I think I would have preferred a defensive "damage cap" BUFF vs nerf to heat n' convergence.
Basicly doing the same thing but without that feel that You've been nerfed, rather defenses are buff.
Or like what was done to clan ERPPC. But based on the mech's body part rather then a weapon. So like if the cap was 20 damage (im just throwin a number). Any damage above 20 either doesn't count or is mitigated with rest of the body parts. Maybe with some safety to any critically damage parts.
Imagine your paper doll right arm has no armor and critical red. Left arm is perfect green. and you get damage cap of 20. Left arm is fired on with 40 points of damage. 20 of it goes to the left arm, the other 20 gets spread out to all other armor except to the right arm because its critical red. (to make it where you have to shoot it off directly).
If it isn't already implemented, I'd like for them to add the thermal damage property of the PPC into the game as I guess that's how they behave in the original game.
"The Particle Projector Cannon (or PPC) is a unique energy weapon. PPCs fire a concentrated stream of protons or ions at a target, causing damage through both thermal and kinetic energy.[3] Despite being an energy weapon, it produces recoil." http://www.sarna.net...rojector_Cannon
Also add the recoil feature so when someone is using them at long range, they can't chainfire them without risking the chance of their targeting/sights being moved.
Alistair Winter, on 21 January 2015 - 07:13 AM, said:
I'm trying to find out if there's any kind of consensus among MWO players in regards to how to improve gameplay balance. Many players complain about the fact that mechs with very high firepower and pinpoint accuracy dominate the game. According to these players, this has a number of unfortunate side effects, such as too low TTK, lack of diversity in builds and loadouts, and dominance of certain heavy / assault mechs.
In the thread "DO THE MAJORITY OF PLAYERS WANT TO GET RID OF CONVERGENCE?" I asked whether convergence was the problem. A lot of people were on the fence, but I did a quick tally of the people who were clearly in favour or against the idea, and it seemed to be fairly even. No huge consensus either way.Certainly not to convince PGI that the community is united behind this idea.
The only other popular answer to the above-mentioned problem is fixing the way heat works in MWO. So my question is: do you all want a major change to how heat works in MWO?
By fundamental changes, I'm not talking about a slight nerf here and there or changing the ghost heat values. The common suggestions include:
Reducing heat treshold. Right now, you overheat at 38 heat points without basic skills. 45.6 heat points with double basic skills. Some people want to reduce the treshold to 30 or below, even for mastered mechs.
Giving DHS and SHS different functions. For example, DHS would be restored to true dubs (double the effect of single heat sinks instead of 1.4x) with a lower heat treshold, while SHS would have a significantly larger treshold. You would choose SHS or DPS based on your build and playing style.
Removing Ghost heat altogether. This isn't really a fix in itself, but many people see it as part of what's wrong with MWO's heat mechanic.
Substantially bigger penalties for overheating. Far greater damage to internal components and far greater risks of cooking ammo, leading to internal explosions.
Negative effects from running hot. For example, when your heat indicator surpasses 70% your mech might start to move slower, your torso twist may be reduced, your arm movement speed may be slower. Maybe your HUD starts to flicker and your radar picks up ghost signals. The idea is to make it difficult for people to constantly run hot and also to punish people who rely on repeated alpha strikes. Apparently, alpha strikes were not common in TT or BT novels (can someone confirm?)
If you have a strong opinion, I'd appreciate a clear YES or NO at the start of your post. It makes it easier to determine whether or not there is a consensus that the heat mechanism needs a major overhaul.
From a development standpoint, I'd be down for the following options:
Substantially bigger penalties for overheating. These are up-front, noticeable consequences that can be implemented simply.
The rest are design-intensive and nerf everything.
LordKnightFandragon, on 21 January 2015 - 09:48 AM, said:
Yes, PGI should reinvent their heat scale.
Hard cap, heatsinks only increasing the speed which we cool off, not the cap we can get to. 40-50 points would be a good spot. It would allow us to alpha a little, but only once, maybe twice if its a small alpha. It would limit people being able to fire off heaps of really hot weapons.
Ballistics would still be good as they gain little heat. So, idk what we could do there to keep it from just becoming cannonwarrior online....but meh.
THen add heat penalties at various points along the way.
