, just wish it didn't explode all the time.. I mean, you know, when you're not 'charging' it.. xxx

Joseph Mallan, on 28 October 2014 - 09:33 AM, said:

The Gauss has it right. Get rid of 2xAC20 Ghost heat!

The reverse of 'Slap..'

[Tombstoner]

Karl Streiger, on 28 October 2014 - 03:02 AM, said:

Face it - all the Star League and Clan Weapons was poor game design right from 1989 and we still feel the consequences

If you really ask you self - what a AC 15 would have looked like in IS-Tech 1 (you would realize it would have more heat - maybe 5 - and ranges of 4-8-12 (right between the AC 10 and the AC 20)

Well the AC15/Gauss weight more as AC 20 - so maybe range would have been increased towards 5-10-15 or even 3/6/12/18 with heat of 5.

So if the Gauss/AC 15 made right - we would have to talk about a gun: with 4/7/14/21 - weighting 15tons and generating 7-8 heat per round.

This is why PGI should just shelve current weapons stats and make there own instead of shoehorning it. Gauss should have been a long charge time, high damage, high heat, ultra accurate weapon. this is where staying too close to TT/lore is detrimental. It leads to ac-2's with a rate of fire of .5s. Producing a 4 seconds burst of 16 damage for only 7 tons + ammo and little heat at extreme range.

Then combine pin point accuracy and group fire with 4 ac-2's and you got yourself an ac-8 with a fire rate of .5. That does a 4 seconds burst for 64 damage for 28 tons. vs. 2x Gauss's 28 tons and 30 damage. nope ac-2s' not broken at all hence being Nerfed into nothingness.

I say nuke the current design from orbit... it's the only way to make the game better.

ollo, on 28 October 2014 - 09:31 AM, said:

Oh, oh, wait, i got a better idea! Why not make a gauss randomly shoot backwards because the electronics messed up plus and minus!?! Or even better, have it **** up targeting every 5th shot so it automatically fires at a teammate!?!?! Or, or, this is absolute best, if you have more than 1 gauss on the mech, they'll just explode in your face when you don't keep a time distance of multiples of exactly 5.0 to 5.3 sec. between firing them!!!!!!!

Careful..... this is how we got Ghost heat.......

[ollo]

Tombstoner, on 28 October 2014 - 09:51 AM, said:

This is why PGI should just shelve current weapons stats and make there own instead of shoehorning it. Gauss should have been a long charge time, high damage, high heat, ultra accurate weapon. this is where staying too close to TT/lore is detrimental. It leads to ac-2's with a rate of fire of .5s. Producing a 4 seconds burst of 16 damage for only 7 tons + ammo and little heat at extreme range.

I don't get what you want. Should they stick to lore or not? If they stuck to lore, NOBODY would EVER equip an AC2 as it's effectively dead weight for 0.2 DPS. So far, i think they are doing fairly well with taking TT stats as a base and tweaking from there, despite all the whine over ghost heat, gauss charge, PPC speeds and whatnot the game plays pretty well and is IMHO the best realtime iteration of battletech so far.

[Karl Streiger]

No they should take their time - and start to think - what should a LAC (AC 2) do

It was supposed to be two things - anti aerial or anit tank, anti infantry weapon

Could be redone in two things:
The MWLL way - make the damage thiny - 0.5 or less - and have a burst mode.... something like a extreme huge Machine Gun - with tracer rounds - same way with the MAC - same handling but more DPS....
so the JaegerMech would spit out hot glowing metal at 500-2000m

Or they could make the LAC - a slow firing weapon .... for example one shot every 4 seconds - that deal 5 or 6 damage at 2000m.
So you may have 3 LACs for 18ton they may deal 18dmg at the same range as the Gauss....(if you stay with the gauss)

Heat should be measured in the same way - for example a LAC would deal 3-4 heat per shot

Same could be said about Small Laser -why 90m - could have been a really long beam for 2000m either.
Or the MLAS -why not a really short beam for 1dmg every second?

[Brody319]

DarthRevis, on 28 October 2014 - 06:58 AM, said:

What? How fast do you think the Gauss round is moving? Also how hot do you think you need to be to melt steel?

It doesn't need to be hot. Gauss rifles are a series of magnets that fling a projectile. Any heat that the projectile creates would go directly into those sensitive parts. Magnets may not be sinsitive themselves, but the curcuits you need to make sure every one of them goes off correctly are. So if their is air in the barrel, as is shown because of the opening, boom a projectile suddenly reaching km/s would generate quite a bit of air resistance and heat, possibly even damaging the components.


As for everyone saying it explodes and thats why its okay I disagree. I've never had a gauss rifle explode, most of the time if I even have one its in my arm, which most of the time people shoot at my ct or side torsos. You have to go out of your way to shoot off the arms and make the guass crit. Look at the jaeger mech, look at how ******* tiny its arms are!

AC 20s 40 damage isnt so bad because ******* it generates heat! lots of heat. Thats why you don't see ultra ac80 direwhales, you overheat and die.
PPCs is not limited by ammo, but it generates a lot of heat and is a slow projectile. it takes skill to aim a PPC and even then it has a minimum range.

So everything with comparable damage has a huge disadvantage, with both heat and other disadvantages
but gauss doesnt have any, no heat, and you so rarely see it explode, that mechs are willing to mount 2 of them. Most of the time people are looking to strip your side torso or ct, which for almost all twin gauss mechs, means the gauss is never the target.

