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Assume up front that we're working in an environment without quirks, because the quirks are a symptom of deficient balance with the basic gear in the game.
Lasers, Lasers Everywhere!
I admit, this section is the primary focus of my concern and is a bit more objective than the following sections. Hopefully, you guys can pick up some of the slack over there.
The laser is the bread-and-butter of equipment in this game. No ammo requirements, works in all situations, easy to aim, decent damage output, low resource requirements. Unfortunately, lasers are also the least-balanced equipment in MWO. Just within the Inner Sphere, there are three lasers that are all but completely useless. Compare the Inner Sphere gear to Clans, however, and the whole thing becomes something of a joke. Inferior range, damage, weight, and size characteristics conspire to make them pretty awful.
But wait, you say, don't Inner Sphere lasers have shorter durations? Why yes, yes they do. Unfortunately, duration doesn't tell the whole story. You see, you can have a laser that burns for 0.5 seconds, but if it only does 1 damage then it's only doing 2 damage per second over the course of the burn, and that's essentially scratching paint. The amount of damage divided by the time taken to deliver that damage is called the impulse damage rate, or impulse damage. Out of the all of the lasers in this game, only two of the Inner Sphere options feature a higher impulse: the Large Pulse Laser and the Medium Pulse Laser.
Here is a list of all the current impulse damages:
IS SL: 4
C-ERSL: 5
IS ML: 5.56
C-ERML: 6.09
IS ERLL: 7.20
C-ERLL: 7.33
IS SPL: 8.00
C-SPL: 8.00
IS MPL: 10.00
C-MPL: 9.41
IS LPL: 16.42
C-LPL: 11.61
The odd-man out is the IS Large Laser, which has range comparable to a C-ERML and an impulse more closely resembling the C-LPL.
So why is this a problem?
This is a problem because a Clan player with a given number of a particular laser can always out-damage an Inner Sphere player with the same number of the same class of weapon even if the Clan player pulls the beam off of the target at the same time the Inner Sphere player's lasers complete their burn. This is in addition to having superior range, superior speed, and superior damage. So the longer duration isn't penalizing the Clan player at all relative to the Inner Sphere player, it's just penalizing the Clan player relative to lore...which is worthless as far as fair game-play is concerned.
You might say "what about the IS Large Pulse and Medium Pulse, though?" Those lasers suffer from tremendous drawbacks in weight and range. 365 meters might seem workable, and it is, but then you remember that the laser weighs 7 tons and you have to consider what else you can take for 7 tons that might be an all-around more useful build. The Medium Pulse has a range restriction of 220 meters, and since it only really offers one extra damage and 0.3 less seconds of exposure over the IS MedLas, it isn't usually worth taking unless you have speed, armor, or cover enough to close with the target.
Now, since I don't like the idea of just butchering Clan equipment to balance with the Inner Sphere or of buffing IS equipment when there are future IS options available, I brought in what I think are the most analogous of those future options and made some tweaks to them to create the following spread:
You will notice how impulse damages are nearly identical for each pairing of Clan and Inner Sphere lasers. What this does is allow both parties to expose themselves for the same amount of time and do the same amount of damage. The Clan player has the option, however, of exposing himself a little longer to finish the burn and deal the extra damage if the target does not retreat to cover or whatever other impetus is available.
On the other side of the fence, the Inner Sphere player can begin engaging the Clan player for maximum damage before the Clan player gets within his own optimum. This allows the slower Inner Sphere a chance to deal some extra damage of their own within a narrow window.
Notice that the range on the Inner Sphere lasers does not correspond to the intersection point where a Clan laser does the same damage as the Inner Sphere laser; it comes before it, i.e. 520 meters for C-ERML to do 5 damage. If it did correspond exactly to that point, then the Clan laser would be dealing that same damage at a massive disadvantage in impulse, and certain Inner Sphere 'Mechs would be able to just hold the Clans out all day without a care and win with the same level of broken reliability as the quirked TDR-5SS.
Furthermore, the Clans still retain a soft range advantage over the Inner Sphere, because their lasers do more damage than their Inner Sphere counterparts at the latter's max optimum range. Clans also have the option of bringing Targeting Computers in addition to Modules (which I also think need a rework, but I'll save that for another time), which dramatically closes the gap. I am on the fence about whether or not Inner Sphere lasers should receive another, smaller nudge in range to stay competitive.