If we have a 50 point heat scale, lets say
0-25 is a free zone, no penalities
26-30: we suffer 10% less acceleration and overall mobility
35-40: Targeting systems fail, we cant get locks on targets and are un able to R mechs
41-45ECM/BAP/AMS/TAG/NARC and other electronic devices begin to fail and do not work.
46-49: We suffer 0.5 point of core damage per second we remain above 46 heat.
50+: We shut down, suffering 1 point of core damage per second we remain above 50 heat. We cannot turn back on until our mech has reached the 25 point free zone.
All effects are accumulative.
That would make ballistics weapons utterly ridiculous.
Lily from animove, on 21 January 2015 - 09:15 AM, said:
it would reduce the amount of PPFLD shots but then people would still shoot 2 ERPPC + 2 gauss every 8 seconds. so the PPFLD is still there. in the fixed 30 heattreshold is exactly preventing this, because 2 erPPC reahc the max, prevent a shutdown, but with the gauss combined, you do shut down. use only PPC? yes 2 gauss and 2 PPC possible, but then PPC has a deadrange at close and is shorter in range on long.
Indeed they could do it every 8 seconds, which is half the rate they can do it now. I'd say maybe even go 10 seconds on the Gauss (no chargeup) and 8 seconds on the PPC (make the projectile very fast) might be better. The slowest of the "DPS" weapons would be the AC20, then, at 4 seconds. By allowing only a select group (2 weapons) to do PPFLD so it still exists but at the same time it is EXTREMELY low DPS. This allows the non - PPFLD weapons to have something (DPS) that the PPFLD weapons don't have. I'm OK with PPFLD being part of the game but the weapons that do it shouldn't have as high of DPS as weapons that don't since PPFLD is a significant advantage given the mechanics of mech fighting.
Rather than eliminating the ability to hit what you aim at (i.e. the endless convergence whining), stronger penalties for running hot would both be truer to BattleTech lore and a much more intuitive and easily understood system for new players and/or Derpalong Sallies. It's a system that would add immersion while also working to organically control extensive weapons fire. Why Piranha hasn't experimented with stronger heat scale penalties is beyond me. A properly designed system of heat penalties needs to go in far, far, far sooner than any shot-randomizing convergence 'fix', and on this both tabletop loreheads and New Shooter Guys can agree.
I am mostly fine with the heat system. I didn't reply to your Convergence thread but will make the same point here... these are pretty much 'game-wide' changes that won't change the overall situation, but will likely alter the prime meta a bit.
Convergence: Make it less pin-point at any range, yes, you survive a little longer. So do all your targets, your team, the enemy team, etc. Meta will shift to any mechs that suffer less from convergence than others. Same poop, different pile
Heat system: Current system seems effective at limiting boating. Open up heat system leads to lower TTK/more boating, tightening it (a la penalties) makes things harder on the noobs, relatively easier on the pros.
Some tweaking will be done over time, likely.
Keep in mind that system-wide changes should promote ease of play, reduced learning curve, and favor newbies over pros (if one must be favored). Also fun factor, of course.
Because TT/canon/lore considerations, mech balance, map selection etc. don't mean crap if you aren't pulling in NEW players and entertaining/encouraging them enough to spend money.
(For instance, look at World of Tanks map progression... new players/lower tier vehicles get one set of maps, this expands and changes as they move up tiers. This helps newbies learn the maps at a more comfortable pace while also allowing the vets to 'move past' the starter maps OR return to them for a bit of nostalgia. Tweaks like that helped make it a game that needs 3 tanks just to take the deposit to the bank every week...)
Yes, I hope enough players and the devs are like-minded in wanting to readdress the heat system.
I've been looking at this stuff on my free time and I feel I have something worthy of sharing that also looks at tweaking weapons in relation to current armor values. I already have a thread in the Feature Suggestions with a similar idea for raising Dissipation and lowering Capacity, but that idea is currently more towards the 2.5x range to what I'm posting below, which is closer to a 2x scale (or can be less than that, with at least fixing external DHS).
Due to how MWO is currently setup, players have the capacity to do one-click high damage weapon combos; thus leading to one of the more common ideas of setting a static universal Heat Capacity to control that problem.
