38 replies to this topic

[PurpleNinja]

I agree with the title (your post is too long).
But this topic is discussed since the time when Gausscat was a god in the battlefield.

[Navid A1]

I think the thread title and what OP had in mind does not match.

you can not stop clan laser vomit with sized hardpoints. the vomit comes from ERML. one of the smallest weapons.

sized hardpoints is to prevent a raven from equipping AC20 and such.

ghost quirks is the way to go to stop med laser vomit. fire more than x, get penalized for y.

[FupDup]

The weapons need to be actually mostly balanced against each other before sized hardpoints can work, otherwise you're just gonna see a lot more of the mechs that get lucky hardpoints to use the meta weapons of choice...like we do now.

Also, on the idea about expanding the "missile tubes" idea to ballistics and energy...no. I've never liked the missile tube limitations to begin with, because if you have the hardpoints to fit something then that weapon should darn well function at its full capacity.

[Black Ivan]

Sized hardpoints is one of the best ideas which have oppoed durng the last years for MWO. It could kill several imbalances at once. Problem is PGI refuses to used it. Instead they create even more imbalances with their ridiciouless silly Quirk system.

[Pjwned]

Ghogiel, on 07 June 2015 - 04:06 AM, said:

Proposal is just negative quirks under a different name really.

Not really, with sized hardpoints you don't have a negative quirk the moment you even equip an omnipod regardless of what weapon you equip.

bad arcade kitty, on 07 June 2015 - 04:15 AM, said:

doesn't fit the tt rules

Quirks as implemented are not even close to TT rules either.

Ultimatum X, on 07 June 2015 - 04:17 AM, said:

The backbone of every laser vomit build is massed CERMLAS, which are 1 ton / 1 crit slot weapons that come loaded stock onto most of the best omni-pods.

The SCR Laser Vomit builds for example, often only have 1 CLPL + 4 or 5 CERMLAS.


This sized hardpoint idea would fail to solve this.

The effect of replacing negative quirks with sized hardpoints would mean that something like SCR laser vomit builds would have multiple hardpoints that were only big enough for small lasers (at optimal performance) where medium lasers would go or big enough for medium lasers (at optimal performance) where large lasers would go.

Basically like I said, just make the hardpoints small enough.

bad arcade kitty, on 07 June 2015 - 04:18 AM, said:

sized hardpoints are usually proposed to nerf lights, like those shouldn't be able to carry big guns etc

imo it's silly

Not really, lighter mechs tend to not bother with heavier weapons and those that do are not really a problem. When I think sized hardpoints, I'm thinking about mechs who actually equip those heavier weapons ever, although obviously not every heavy mech would get slapped with tiny hardpoints either.

Fate 6, on 07 June 2015 - 05:46 AM, said:

Negative quirks are effectively sized hardpoints because they give us incentive to take certain weapons.

It also impacts builds that it shouldn't.

Navid A1, on 07 June 2015 - 05:59 AM, said:

well... sized hardpoints only work with large weapons. med lasers are one of the smallest and can be boated anywhere... so its not a matter of size. AC20 on a raven is.

Well then I guess certain mechs would need to have particularly small hardpoints.

Quote

decreased performance by having more weapons of the same type is not called sized hardpoints. its called "ghost laser duration" , "ghost cool down" and "ghost range reduction". And it can solve the problem of laser vomit.

example: ghost laser duration:
firing 2 ER meds is fine
3 gives 4% more duration
4 gives 8%
5 gives 12%
6 gives 16%
etc...

and for penalties to trigger you'll have to fire the said number of lasers at the same time (pretty much like ghost heat)
and it logically makes sense.... significantly more sense than ghost heat.

And those have been suggested countless times and everytime landed on deaf ears.

That's not exactly what I mean actually, when I said decreased performance by having more of the same weapons I meant decreased performance for those weapons that would now be considered oversized for the hardpoint they're in; having more of the same weapon would not actually affect anything itself.

An example would be the SCR-B right arm, let's say (very hypothetically) the first 2 hardpoints were big enough to fit a C-MPL, the 3rd big enough to fit a C-ER ML, and the last 3 only big enough to fit a C-SPL. You could still cram in 6 C-ER ML, but 3 of those lasers would have a duration penalty because they're too big for the hardpoint. I realize that the SCR-B in particular comes with 6 C-ER ML stock and that it would be punished for running its stock build with hardpoints like that, but the answer is honestly "too bad so sad" and that it's better than how it is now.

Mystere, on 07 June 2015 - 06:34 AM, said:

SIzed hardpoints?



Bringing it up is just and exercise in futililty.

You're probably right, but after the clan laser vomit nerf fiasco I just couldn't help thinking this would be a better solution than what we have now.