One of the primary issues I had with this table is figuring out what to do on the Small end of the scale. They are all so similar that it's really a wash on which one to take; an ER Small is the best in pretty much any scenario, and I can only imagine ever taking the Pulse or Heavy variants when running a Light like the Arctic Cheetah or Firestarter.
Dakka, Dakka, Dakka!
Auto-cannons are, I think, one of the gimpiest classes of weapons in the game. They are generally too heavy or too big to do anything particularly well with the exceptions of extreme long-range and extreme short-range combat, where Gauss and AC/20 reign supreme. Sure, ACs do okay, but they aren't stellar and their deficiencies handicap 'Mechs that have a lot of ballistic hard-points.
For the Inner Sphere, the primary drawbacks to ballistics are size and weight, with the AC/2 getting a special mention for heat and the AC/20 a special mention for range. They deliver single-shot, pinpoint damage and that's a huge boon, but it's not enough to offset the negatives when bringing multiples precludes speed, good heat dissipation, and good backup firepower on even some of the heaviest 'Mechs in the game.
For the Clans, the primary drawbacks are projectile speed and the duration of the burst. They also suffer from less critical size and weight limitations, but in the majority of cases that typically prevents the stacking of 20-class or C-Gauss weapons on chassis that have supreme agility characteristics. Bringing ballistics as a Clan player means rolling with lots of face-time against Inner Sphere ballistics and having to be an excellent marksman to even hit the target, since Clan AC round velocities are low and the long burst can be spread.
The following table attempts to correct for these deficiencies in the same mode of thought as the Laser table:
EDIT: There is an error on this table. The LAC/5 should weigh 5 tons and take 2 slots, not weigh 2 tons and take 5 slots.
There are more than a few major deals in this chart.
First up, burst fire for everybody! Standard ACs and Ultra ACs receive bursts, and their shell velocities have been eyeballed according to how much damage each single one does and how fast a similarly damaging, single IS slug does in the game now. Burst fire is how ACs are described in the lore: each "shot" is a cassette containing a pre-determined number of actual shells that get fired. I admit, there was no real game-play reason for doing this, so consider this my olive branch for people who love the lore of the game. I did, however, differentiate the burst behavior between ACs and UACs, and even between IS and Clan UACs. Inner Sphere retain some of their front-loading because their ballistics are so much heavier, and bringing standard ACs and UACs is a real commitment that typically demands an XL if your machine is less than 80 tons. I'm open to the possibility of reducing shot interval on the C-UAC/20, I wasn't sure if giving them the same duration as the IS UAC/20 would have been fair given how crippling it usually is to bring a 20-class weapon in an IS 'Mech in both range and resource requirements.
Next, LB-series ballistics are basically defined by their ability to fire single shots and switch ammo types. So nobody feels left out in the cold and because it seemed prudent given that IS started recovering real LB tech without having to reverse engineer Clan tech (okay, olive branch part two!), I elected to make all LB-series ballistics fire single slugs and with the same performance curves. I think that means almost everybody will take an LB over a standard auto-cannon, but I did tweak the heat profiles and firing cycles to make them less appealing if you want to bring additional weapons. They are lighter, smaller, and have better range, but they are also hotter, slower, and more difficult to aim on account of shell velocity.
Finally, MagShots and AP Gauss are there to give 'Mechs like the Locust and the Nova a ballistic option beyond Machine Guns, but they have very different uses. The MagShot is described as an anti-materiel sniper weapon, while the AP Gauss is an anti-personnel weapon with armor-piercing characteristics (ugh, another olive branch!). As such, it seems rational to provide the MagShot with long range and low cyclic DPS while the AP Gauss is much shorter ranged with higher cyclic DPS. There are some game-play motives, too. No 'Mech has more than six ballistics, with the upcoming exception of the Shadowcat. Six MagShots is only 12 damage, less than a single Gauss. Boating them on a heavier 'Mech with six of these hard-points is inefficient and you'd be better served bringing two Light Gauss and four MagShots, which still isn't a particularly phenomenal hit but is light enough to also bring backup firepower similar to the Clan options. If it gets out of hand, a possible limiter would be restricting charge to three at a time. Also immediately on the table is limiting range down to 720, 600 and as low as 540 meters.
The AP Gauss, on the other hand, does 3 damage, and six of them is 18 points...that's more than a whole C-Gauss for a mere three tons. Consider a Dire Wolf with two C-Gauss and four AP Gauss; that's 42 damage with only 16 heat and massive amounts of dissipation. Capping the range on it creates a niche where smaller 'Mechs can use it as a primary ballistic while a Dire Wolf won't be delivering 42 points of low-heat damage across the map. If it becomes a problem, restricting charge to two at a time would put it in line with the MagShot.
