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Really? What loadout are you using that gives them a survivability warranting their tonnage, while maintaining sufficient speed inside the enemy gates?
Their tonnage is why they're good. 80 tons leaves a player room for more than a bunch of lights/light-mediums in their drop deck. You don't see many mechs over over 90 tons in cw, because when you only have 240-250 to work with putting 100 tons into a singe mech gimps the rest of your deck. They have enough tonnage to carry the firepower/speed needed to kill and keep up with a rush* and sufficient armor and hitboxes they can afford to duke it out while still leaving the player another 160-170 tons to play with. If IS players want to bring assaults to CW it's Victors and Stalkers (and maybe Zeus haven't seen them enough to decide) that you want to bring. Anything else is too heavy or isn't as good unless you're running a very specific strategy.
*This does not include light rush, which works too well not just because the light rush itself works, but all the weight saved bringing 2 drops of lights frees a lot of weight for heavier assault mechs which I think works well on defense and offense. EDIT: To clarify this, light rush works really well. Anything that manages to survive 2 well executed light rushes, is very libel to simply be plowed over when the opposing team marches in wall of Stalkers, Atlasi, and Battlemasters, which a 2 wave light rush can allow a defending or attacking team do twice.
Appogee, on 22 March 2015 - 04:52 AM, said:
BTW, the unpopular alternative which noone likes to talk about, would be to nerf the holy trinity a bit while buffing the lesser Clan Mechs a bit, so that there is less of a yawning performance chasm between them all.
You'd think that, but how?
The Crow I think might be fine with its hitboxes fixed (I just assume these are real as I've never had the issue hitting the crow) and see where that leaves it. The Dire. It's absurdly strong in TDM because of sheer dakka but it's so slow that it doesn't have much place in CW. The Timber to me is a significant challenge to balance because it's the perfect balance of speed, armor, and firepower. How exactly can they be nerfed without it being stupid or nerfing everything else in the process? I'd like to see some of the Dire's weight shifted to a better engine which might give it some niche use in CW, but clan stuff is so light I don't think that alone would fix it.
Honestly the only way I see to balance the later two is a complete design of Clan gear, adjusting weight, heat, everything.
Honestly I never really liked the way a lot of mechs were designed in MWO mechanically. Hitboxes tend to be poorly placed (a problem that grew worse when PGI just decided to make everything IS XL friendly), the speed tiers just feel off, made worse by speed tweak, and map design tends to revolve around fights over specific pieces of terrain that favor cover fights. There are just a lot of long standing balance issues in game and I just don't feel nerfing the trinity is really what MWO needs. We could do it, but it's just throwing a bandaid on the symptoms of the larger problems that are MWO's balance challenges (and this said, I do think the trinity is very strong, especially the Timber and the Dire, but I just can't justify to myself any of the ideas I've seen for fixing them).
Edited by Lord0fHats, 22 March 2015 - 05:40 AM.