Decent idea. I got two alternative ideas. These two ideas i have could easily be combined.
But if we do combine these two ideas MWO would trully become a thinking mans game where you got to keep your cool. Pun intended.
The learning curve would most certainly increase by a lot.
1: Make SHS capable of being linked into a weapon (SHS in the engine cannot be linked). An ML could have a 1 SHS linked to it.
This SHS cools only the linked ML but has no effect on other weapons since 1 SHS can only link to 1 weapon.
SHS that is linked to a weapon has superior cooling efficiency for the weapon it is linked too.
How much is superior? No idea. That is for someone with better brains than mine to figure out.
DHS cannot be linked since they are so clunky. You could take it a step further and say....energy weapons can fit 1 SHS per critical slot the weapon takes up.
Ballistic/missile weapons can take 1 SHS per 2 or 3 internal slots they fill up.
The heatsinks in the engine funtion as normal though. (yes i had to say that twice because it's so important.)
This idea means builds with 1-2 hot weapons would benefit greatly from having SHS i think. It really depends on what mathematical hypotesis the eggheads come up with.
But builds with a huge bundle of ML's would be better of with DHS because it would be too heavy to link SHS to all the ML's.
2: Make heat local...kinda like your idea but slightly different. Example. You fire 6 ML's from the 4P hunchbacks right torso. Heat spreads in the mech but it's worst in the right torso of course.
You can put more SHS than DHS in the remaining internal slots not occupied by the ML's. Therefore more effective local cooling with SHS.
You could take it further and say SHS deals better with local cooling than DHS, but DHS does better against heat in neighbouring mech sections.
This means storing ammunition in a section that is bound to get hoooot is not a good idea. Also if a mech has an XL engine and a side torso gets too hot it damages the engine.
Please note that i personally use XL engines a whole lot so this hurts my builds a lot too....and i have a strong preferance for hot weapons such as ER PPC, ER LL and PPC.
Idea 2 has a side effect though. The learning curve on making good mech builds would be higher since local heat has to controlled.
Furthermore we would need 2 heatmeters in the cockpit. One that shows heat levels before engineshutdown like right now.
Our damage paperdoll could also show how high heat is in the different parts of the mech.
Or a totaly seperate heatmeter for local heat would be needed.
Another fun thing would be seeing how high the heat is in our enemies through targeting sensors and heatvision.
I made a thread about how to make SHS worth using once, but players just outright ignored it or said:
: "Can't you see that DHS is an outright upgrade?" or "if this was done i could no longer use my 4 PPC build" without really thinking about it.
Then the thread just went downwards as players started throwing mean sounding critique at me.
Edited by Spleenslitta, 31 March 2015 - 09:03 AM.