109 replies to this topic

[Ursh]

Many assaults are either too generalized, like the Atlas, or have some combination of bad hitboxes, terrible hardpoint locations, or terrible hardpoint selection. Some mechs have all three to some extent. Due to critical slot limitations, particularly with IS assaults, you run into cooling problems even on the assault mechs that do have good hardpoints.

Notice how the Stalker has always been good because it's skinny from the front with very high-mounted energy points, meaning it can peek. The Dire Wolf and King Crab both have the ability to bully mechs because you can't win a staring contest with them, allowing them to deny areas or break up defensive positions with a hail of dakka. They're also backed up by energy weapons and don't rely on their missiles.

[Harrison Kelly]

I think the bigger issue between mediums and heavies is that heavies are the class where you can really get your builds rolling in terms of bringing two of anything. Whatever you can carry in a medium, in a heavy, you can probably carry equal or more of that build in energy weapons or ballistics, up to twice that load.

There isn't a single medium that can carry dual Gauss. (Granted, the Grid Iron might as well have two, but still . . . )

The Cataphract, Catapult, Jager, and probably one more that I'm forgetting can all roll dual Gauss. For sure the Jager and the K2 can carry dual AC20.

Dual PPCs...well, there aren't really a good quirked mediums for PPCs. The Cicada-3C? Amazing quirks . . . for 1 energy hardpoint. In heavies, queue the Thunderbolt-9S. I guess you could do dual PPCs on the VND-1R, but then it runs like 80 kph ...the 9S does that already. Griffins can't pack more than 2 either, and again . . . the 9S does that while also being almost as fast and with a lot more armor and backup lasers.

I can fit 3 or more AC5s, possibly 2+ UAC 5s on certain ballistic-friendly heavy 'Mechs without compromising my speed or armor. It's a struggle to even remotely do so on a medium.

Same arguments probably go for mediums and LRMs . . . I wouldn't know, never tried to build an LRM medium.

Point is, when I can carry equal (or a LOT MORE) firepower in a heavy with similar speed and superior armor, it's hard to pass that up. Especially since a lot of those loadouts (dual Gauss, dual AC20) were restricted to heavies alone until the Dire Wolf and King Crab came out.

[Ultimax]

Harrison Kelly, on 01 April 2015 - 07:06 AM, said:

Point is, when I can carry equal (or a LOT MORE) firepower in a heavy

Aside from the mediums that are hardlocked to a specific (low) engine size, if your mediums are traveling the same speed as heavies that are carrying oodles of firepower then that's a build issue.

[Deathlike]

Lily from animove, on 01 April 2015 - 02:43 AM, said:

the issue is:

heavies are often as fast as most mediums, therefore mediums do not enjoy this advantage. Only a very few do.
Size, While light mechs have a big chance to spread damage by their size vs non PPFLD weapons, most mediums can not do this, they are as easy to hit in specific locations as heavies. Only a few mediums are an exception.

And so mobility and survivability are not really that much of an advantage unless you play a CDA or a SCR or Kintaro. most others do not really differ much.

Well, I had said a while back when Mediums got their overall buff... that their quirks completely forgot about turn speed as IIRC that's connected with the engine. Acceleration and deceleration were affected by tonnage, so that didn't need a change. A Heavy can turn as fast as a Medium with the same speed... it's pretty obvious that's already problematic (especially with some terrible/slow Lights that can't even torso twist faster than the already quirked Mediums).

So... you figure that out.

[mogs01gt]

It would be nice to remove TBR's from that graph to see if they are the reason the numbers are soo one sided.

[Harrison Kelly]

Ultimatum X, on 01 April 2015 - 09:17 AM, said:

Aside from the mediums that are hardlocked to a specific (low) engine size, if your mediums are traveling the same speed as heavies that are carrying oodles of firepower then that's a build issue.