That is something that I can easily live with for MWO, since it seems so hard to deal with convergence and since enforcing a base chain-fire state to fire weapons individually with say maybe a ~0.5+ second delay from existing weapon groups, not widely considered to be on the table.
And enforcing a chain-fire mode with weapon groups would also allow a use for the Alpha Strike command, where it could then have a random scatter of weapon focus when used, but be able to fire all weapons at once.
Moving on to the Heat System, if this is what can be changed, then what I propose is to use the doubled factor from the original and scale from there. So that the first override-able Shutdown occurs at 28 heat (14 doubled) with Heat Capacity. Then Setting a Max Heat value at 44, for an automatic shutdown with the rest of the original effects.
And such a design can make full use of the original heat table structure. The only questions would be what effects can be coded in MWO and how soon they would kick in, either before or after the shutdown at 28.
So staying with the heat system, dissipation should at least have a consideration to also be doubled. Since it originally was a method to help balance out lighter weight energy weapons against heavier ballistic and missile weapons. Where heat management was easier to learn for newer players, especially compared to MWO with Heat Scale Penalties that is very hard on new players.
So here is a table exploring some values that can be tested out if any issues arise from doubled dissipation, with the main goal being to equal weight requirements between mechs energy vs ballistic and so on:
Far left is the Heat Sink count with the first set at how the P&P game was originally translated to real-time for MWO (the problem being that the rate of fire was two high generating to much damage and heat against original armor values, leading to doubled armor and other system shocks along the way). The next three columns show increasing dissipation depending on how fast heat should decreasing based on the best Heat Capacity and Weapon Heat Generation.
Currently a fully Elited Mech with SHS dissipates 0.115 heat each and DHS dissipates 0.23 heat each internally and 0.161 externally.
And remember that the Heat Cap value does not have to be as low as 28 or 30.
Say we keep to current weapons stats and keep Heat Scale penalties as-is, then it might be better to set the first override-able shutdown at 44 on a 60 point scale, with 60 heat being an automatic shutdown (which is what is in the thread I mentioned earlier).
So the next element to look at is how weapons fit into this sort of heat framework, against doubled armor and now with quirks available for specific cases on various Mech variants.
What I'd prefer is to first consider adjusting weapons to fit in with current armor values and possibly have dissipation at 1.5x (150% in the dissipation table above). But that is not exactly necessary if we can make use of other systems such as the base chain-fire for weapon groups idea I mentioned earlier.
I'll leave the rest of this part in a spoiler since it is long, and a hypothetical that I'd love to test out if we were to try a scale at 28 avoidable, 44 max Heat Cap.
Spoiler
What I suggest is provide a boost to ammo values, and slowdown damage output in relation to armor.
Here are two tables for IS and Clan looking at some ideas:
Inner Sphere
Clan
Some weapons were over-buffed and some have remained elusive to get feeling right, against current Armor and Internal Structure values, with issues such as hits not registering, making matters worse.
Also having the first override-able Shutdown at 28 necessitated a tweak to weapon heat generation to stay around the 24 mark. And with such values it would likely be possible to adjust some Heat Scale Penalties (Ghost heat), since the Heat Cap has been universally lowered with this idea.
So, Ballistics should remain lethal and would only need minor tweaks from the values I'm exploring. And also factoring in all of the mechs with Cooldown quirks and the ability to mount Cooldown modules, one other area to look at is Projectile velocities that can be increased with decreases to projectile impulse.
Lasers have improved, and with Cooldown quirks and modules, provides more mechs more opportunities to get quirks if they have few available hardpoints. Since boating Energy Weapons can still be an issue.
Then with the greatest change occurring with Missiles, where I would personally prefer having all missiles have a tracking to cross-hair / reticle feature for targets in Line-of-Sight of the firing mech. And with Missiles that would fire in a modified ripple pattern. Having a shared cooldown and the same duration should benefit mechs that rely on LRMs and the standardized ripple fire pattern modifies how builds get min/maxed by players. This way any system is able to off their rated missile count inside of 2 seconds, with the LRM 20 firing 4 missiles at time ~0.5 seconds apart. AMS will also need a tweak against this new firing pattern, which should be easy to do.