[Kaeb Odellas]

theta123, on 28 October 2014 - 02:37 AM, said:

6 PPC stalker
4 PPC stalker

NO

6 PPC Stalkers existed at a time when PPCs generated 8 heat, did reduced damage under 90m, and fired 2000 m/s projectiles, and even then they were bad builds. A 6 PPC build would simply not be viable today. 4 PPCs would be better, but when you consider that a Dire Wolf can fire off a 90 point alpha without any ghost heat penalties, a 4 PPC Stalker starts to look silly.

[nehebkau]

Elizander, on 26 October 2014 - 09:54 AM, said:

AC/20 x2 = Ghost Heat.
Gauss Rifle x2 = No Ghost Heat?

That is the best damn question i've seen asked in a LONG time.

BTW the magnets are super-cooled....so where does the heat go that they drain away from the magnets? Likewise, electrons flowing in a wire produce heat that needs to be dissipated

I guess what I am awkwardly trying to say is that any system that uses energy produces heat.

Edited by nehebkau, 28 October 2014 - 02:34 PM.

[ollo]

Tombstoner, on 28 October 2014 - 09:51 AM, said:

Careful..... this is how we got Ghost heat.......

And? Ghost heat is a not so bad solution against boating compared to other solutions like just preventing more than X of Y on an mech. You can at least decide if the current situation is worth the risk of the additional heat, i.e. a last ditch killshot.

Also he was proposing a ghost heat factor of 1000% when firing 1 gauss plus additional 1000% for each gauss more, so it's quite fitting after all.

[Y E O N N E]

Everybody is over-complicating this. A Gauss Rifle will heat up simply because it has to. There's a lot of energy being shunted in a very brief period of time through the system (read: from the capacitors through the coils), and the inherent inefficiencies of any transport methods for said energy results in loss of energy as heat.

The end.

[Glythe]

Ultimatum X, on 28 October 2014 - 09:18 AM, said:

We're getting the King Crab soon.

ENDO + STD 300 for an extra 4.5 tons is better than CXL 300 when you are an Assault mech.


It will have little less firepower, but it will be harder to kill, and will need less heatsinks because it uses less heat intensive IS energy weapons.

Check your math there.... CXL 300 =15.5 tons while the IS STD 300=25.0

Meanwhile the IS mech dumps 14 critical slots to save 4.5 tons to get less than half of what the DW saves with the engine. On top of that the DW saves 6 more critical spaces with double Gauss. Every external double heat sink saves the DW another critical slot.

Joseph Mallan, on 28 October 2014 - 09:33 AM, said:

The Gauss has it right. Get rid of 2xAC20 Ghost heat!

Actually this would be fine if the Gauss rifle isn't nerfed. The Gauss rifle has a ridiculous range advantage so this would put the weapons in line. Does 10 more damage really constitute massive ghost heat?

Compare 30 damage for 2 heat vs 40 damage and 12 heat. That actually makes sense when you consider the range difference.

Edited by Glythe, 28 October 2014 - 05:30 PM.

[Pjwned]

They're different weapons and not very comparable, they're both heavy ballistic guns that do high damage but that's where the similarities end.

[Kjudoon]

Ultimatum X, on 28 October 2014 - 09:18 AM, said:

We're getting the King Crab soon.

ENDO + STD 300 for an extra 4.5 tons is better than CXL 300 when you are an Assault mech.


It will have little less firepower, but it will be harder to kill, and will need less heatsinks because it uses less heat intensive IS energy weapons.

Yeah. really looking forward to Dire Noskills vs King Noskills shooting each other with 50pt pinpoint alphas.

It'll be a real hoot!

[Ultimax]

Glythe, on 28 October 2014 - 05:21 PM, said:

Check your math there.... CXL 300 =15.5 tons while the IS STD 300=25.0

25 - 15.5 = 9.5

ENDO saves 5 tons on a 100 ton mech

9.5 - 5 = 4.5


My math is fine.

STD > CXL for Assault mechs, especially 100 ton mechs.

The crit slots will be irrelevant to a 2x AC 20 or 2x Gauss King Crab.


If the DWF could take a 350CXL this would be a different conversation, but it can't. It is locked to a 300.

Edited by Ultimatum X, 28 October 2014 - 06:53 PM.

[FupDup]

Ultimatum X, on 28 October 2014 - 06:51 PM, said:

25 - 15.5 = 9.5

ENDO saves 5 tons on a 100 ton mech

9.5 - 5 = 4.5


My math is fine.

STD > CXL for Assault mechs, especially 100 ton mechs.

The crit slots will be irrelevant to a 2x AC 20 or 2x Gauss King Crab.

Well, let's experiment.

XL Atlas: XL Atlas Test
His current tonnage is 44 tons (56 remaining).

Switch to STD + Endo: STD + Endo Atlas Test
Current tonnage of 48.5, with 51.5 remaining.


So, the XL does in fact save more tonnage than STD + Endo, but of course the STD + Endo is a much better exchange in spite of that due to durability (hard to make something so fat be IS XL viable).

Personally, though, I think the Clan XL would be fine on the KC (but we don't get that choice). Then again, I'm the crazy type that puts IS XL in just about everything excluding the outlier cases like Stalkers or certain others.

Edited by FupDup, 28 October 2014 - 06:58 PM.