It's pretty easy for me to get up to 80 KPH in pretty much all my heavy builds. Even my Gauss Cat runs 78 if I remember properly, which isn't nimble . . . but isn't sluggish either. And while I can get up to 100 in my Shadow Hawks without skimping too much, I'm also carrying two thirds the firepower. 20% speed in exchange for what is it, 20% armor and 35% more firepower? Yeah, that's a hard decision.

When I ton up from a heavy to any IS assault 'Mech not called a Stalker, King Crab or a Banshee, I'm severely constrained in terms of hardpoints/critical slot to be able to boat THAT much more guns than a heavy. The discrepancy in Firepower/Speed/Armor between Heavy to Assault isn't nearly as drastic as it is from Medium to Heavy.

Or maybe I just pilot the assault 'Mechs that suck. I dunno. YMMV.

Edited by Harrison Kelly, 01 April 2015 - 11:21 AM.

[Jman5]

mogs01gt, on 01 April 2015 - 10:11 AM, said:

It would be nice to remove TBR's from that graph to see if they are the reason the numbers are soo one sided.

Just for fun I went through and deleted all the timberwolf values. While the best score was a timberwolf (tfun90 come on down!), the average damage didn't change a whole lot. It went from 375 to 367. Skimming through it, there didn't seem to be one mech that dominated the top damage spots for heavies. I see a lot of timberwolves, but that seems more a case of them being popular. For example I had a dragon, orion, catapult, and grasshopper in my top 10 heavy damage.

The main reason I lumped all heavies together into one value was that I simply didn't have a big enough sample size for a more granular breakdown. The numbers would have been weird for the less popular mechs. For example I kept coming across this one guy who was making the catapult A-1 look like a Tier 1 meta mech.

Edited by Jman5, 01 April 2015 - 01:17 PM.

[mogs01gt]

Jman5, on 01 April 2015 - 11:55 AM, said:

Just for fun I went through and deleted all the timberwolf values. While the best score was a timberwolf (tfun90 come on down!), the average damage didn't change a whole lot. It went from 375 to 367. Skimming through it, there didn't seem to be one mech that dominated the top damage spots. I see a lot of timberwolves, but that seems more a case of them being popular. For example I had a dragon, orion, catapult, and grasshopper in my top 10 heavy damage.
The main reason I lumped all heavies together into one value was that I simply didn't have a big enough sample size for a more granular breakdown. The numbers would have been weird for the less popular mechs. For example I kept coming across this one guy who was making the catapult A-1 look like a Tier 1 meta mech.

Interesting. One could also say that the better players flock toward heavies because they are the best class in MWO?

Wonder how much Crows skewed the medium numbers?

Edited by mogs01gt, 01 April 2015 - 12:29 PM.

[Telmasa]

This may seem kind of weird, but hear me out: I think light mechs might do less damage but *win games* (by virtue of spotting, timely flanking, lightspeedlagshield powers, etc.).

Heavy mechs might do more damage, but lose games most often - as in, you might pump out more hits & have the armor to survive taking hits (so you can pump out more hits); but you can't do as much as other chassi in order to create a *win*.

Hence people are losing more in heavies, and spending more time trying to get doubles/grind exp in Heavies, artificially inflating the qeue on top of those players who already have max pilot skills.


The reason I come up with this theory is I have a hell of an easier time winning in my Light mechs than in any other chassis - I'm able to vastly affect whether a game can be won or is going to be lost according to what I can do with a Light mech, even though clearly I'm not (usually) able to carry the game in terms of kills or damage.*

Whereas in my Heavy mechs, all too often I'm able to pump out considerable damage, and even kills, but still end up being helpless to change much when it comes to the overall situation.

Mediums & assaults are in between, for different reasons - mediums can't take enough punches to tank hits to trade evenly with the enemy team, and aren't quite mobile enough to flank or do things to win the information warfare as handily as lights can; they're somewhere inbetween, which lends them some flexibility - but that's about it.

Whereas Assaults have the meat to tank hits and out-punch the enemy (with some exceptions), but lack the mobility to really do anything else. It's something of an art form of performing 'surprise' attacks with Assault mechs, singling out one target at a time in a relentless death march - and that's really the only way an Assault mech can hope to turn a given match into a 'win'. It's effective, but only to a point, and comes at the exclusion of flexibility.

