6
AC2 — The forgotten ballistic weapon
I remember the times when just a single AC2 was a viable choice for a 'Mech. It had great DPS and suppression power. I even remember an AC2+2xML+3xSRM4 Centurion-A being one of my favorites back then. Its sheer DPS, speed and range was offset by its heat generation and the ridiculous face-time needed to apply damage. It was a true support weapon with serious drawbacks and it has never been truly popular because of this.
When a single weapon is decent, people tend to boat them to reach ridiculous levels of "decency" in MWO and the AC2 was no exception to this. There were some ridiculous Jager builds roaming in the battlefields back in 2013 including 4-6 AC2's macroed to fire in succession. Even though they shook your cockpit a lot and sounded terrifying, what these macros achieved was a perfect demonstration of "Its bark is worse than its bite" because they spread the damage all over your 'Mech. Still the total DPS was terrifying and AC2s were given ghost heat before the game launched, essentially eliminating these boats.
Though, there was an issue of chaining AC2's since their cooldown was 0.5 and the ghost heat triggered if you fired more than two AC2 bullets every 0.5 seconds. So the cooldown was bumped to 0.52 and everybody lived happily after that . . . well, no.
I won't list every nerf here, but I'll just do a "before and after" comparison for you to see.
As you can see, the most striking difference is the change of ROF and the sheer DPS loss because of it. I agree that previous DPS was maybe too much. But, if you look past spreadsheets and numbers, and consider the heat generation and the face-time needed, then you realize it was actually balanced. It gave low-tonnage ballistic 'Mechs like the Centurion and the Cicada the "cheap" firepower to duke it out with bigger 'Mechs.
The AC2 we have right now is just a ghost of its former self. It lost 28% of its DPS. Now you have to stare at your target 28% longer to apply the same damage and pray that some of those 2 damage bullets land at the same spot. Let me tell you, it's pretty much impossible. The fire rate is also very annoying. It's in a place between "This is long, maybe I should twist after shooting" and "I better stare to put these shots in the same place".
The result is irrelevance in any situation. Its damage is too low to be an effective sniper weapon, while its ROF is too low for it to be a true DPS/suppression weapon. For most people, the AC2 doesn't even exist anymore. Ask yourself, what was the last time you put one of these in your builds?
Why did PGI do this? Why did the AC2 have to suffer? There are some theories about this:
- AC2's could be used to shake cockpits and blind opponents by macro-fire, so they had to be nerfed. This is one of the most common responses out there.
- Since C-UAC2 is identical to AC2 (for some reason) except bullet numbers and double-tapping, it had to be nerfed to avoid an overpowered C-UAC2.
- The introduction of quirks forced PGI's hand to further increase AC2 cooldown to avoid the quirked cooldown dropping below 0.5s, thereby triggering the ghost heat. For example the Grid Iron has a general ballistic cooldown quirk of 25%, bringing the AC2 cooldown to 0.54 seconds. It's barely over the 0.5s ghost heat limit.
It's a legitimate concern for a developer too since the ghost heat mechanic is only programmed to check how many times a weapon has been fired inside a 0.5s period. I'm pretty sure their main concern was curbing the rampant PPC boats at that time and they had put only a little thought into how it was going to affect the AC2 in the future. When they needed to introduce quirks, the AC2 suddenly became problematic. Instead of altering/improving the Ghost Heat mechanism or taking other measures, they chose to go the easy way of reducing the ROF and being done with it. This isn't right.
I also think there's a problem with build varieties with lower tonnage mediums and lights stemming from these "forgotten weapons". The single AC2 should be viable so that we can spice up the build variety for these 'Mechs.
"Ok, something has to be done. But what?"
Obviously there are more than one approaches to this. These are my ideas, but as long as we're increasing the effectiveness of the AC2 then we're on a good track. Before we move on, we need to keep three things in mind:
- Because of the quirks, we can't buff the ROF anymore.
- The Ghost Heat has to stay to limit ridiculous/abusive builds.
- We still need to increase DPS somehow (preferably over 3.5 again) or make the weapon more attractive in another way.
- Increase the damage per bullet. It's an easy but ugly solution, and it will piss off BT purists and confuse newcomers (as in "Why is this weapon named AC2 if it's not doing 2 damage?!").
- Change/rework the ghost heat implementation. For example give each weapon system different GH trigger timers. If they could reduce the trigger to something like 0.4 for the AC2, we could have the old AC2 ROF without changing the current quirks.
- Keep the current stats, but drastically reduce the AC2 tonnage. Make it more desirable by making it more affordable. Something like 4 tons instead of 6. This would pave the way to true ballistic lights and would actually benefit obscure 'Mechs like CDA-3C, VND-1X, RVN-4X and such. Leave C-UAC2 tonnage as it is (this will probably piss off some people).
So, what do we do?
PGI just needs to squeeze this topic into one of their meetings and come up with a plausible solution. We have a great deal of weaponry still waiting to find their place in this game. They're either not aware of it, or either they think they have more important things to work on. Nevertheless, you can make a difference by voicing your opinion on Twitter and in the upcoming Town Hall event with Russ Bullock.
