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As usual, anyone who TL;DRs this (That's 'Too Long; Didn't Read' for anyone who doesn't know) or calls it a giant wall of text (walls of text by definition lack paragraph breaks and other things to render them digestible), I will ask that you leave and not come around again until you do read. I can't make you and won't try to make you, but if you post again afterwards without demonstrating that you've taken the time to actually read and try to understand what I'm saying here, I will ignore you.
That said.
What am I here to do this time? I'm here to try and help bring clan 'mechs into balance with each other. In addition to focusing on an individual 'mech this time, I'm going to propose a systematic alteration that could be used to more easily bring omnimechs into line with each other in terms of power. The idea being that a unified method of applying quirks to omnipods could be used to accomplish a set of goals. Specifically, these goals are:
- Reduce boating.
- Increase the value of 'mechs that have limited equipment options.
- Increase the value of 'mechs that have limited hardpoint options.
- Increase the value of 'dead' omnipods ('pods with no hardpoints or inherent equipment).
- Improve the viability of 'mechs that have severe tonnage or space limitations thanks to hard-locked equipment.
The Summoner
For the sake of examples, I'm going to need a 'mech that underperforms compared to its peers to demonstrate the system I'm thinking of. The Summoner stands out as a particuarly good choice for several reasons.
First of all, the Summoner has a very inconvenient base construction. As a 70-ton 'mech with a very large built in XL 350 and Ferro-Fibrous armor but no Endo-Steel, it is not terribly weight efficient- stripped of all armor and weapons, it has only 32 tonnes to devote to equipping itself. This is slightly exacerbated by the presence of five tonnes of jump jet, and while the jets are useful, there are regular complaints that they are relatively ineffective (this may be a perceptual bias, all Summoner legs except the D have some form of agility boosting effect. I'm not honestly sure.) With the maximum efficient armor (if one assumes no use of machine guns), it only has 21 tonnes of pod space. In exchange for all of this, it has decent hitboxes, good speed, and fourteen built in double heat sinks.
Second of all, the Summoner's hardpoints aren't terribly favorable. It has a predilection for ballistic weapons, which are heavy and not very hot (both disadvantaging it on tonnage and failing to make use of its heat dissipation capability). The right torso can only have a ballistic mount, and only one Right Torso pod has that, and the left torso is limited to a choice between a ballistic mount and a missile mount. This leaves the majority of the weaponry in the arms, which are relatively easy to lose. Beyond that, mounting noteworthy ballistics on the left arm removes the machine's elbow to boot, reducing its viable firing arc.
Finally, while the Summoner's torso twist range is a nice strong 100 degrees, it leans like an Atlas with only 20 degrees of pitch, and the arm range is very small as well- 20 degrees vertically or horizontally.
This places the Summoner in one of two positions most of the time- as a missileboat, which is a very shaky place to stand even if you are 90 kph fast and jump-capable, or as a laserboat, which the Summoner is okay at thanks to its heat dissipation, but with only four energy weapons (two to an arm) and only arm mounts, it's not really all that skilled at that role either.
Theoretically, the Summoner could mount dual ballistics using the D side torsos, but these aren't ballistic hardpoints with benefits for autocannon, and the limited tonnage makes it hard to fit anything larger than a 2-class autocannon in anyways, unless the pilot is fond of running out of ammunition right away.
The Problem
The Summoner's main issue, then, is fitting enough weaponry and ammunition into the 'mech to make it work despite the various hardpoint limitations of the machine. Clearly space is not an issue, but the placement and quantity of hardpoints is.
The secondary problem is that the Summoner's quirks are not very useful to making it feel strong and useful in combat- in default configuration, the quirks are spread out across a variety of weapons, and the placement of hardpoints on omnipods makes it difficult to focus on anything but missiles or a set of ER Laser arm weapons.
Lots of structure durability and agility quirks here, but there are issues with that. Most of the agility quirks are raw acceleration and deceleration, with a slight benefit to speed. This doesn't actually help significantly in combat, particularly since peeking is largely not needed by a machine that jumps anyways. The structure durability is nice for keeping the legs on the machine, but otherwise this mostly means that instead of losing the component with structure durability, the pilot loses the equipment installed there- at which point the component often might as well be gone anyways. Also, the empty right torso gets a lot of durability improving options that don't mean much, because there's nothing mounted there when that quirk is present.
The First Part of the Solution
The first step amounts to looking at the quirks and ajusting them so that they produce results that feel and are better for the health of the machine. This doesn't necessarily mean more powerful overall, but it does mean something that the pilot is going to notice as they're driving the machine and be able to make use of.
So, let's look at the Summoner Prime. The total quirk benefit of the Summoner Prime is as follows:
- Left Arm Structure +11
- Right Torso Structure +8
- Right Arm Structure +11
- Left Leg Structure +15
- Right Leg Structure +15
- Ballistic Cooldown +10%
- LB-X Velocity +10%
- LB-X Spread -10%
- Arm Speed (Pitch) +7.5%
- LRM (5/10/15/20) Spread -4%
- SRM (2/4/6) Spread -4%
- Missile Velocity +2%
- Acceleration (All speeds) +30%
- Deceleration (All speeds) +30%
- Speed 5%
- ERPPC Velocity 7.5%
- ERPPC Cooldown 5%
- Energy Cooldown 5%
Well, the arm structure boosts are nice, but having them as structure is simply not that useful. Plus, the right arm is the less bulky of the two and the less likely to be shot, yet it has the same degree of benefit. The right torso structure boost just doesn't mean much with no equipment there and the missile drum mounted over the left torso.