So...heavies are the 'simplest' to play, and yet are the least effective in winning a game - they don't exceed mediums in terms of flexibility; they don't exceed assaults in terms of tanki-ness; they don't beat lights at all when it comes to winning information warfare or distractions.

I could say that heavies are best, really, in a 'supporting' role, which as I see it is the easiest to figure out.

But that also, again, means they are the least effective type of mech for single-handedly affecting the outcome of the match.

Make sense? Or maybe I'm just crazy...lol

*Note: I see any match, no matter what weight class, where I do less than 500 damage as a sub-par match. Personal tryhard issues.

Edited by Telmasa, 02 April 2015 - 12:10 AM.

[WarZ]

mogs01gt, on 01 April 2015 - 12:27 PM, said:

Interesting. One could also say that the better players flock toward heavies because they are the best class in MWO?

Wonder how much Crows skewed the medium numbers?

Are these questions out of curiosity ?

Or are you grasping at straws that would prove the misconception of holy trinity being OP, but are realizing from Jmans data, that there isnt actually proof of it ? That there actually isn't real data to support the tbr/scr's being OP ? I consider it an eye opener how LITTLE removing tbr's from the heavy queue data affected the average damage.

[Roadkill]

My aggregate stats over the last 90 days:

Class  Matches  Damage
Light       93  259.12
Medium     267  384.22
Heavy      167  412.33
Assault    237  434.28

That's about what I expected, though the average damage is a little higher. I didn't expect to be averaging 400+ damage in any class. Sure, I get those 1000+ games now and then, but I figured the 0-12 stomps would more than offset those.

FWIW, those matches are mostly from leveling up recently released Mechs. Firestarters (hey, I was late to catch on), Enforcers, Grasshoppers, King Crabs, and Zeuses have gone through the grind in that 90-day window. The bulk of the rest of the matches in mediums are in my Stormcrow Prime, which is my money grinding Mech.

[Insanity09]

Well, first off, I need to up my game, but I've known that for a while. My average damage is mostly... average, but my W/L and K/D are mostly bad.
A lot of my mechs aren't good (some are, mostly lights and mediums, hmm), but they aren't too far off reasonable, but then, argh, there are some particularly awful mechs for me, apparently.
As an aside, I know I'm much better at getting KMDD's than I am actual kills, so it would be nice if that were somehow visible or folded in to the K/D ratio (perhaps a KMDD could count as a half kill for purposes of the ratio, unless you also got that actual kill, in which case you would get only the full point?).

Anyhow, yet another nail in the coffin of light effectiveness is the hide and peek methods.

A light depends on mobility to survive, stopping, even in cover, even for a moment, is often a very bad thing. Needing to move constantly often means either keeping away from the bulk of the fight (lower damage), hopping from cover spot to cover spot (+ exposure time & damage if somebody is looking that way), and the ever present danger of turning the wrong corner (~=sudden death for a light).
The only lights this doesn't really apply to is ERLL snipers, where they are far enough away that they don't need to worry about popping around the wrong corner, and their speed works well for getting in and out of cover. Even they will tend to lose vs heavier builds using the same gimmick.

Lights, simply by their tonnage, cannot carry enough weaponry to make a big impact, except over a longer time, and their survivability hurts them in that effort. Medium also suffer this, as many above have mentioned, though to a lesser degree.

There are potential ways to change (and improve?) this seeming problem.
Mediums (and lights?) could get a mobility boost (accel/decel, torso speed, turn rate, some combo thereof). Alternatively, heavies could be nerfed, which would make more sense, but would likely cause more outcry. Maybe both?
As suggested above, lights and mediums (any regularly low pop class) could get a multiplier of some sort to improve their payouts.
Rewards for non-damage/kill match items could be improved a bit more, and since more mobile mechs tend to get those more readily, that would actually be helping the payday for lights and mediums.

[Requiemking]

Ugh, sir, you do realise that this thread is from 2015, and now I have to do this.