SRMs would then fire a sequence of one missile followed by another within ~0.5 seconds, so an SRM 6 would fire three missiles at a time with a ~0.5 second delay. And then the different with Streaks is that Streaks will not fire without a Lock and SRMs would be like LRMs and fire at any time they are ready.
So basically missiles can follow where the player aims the cross-hair / reticle and with missiles more spread like ballistic fire should also have improved targeting. The variable left for testing is if a speed boost is needed with this new behavior for LRMs and SRMs.
Spoiler
One last idea I might as well share is the idea of increasing weapon variety. These can be limited to certain chassis or freely available to buy and mount on any appropriate chassis (although some combos can get harder to balance in a wide open system):
The idea being that on one mech you mount an AC/20 and you have yourself a Pontiac 100, while on another you have a Death Giver AC/20 with a different firing profile. Both have would have the same DPS, but different damage per projectile and ammo counts.
I am all for looking at solutions that encourage less alpha strikes and more weapons groups/back up weapon usage. Making Time to Kill slightly longer and making PP alphas less common and more risky.
If a new heat scale can accomplish this, let’s have a look. If convergence can accomplish this, let’s have a look.
Part of me thinks the KISS (keep it simple stupid) theory may be the best solution. Make all ACs burst fire and make PPCs and Gauss cool downs longer.
that will do nothing for "FIRE EVErYTHING" laser vomit.....
All increasing cool downs does it increases the time between the lolpha by a fraction of time... lower heat scales, heat penalites, CoF or some kind of deviation together, that will stop the PPFLD from being as frequent, as feasible, and as deadly.
Fixing PPFLD is a multi step process, no single mechanic is going to solve it alone.
Its a combo deal that has to be done before PPFLD will be...reigned in...
To me it's not so much of a balancing problem as it is playing "hide the ball" with new players, which is bad for business.
Even better than removing ghost heat would be to have comprehensive stats on all battlemechs, weapons, equipment systems, and basic game mechanics ("How heat works 101" and "Heat sinks: single or double?" and things like that) here on the website in a clearly marked, easy-to-find, easy-to-use format, and with a link to this information prominently displayed both on the patcher and in mechlab. There is no good reason anyone, but especially new players, should have to be researching old forum posts, user-made charts, and smurfy's mechlab just to figure out simple things like putting 3LL on an Atlas is going to be much hotter than what the weapon descriptions reveal.
To me it's not so much of a balancing problem as it is playing "hide the ball" with new players, which is bad for business.
Even better than removing ghost heat would be to have comprehensive stats on all battlemechs, weapons, equipment systems, and basic game mechanics ("How heat works 101" and "Heat sinks: single or double?" and things like that) here on the website in a clearly marked, easy-to-find, easy-to-use format, and with a link to this information prominently displayed both on the patcher and in mechlab. =
Not even on the website, it should be built right into the client! Like the Civ games have the "civilopedia" that is a quick reference that explains all the game mechanics in the game
That would make ballistics weapons utterly ridiculous.
Lol, we could add in a heat penalty, where at around 30 heat, Cannon weapons jam up and do not work anymore. Sure, your cannons gain heat slowly, but they gain heat eventually. And Ac20s do so surprisingly quickly...idk if its GH or htey are that hot...
FupDup, on 21 January 2015 - 09:56 AM, said:
Lower heat threshold combined with drastically faster dissipation is something I'd like to try out.
As for heat penalties, those we have to careful on. When people quote how TT's penalties worked, what they forget is that TT didn't calculate heat in real-time. TT calculated your heat in a "frontloaded" manner. That is, all of your weapon heat from that turn was added to your heat dissipation for that turn, to determine where you ended up on the scale.
Your heat would never immediately jump up, because your dissipation was calculated instantly instead of spread out over time. This allowed players to actually build their mech to not overheat if they wanted to, at the downside of needing more tonnage and critslots for heatsinks.
For example, in TT you could fire a Clan ERPPC on a mech with just 10 DHS and never generate any heat whatsoever. A mech with 4 ERPPCs and 30 DHS would also be almost completely heat-neutral and never suffer a heat penalty if played correctly. Even 10 SHS could infinitely sustain a single PPC with no penalties (unless you walked/ran several turns in a row).