The cooldown quirks are decent, but the ERPPC is the no-ammo weapon and also the slower-firing direct fire weapon, so it would make sense to have that bear the stronger cooldown quirk.
The arm movement speed quirk is basically meaningless- Summoner arms have relatively small movement range, so crossing it quickly just isn't an issue to begin with.
A 4% reduction to missile spread is basically meaningless- it's too small a change to be of real significance on an SRM rack, and Clan LRMs don't care anyways, they ripple fire.
Finally, that acceleration/deceleration quirk group is nice for getting out of dangerous situations, but otherwise has very limited value. It's relatively rare for the speed of acceleration or deceleration to matter a lot, and a lot of the times when it does are when the 'mech is forced to decelerate by a slope- in which case you want a worse deceleration so you can get up the hill further.
At least the speed increase and the ERPPC/LB-X projectile velocity quirks are solid.
With all of that in mind, I would propose the following overall quirk benefits to the Summoner Prime omnipod set:
- Left Arm Structure +5
- Left Arm Armor +5
- Left Torso Structure +5
- Left Torso Armor +5
- Right Arm Structure +5
- Left Leg Structure +10
- Left Leg Armor +5
- Right Leg Structure +10
- Right Leg Armor +5
- Ballistic Cooldown +10%
- LB-X Velocity +10%
- LB-X Spread -10%
- Arm Movement Range (Pitch) +5
- Missile Velocity 5%
- Missile Cooldown 5%
- Acceleration (All Speeds) +20%
- Deceleration (All Speeds) +10%
- Torso Twist Speed (Yaw) +5%
- Speed +5%
- ERPPC Velocity +7.5%
- ERPPC Cooldown +7.5%
- Energy Cooldown +7.5%
- ERPPC Heat Generation -7.5%
The Second Part of the Solution
So this is where things really get interesting. I've decided to follow Ms. Frizzle's advice and get a bit messy here, so do please hold on to your assorted limbs and, if you still have it by this point, your sanity. I'm going to be making a suggestion that I haven't seen anyone else make before, so here goes:
Put the quirks that benefit a given weapons system on a different location's omnipod from where that weapon is located.
Now, before you lose your ever-lovin' minds, I'm not proposing that this idea 'must be done on all omnimechs' or anything quite that extreme. I'm not going to say it absolutely couldn't work that way (I'm quite certain it could work out very well if applied to all omnimechs carefully) but I don't think it's something that must be applied to all omnimechs, either. I don't even think all of the quirks that benefit a given weapon should be moved out of the omnipod holding that weapon.
I do think that it would help to encourage more varied and/or mixed loadouts, which would help to liberate the game from the 'boating is everything' mentality that seems to pervade it sometimes.
More importantly, it would allow serious uses for omnipods with no actual hardpoints or fixed equipment in them- such as the right torso pod of the Summoner Prime, B, and C. By portioning out some of the quirks given to a configuration of an omnimech to otherwise dead pods, the flexibility of the 'mech as a whole is improved and those pods start to actually matter, rather than just being something to ignore entirely, or trade out for pod variants with hardpoints on them as soon as possible.
Additionally, placing quirks on pods that can't contain weapons that match those quirks allows for quirks that benefit stock omnimech loadouts much more strongly with less risk of things getting out of control when players are allowed to mix-and-match omnipods.
Finally, 'farming out' quirks to pods that don't have the weapons in question would allow some of these quirks to be moved to the Center Torso omnipods of 'mechs where the Center Torso is otherwise identical, making choice of which omni variant to purchase significant as well, and thus making the variant bases mean something when spotted in combat.
Thus, the resulting Omnipod Quirk Lists for the Summoner. Keep in mind, all values are theoretical. I'll discuss the numbers of course, but I'd rather talk about the idea for quirk placement on omnipods.
Summoner Prime:
Spoiler
Summoner B:
Spoiler
Summoner C:
Spoiler
And finally, the Summoner D:
Spoiler
So, there's the idea. Feel free to clobber together theoretical omnipod sets and see if the proposed set of changes is breakable or not, and how, and why. Even if the pod quirks as proposed are exploitable, I still think the idea- moving weapon quirks to pods that don't have those weapons, so as to reduce boating and improve the viability of mixed builds while also allowing 'mechs to have larger quirks more safely- is good, and I'd like to see it at least worked through theoretical paces.
Just remember, 'this is dumb' is not an argument. 'You're wrong about x thing because y, z, and q reasons' is an argument. Please only arguments.
Heck, who knows, maybe if we toss thoughts and build ideas and such around enough, we may see such a system- or at least an improvement to the Summoner- somewhen in the future?
Well, that took a few hours. Time for lunch, methinks.
-QKD-CR0
Edited by Quickdraw Crobat, 23 May 2015 - 12:51 PM.