In either case, at 2 heat per shot, stacking multiples quickly becomes hot with an inferior damage-to-heat and DPS-to-heat profile compared to larger ballistics like the 5, 10, and even 20-class weapons, which matters quite a bit in a brawl.
Let it Rain, Let it Rain!
Missiles. Missiles are weapons of extremes, either extreme short or extreme long. This limits their usefulness, but it also means the complement each other well. SRMs are amazing in a brawl, and LRMs are amazing support for brawlers which, by nature of the role, keep their locks.
I really don't think there's too much of an imbalance in missiles. They are pretty good. I do think IS need their larger Streaks and that Streaks should not be able to turn on a dime, and I think LRMs need flatter trajectories and higher projectile velocities so that they are more useful as direct-fire weapons, but overall they are pretty good.
As you can see, not much was changed. IS SRMs received 2.5 damage per missile to balance the weight commitment, Clan SRMs received longer range and faster projectile velocity. Streaks have had their projectile velocities equalized; I really don't know what the rationale was for granting C-Streaks higher velocity. They've also been given an extra 0.15 points of damage per missile, similar to current SRMs.
Clan LRMs have had their cool-downs reduced to compensate for the time taken to stream a single volley, equalizing the cyclic DPS with their Inner Sphere counterparts. While both Clan and IS LRMs have had their missile velocities increased, the Inner Sphere ones received a greater bump to acknowledge the greater commitment made when bringing LRMs similar to the impetus for increased damage on the IS SRMs.
Blue Lightning
PPCs. I don't like PPCs as they are, but I'm not about to rewrite the book, so all I did was add the IS future options, reduce the heat, increase the velocity, tweak the cool-downs, and call it a day.
C-ERPPC is the ideal version. It offers the best damage and range profile for this class of weapon, which isn't usually going to be fired rapidly since it takes time to calculate the trajectory. So while the heat profile looks a bit steep, in practice it's going to perform more similarly to the IS ERPPC when firing at maximum rate. All of the Inner Sphere options are essentially dancing around it. A trio of LPPC is the best match for it, but chews up hard-points and requires greater trigger discipline. The PPC is better for 'Mechs that are slot-starved, and the ERPPC is ideal for IS 'Mechs that are neither slot-starved nor tonnage-starved. The Heavy PPC is going to be a good option for slot-starved 'Mechs, though a combination of LPPC and PPC might perform better if you have tons and slots and not a whole lot of other hard-points.
I'm open to suggestions.
Engines, Heat Capacity, and Dissipation
This is the cherry on top of everything else. While I believe the above concepts can work with what we have now, I think it becomes even more appealing if we change the heat system.
There are many vocal complaints over the way MWO handles heat. Before presenting an alternative, let's list them:
- Heat capacity is too high, allowing rapid repeat strikes with high damage values
- Heat capacity scales with the number of heat-sinks, providing insane cap advantages to 'Mechs that can fit large numbers of heat-sinks and empowering No. 1 on this list
- Engine-external double heat-sinks do not offer their full dissipation capabilities, permanently crippling 'Mechs that do not have 10 internal sinks and reducing the utility of the lower heat caps
- Ghost heat is arbitrary and unfair
The idea is to incentivize firing in smaller groups or using smaller weapons. A Locust that can alpha with 30 points of damage from six ER Mediums is still perfectly feasible, but it's going to take 11 seconds before he can do it again, 10 if he has all of the skills unlocked. That Locust, however, has a lot to gain by mounting six small-class lasers instead, though, including much higher impulse damage per point of heat, better overall DPS, and the ability to fire multiple times before having to cool off.
On the other end of the scale, a 'Mech like the Gargoyle extracts maximum benefit from its locked C-XL400, with the highest heat-cap in the game giving it the ability to fire a combination of several powerful guns all at once without shutting down or allowing it to stay engaged for longer than other more agile 'Mechs with smaller engines. With 18 DHS, a Gargoyle could fire three C-LPL or two C-HLL together and still have some room left over for some smaller lasers to augment that firepower.
Ghost heat is entirely unnecessary with this.
My concern is that 40 max might be too low. I think anything above a max of 50, though, is too high.
So, that's that. I welcome all ideas and concerns. Insults or otherwise unconstructive posting will be ignored. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Let's fix this game!
Edit: Spelling and grammar.
Edited by Yeonne Greene, 30 May 2015 - 09:09 PM.
