30 replies to this topic

[Bulletsponge0]

Shatara, on 02 April 2015 - 05:33 PM, said:

This 'muh realizms' argument falls apart on several levels.

First, this is Battletech, a world where one Space Kalashnikov does 0.52 damage over a ten-second turn, and a bunch of guys with table legs and carbon-reinforced fingernails can hypothetically kill a Battlemech.

Second, these are half- to full-ton weapons. That's 500-1000kg. For comparison the GAU-8 Avenger, the biggest real weapon you could modestly describe as a 'machine gun', weighs in at all of 281kg.

Third, while you would not fight a tank with a machine gun...this was not always the case. It wasn't uncommon in the early months of WWII to have tanks whose main anti-armor weapon was a 12.7-20mm machine gun, and Panthers were dying to 14.5mm rifles through the whole war. As for flamethrowers...tanks aren't actually that fond of being doused in liquid fire.

Fourth, these are 90-120m weapons, in a game that doesn't have 'soft targets'. Sure, there may be tanks at some point, but Battletech tanks are covered in the same stuff that Battlemechs are. If they don't have close-combat DPS, they're not going to be particularly useful.

and you forget to mention...the GAU-8 was designed specifically to chew through enemy armor...its the primary weapon of a platform designed to kill armor...with 10x the range of MW:O MGs




Edit: added range comparison

Edited by Bulletsponge0, 03 April 2015 - 10:35 AM.

[verybad]

Perhaps have them cancel out heatsinks on the targeted mech for a certain period of time rather than causing heat directly?

Obviously flamers need a re-look,

[Trashhead]

MWO is a game based on the Battletech-Universe; more specifically the Battletech TableTop game (a Strategy game).
I have never played that game, so the following info is what i have heard or read about.

Within this game the flamer had multiple roles.
one was to fight infantry (which was relatively powerful in quad-size),
another one was to create fires, which would negatively effect any mech (check River City: stand in one of the fires and see your heat go up).

The flamer was therefore more of a tactical weapon.

Without infantry or the ability to start fires (which would be hot enough so that players would avoid the burning area),
the flamer has no real use in MWO.

The Flamer was available in older MechWarrior games, such as MW2 (Ghost Bears Legacy Addon) and MW3.
In MW2-GBL the flamer was able to overheat enemy mechs so efficiently, that 2 or 3 shots forced then to shut down - making them easy prey.
In MW3 it was possible - given enough flamers - to cook enemy mechs to death with one salvo.


Both are scenarios that are not very desirable in MWO, since this is not PvE (like in MW2 and MW3) but PvP.
The Flamer would be totally uber, as it was in MW2 and M3 (provided you could get into range).

I would rather like to see PGi implement Infantry or the ability to set fire to th environment like in the TableTop game.
(No i am not a Lore-Humper, but i think the TT-game has something to it that MWo could benefit from.)

[Jaeger Gonzo]

Flamer quirks for Firestarters!!!

[LordMelvin]

Bulletsponge0, on 03 April 2015 - 10:25 AM, said:

and you forget to mention...the GAU-8 was designed specifically to chew through enemy armor...its the primary weapon of a platform designed to kill armor...with 10x the range of MW:O MGs




Edit: added range comparison

This prompted me to go ahead and look up the effective range on a GAU-8. According to Wikipedia: Effective firing range 4,000 feet (1,220 m) Maximum firing range Over 12,000 feet (3,660 m)

That means that a weapon that weighs roughly a third as much as an MWO machine gun has a better engagement range than a Gauss rifle at half the muzzle velocity (1070m/s vs 2000 m/s). A little more research revealed that an M16 has roughly the same range profile as our gauss rifles do (550 effective, 3600 max).

Now I understand that realism and 20-100 ton robots don't mix (and I am by no means a firearms expert), but there's some serious lostech going on here.