But in real time, our heatsinks don't get to work like that. We generate our heat in large spikes and have to wait for the heat bar to slowly and gradually go back down. If TT heatsinks worked like that, firing a single PPC would instantly give you a movement and accuracy penalty, even if you started at zero heat and weren't even moving, on a cold map.
So penalties have to be a lot "softer" than TT, because our heat system isn't as lenient due to not "frontloading" the dissipation like a turn-based environment does. If the threshold is low enough, you'd reach the top so quickly that we might not even need penalties in the first place (insta shutdown would be a penalty in and of itself...). We have to be careful not to trigger a Gauss meta here...
Lol, to not trigger a Gauss Meta, or cannon meta, the ballistics can also get some heat penalties applied a bit sooner then energy weapons. Like, at 20 heat, a Gauss overheats and jams up. At 25 heat cannons jam as well. But I think that would be derpy.
I like the bottom four suggestions. They would significantly reduce or eliminate the "pinpoint alpha" mentality we currently have, drawing out confrontations and making battles more like Mechwarrior, and less like Twitch players/COD.
So while you could still have a high alpha, the risks would be huge.
Alistair Winter, on 21 January 2015 - 07:13 AM, said:
Giving DHS and SHS different functions. For example, DHS would be restored to true dubs (double the effect of single heat sinks instead of 1.4x) with a lower heat treshold, while SHS would have a significantly larger treshold. You would choose SHS or DPS based on your build and playing style.
Removing Ghost heat altogether. This isn't really a fix in itself, but many people see it as part of what's wrong with MWO's heat mechanic.
Substantially bigger penalties for overheating. Far greater damage to internal components and far greater risks of cooking ammo, leading to internal explosions.
Negative effects from running hot. For example, when your heat indicator surpasses 70% your mech might start to move slower, your torso twist may be reduced, your arm movement speed may be slower. Maybe your HUD starts to flicker and your radar picks up ghost signals. The idea is to make it difficult for people to constantly run hot and also to punish people who rely on repeated alpha strikes. Apparently, alpha strikes were not common in TT or BT novels (can someone confirm?)
No. And in addition, most of your suggestions are AWFUL and push things in the wrong direction.
Overall, heat is already too restrictive and making it worse is just going to make things worse.
Ghost Heat is a mechanism to tone down the most abusive builds and works for some of them. It really belongs in the convergence thread since that's what it's for.
The heat threshold is higher than the table used in TT because the mechanism works differently -- you need to add to the threshold to simuate the pre-check dissipation that TT gets.
Overheating is already really, really bad -- if you do it, you screwed up. You are probably going to take a bunch of damage and there's a good chance you'll die. The last thing we need is to make it worse. No one is doing it on purpose (except in joke builds), so you're punishing newbies. Stop it.
It would be nice if SHS didn't suck, but they do. It's a symptom of heat in general being way more restrictive and unforgiving than on TT. If you want a band-aid fix, maybe make in-engine SHS dissipate 1.6? Then DHS is adding 0.4 to every heat sink, and SHS mechs don't dissipate 1% per 2 seconds on Terra Therma.
LordKnightFandragon, on 21 January 2015 - 11:37 AM, said:
that will do nothing for "FIRE EVErYTHING" laser vomit.....
All increasing cool downs does it increases the time between the lolpha by a fraction of time... lower heat scales, heat penalites, CoF or some kind of deviation together, that will stop the PPFLD from being as frequent, as feasible, and as deadly.
Fixing PPFLD is a multi step process, no single mechanic is going to solve it alone.
Its a combo deal that has to be done before PPFLD will be...reigned in...
Maybe I am missing something, but I’m not sure how "FIRE EVErYTHING" laser vomit is PPFLD. Lasers have burn time to apply all damage. Now I have used the “"FIRE EVErYTHING" laser vomit builds and I have killed incredibly fast. And every single mech I have one shot was standing perfectly still “deer in head lights” XL noob, or I was behind them and they had next to nothing for back armor.
Then I alpha at a competent Locust pilot and he laughs at my attempt on his legs as he twists and turns away with minimal damage. Somewhere in this PPFLD discussion, we are going to need to decide what is too much PP damage, and what is just bad piloting.
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