[Xavori]

Assault weakness is all about ghost heat. Ghost heat means that all that extra tonnage and such assaults bring is pointless. They can't fire any more weapons at a time than a medium or light. But they're still saddled with lack of speed and mobility making them slow, easy to hit medium mechs with some extra armor that doesn't do them much good in a game with pointpoint accuracy.

There is a reason why of the ~80 mechs I own, only 8 are assaults, and two of those were freebies. The other 6 have very specific, very unusual builds that makes them interesting even tho none of them are what I consider top damage mechs.

[Insanity09]

Nope, hadn't noticed that.
I was trying to find a thread that talked about weight classes and the influence they seem to have on an individual match.
This one came up as one of the candidates on the google search, though it was not what I had been looking for.

That said...
the subject still seems relevant.

Does policing the forums for old thread revivals make you feel good and superior? Is that specifically why you have that account name? Would you prefer the forums be clogged with duplicate after duplicate? Hmm.

Edited by Insanity09, 30 November 2017 - 07:44 PM.

[Requiemking]

Insanity09, on 30 November 2017 - 07:42 PM, said:

Nope, hadn't noticed that.
I was trying to find a thread that talked about weight classes and the influence they seem to have on an individual match.
This one came up as one of the candidates on the google search, though it was not what I had been looking for.

That said...
the subject still seems relevant.

Does policing the forums for old thread revivals make you feel good and superior? Is that specifically why you have that account name? Would you prefer the forums be clogged with duplicate after duplicate? Hmm.

Nope. Just the standard way of letting the mods know there is a necrothread that needs to be locked.

[Jman5]

I don't even remember writing this, but old me made some nice looking pie charts!

Might be interesting to do a follow up on this and see how things have changed.

Edited by Jman5, 30 November 2017 - 08:06 PM.

[JediPanther]

The main reasons I never pilot assaults unless I'm either very bored or want to run a mix weapon build is because they are super slow, They can't torso twist to spread damage and ghost heat makes it impossible to fire their main group of weapons. Using the kgc with 2x ac 20 you can't fire both of them without the gh. 40 ballistic damage is a no no but a 40-70 laser alpha is allowed.

They also have very low hard point number and/or placement. Atlas has waist high placement, you hit rocks and terrain you were trying to use for cover especially when on polar trying to use the trenches or down in canyon trying to avoid lrm and atm. All the armor and structure quirks from skill tree or the mech doesn't do jack when you can't move to make use of it.

Lights are pretty much cannon folder with a few exceptions such as the lcts,ach and mlx g trolls. Those er build ravens die once any faster mech gets close to them or they get focus fired down.

[Wolfways]

Khobai, on 30 November 2017 - 07:38 PM, said:

they go as fast as most mediums but carry 30% more armor and firepower. they make mediums pretty much obsolete.

I've always thought it was lights that made mediums obsolete. Mediums are supposed to be the workhorses and I always assumed the best brawlers, but with lights being able to chuck in a big engine they are way faster than they are supposed to be which increases their survival. They are no longer the scouts/harassers/skirmishers they are said to be in BT lore.
I don't use big alpha builds, and don't see that many who do in QP, but lights are a PITA to kill and they are very often amongst the high damage dealers.

[FupDup]

Wolfways, on 30 November 2017 - 08:50 PM, said:

I've always thought it was lights that made mediums obsolete. Mediums are supposed to be the workhorses and I always assumed the best brawlers, but with lights being able to chuck in a big engine they are way faster than they are supposed to be which increases their survival. They are no longer the scouts/harassers/skirmishers they are said to be in BT lore.
I don't use big alpha builds, and don't see that many who do in QP, but lights are a PITA to kill and they are very often amongst the high damage dealers.

The majority of mechs in MWO are using engines "way bigger than they are supposed to be."

And really, the lights > mediums thing only lasted until the release of the Shadow Hawk, since the mediums before it had severe glaring design issues (the Shad has new issues of its own in the modern meta but that's beside the point).