[Bulletsponge0]

LordMelvin, on 03 April 2015 - 11:59 AM, said:

This prompted me to go ahead and look up the effective range on a GAU-8. According to Wikipedia: Effective firing range 4,000 feet (1,220 m) Maximum firing range Over 12,000 feet (3,660 m)

That means that a weapon that weighs roughly a third as much as an MWO machine gun has a better engagement range than a Gauss rifle at half the muzzle velocity (1070m/s vs 2000 m/s). A little more research revealed that an M16 has roughly the same range profile as our gauss rifles do (550 effective, 3600 max).

Now I understand that realism and 20-100 ton robots don't mix (and I am by no means a firearms expert), but there's some serious lostech going on here.

don't forget, the GAU-8 has a narrower cone of fire at its effective range too (about 5 mils...about a 40 foot diameter circle at 1200 meters)

Edit: of course, the GAU-8 does weigh more than an MW:O machine gun once you add the feed mechanism and ammo... (about 1400 kg for a fully loaded, fully functional gau-8 inside the A-10)

Edited by Bulletsponge0, 03 April 2015 - 01:26 PM.

[Mcgral18]

LordMelvin, on 03 April 2015 - 11:59 AM, said:

This prompted me to go ahead and look up the effective range on a GAU-8. According to Wikipedia: Effective firing range 4,000 feet (1,220 m) Maximum firing range Over 12,000 feet (3,660 m)

That means that a weapon that weighs roughly a third as much as an MWO machine gun has a better engagement range than a Gauss rifle at half the muzzle velocity (1070m/s vs 2000 m/s). A little more research revealed that an M16 has roughly the same range profile as our gauss rifles do (550 effective, 3600 max).

Now I understand that realism and 20-100 ton robots don't mix (and I am by no means a firearms expert), but there's some serious lostech going on here.

The (supposed) logic there is that it's only powerful enough to damage mech armour at that range.

As long as you ignore the infantry having the same range.

[Xiomburg]

Flamers should overheat and shut down 'Mechs. The issue that comes to mind is the following:

3 Light 'Mechs drops, swing around shut down the assault and make them die to overheating. No radar blurbs to warn the enemy of what is going on.

Next, they do it again and again and again.

It has already been shown that people/players do not know how to handle flamer 'Mechs, this is the reason why they were moved to a sub par/useless weapon.

[Weeny Machine]

Flamers could be more of a utility weapon than a damage weapon. Messing with an enemy's heat management is interesting - the implementation isn't. Currently you are more likely to shut yourself down than the enemy plus doing not even much damage. I can see, though, that they are relcutant when it comes to that. Imagine a Firestarter shutting easily down a DW etc.As for the TT flamer: he wasn't really useful against mechs damagewise. However, it also could mess up your heat management by adding 2 heat. Doesn't sound much? Well, it is because the heat scale in the TT was punishing you for certain stepps (like -1 movement etc) when you exceeded a certain heat. That in turn could mess up your plan to get into cover and so on.

Edited by Bush Hopper, 03 April 2015 - 02:05 PM.

[A Large Infant]

Please don't turn this into a discussion of weapon ranges vs current technology, because Battletech and many, many other video games (most notoriously Halo) have extremely short weapon ranges usually due to technical limitations carried forward. In a tabletop game it is simply not feasible to have 100 yards of table to play on, in order to accurately simulate the 20 mile range of artillery, and even the 4km range of a current tank's main gun creates balance issues.

It is rare you will hear me say this but it isn't PGI's fault. Lol....

[Zen555]

Thanks for the well-thought-out replies!

I strongly agree: something that comes stock on many mechs should be able to do *something* more than look pretty, especially at a ton a pop. Even MGs, if you had 9 of them, would be painful, and those are the same tonnage (counting a half-ton of ammo each) as the flamer (and twice the range, AND no heat). 9 flamers, on the other hand, only seem to get you laughed at.

So it sounds like there is no real debate that the flamer is a broken weapon. The real question is, what to do? I'd rather remove it from the game entirely than leave it in its broken state. Honestly, new players are up for a world of disappointment when they get a stock Firestarter and realize half its weapons are junk. Better to just chuck them entirely if we can't find a decent balance.