Navid A1, on 07 June 2015 - 07:23 AM, said:

I think the thread title and what OP had in mind does not match.

you can not stop clan laser vomit with sized hardpoints. the vomit comes from ERML. one of the smallest weapons.

sized hardpoints is to prevent a raven from equipping AC20 and such.

ghost quirks is the way to go to stop med laser vomit. fire more than x, get penalized for y.

You say this as if it's a given truth by default when it's not.

FupDup, on 07 June 2015 - 09:20 AM, said:

The weapons need to be actually mostly balanced against each other before sized hardpoints can work, otherwise you're just gonna see a lot more of the mechs that get lucky hardpoints to use the meta weapons of choice...like we do now.

Except that those mechs with "lucky hardpoints" could be reined in with hardpoints that aren't big enough to cram in whatever weapon the pilot wants, or at least not without a penalty.

Quote

Also, on the idea about expanding the "missile tubes" idea to ballistics and energy...no. I've never liked the missile tube limitations to begin with, because if you have the hardpoints to fit something then that weapon should darn well function at its full capacity.

What would be a better solution then? What we have now is crap and sized hardpoints allow for much more finesse in mech balancing instead of blanket nerfing omnipods with negative quirks that affect the whole mech no matter what weapon(s) you equip on it, and of course there are other uses for sized hardpoints as well.

Edited by Pjwned, 07 June 2015 - 01:31 PM.

[Ultimax]

Pjwned, on 07 June 2015 - 01:05 PM, said:

The effect of replacing negative quirks with sized hardpoints would mean that something like SCR laser vomit builds would have multiple hardpoints that were only big enough for small lasers where medium lasers would go or big enough for medium lasers where large lasers would go.

Basically like I said, just make the hardpoints small enough.

I can't support that.

You want to reduce the hardpoints to weapons smaller than the stock loadouts?

That's not even a possibility, consider we buy mechs stock and they come loaded with those weapons - multiples of them.


That would also be a ridiculously huge nerf - and easily 5x worse than the nerfs the SCR & TBR already received.



You can't even build a SCR around Small lasers, because you run out of crit slots long before you run out of tonnage.



We don't need to cripple mechs or build diversity.

[Pjwned]

Ultimatum X, on 07 June 2015 - 01:21 PM, said:

I can't support that.

You want to reduce the hardpoints to weapons smaller than the stock loadouts?

That's not even a possibility, consider we buy mechs stock and they come loaded with those weapons - multiples of them.


That would also be a ridiculously huge nerf - and easily 5x worse than the nerfs the SCR & TBR already received.



You can't even build a SCR around Small lasers, because you run out of crit slots long before you run out of tonnage.



We don't need to cripple mechs or build diversity.

Considering you would still be allowed to equip all of those lasers if you wanted to, I don't see how it's worse than automatically having a significant penalty applied to every laser on the entire mech just because you chose that omnipod.

[FupDup]

Pjwned, on 07 June 2015 - 01:05 PM, said:

Except that those mechs with "lucky hardpoints" could be reined in with hardpoints that aren't big enough to cram in whatever weapon the pilot wants, or at least not without a penalty.

What we have to remember here is that some mechs have big weapons and/or many weapons right out of the box stock, so it's kinda hard to penalize a mech for using the weapons it came with from the factory.

Pjwned, on 07 June 2015 - 01:05 PM, said:

What would be a better solution then? What we have now is crap and sized hardpoints allow for much more finesse in mech balancing instead of blanket nerfing omnipods with negative quirks that affect the whole mech no matter what weapon(s) you equip on it, and of course there are other uses for sized hardpoints as well.

I'm okay with hardpoints based on size, I just don't really like the missile tube mechanic getting dragged over to other weapon types. If the hardpoint ain't big enough, you just don't get to use that gun.

As said earlier, though, we need to rebalance the weapons themselves before we start to limit which mechs get to use which weapons.


On a side note, now that you mention Omnipods I think that sized hardpoints might actually be a nice way to differentiate battlemechs from Omnimechs...

For example, most of us can figure out that a Clan battletech, with full Clan tech and the customization of a current IS battlemech, would probably be overpowered as ****. With sized HP's, there might be a reason to use that Clan Omni instead of the Clan BM. The same goes with IS BM's versus IS Omnimechs (the latter of which are really terrible in most cases).

Edited by FupDup, 07 June 2015 - 05:31 PM.

[Chuck Jager]

bad arcade kitty, on 07 June 2015 - 04:15 AM, said:

doesn't fit the tt rules

and I should care because?

[Pjwned]

FupDup, on 07 June 2015 - 05:27 PM, said:

What we have to remember here is that some mechs have big weapons and/or many weapons right out of the box stock, so it's kinda hard to penalize a mech for using the weapons it came with from the factory.

A great example of heavier mechs with sized hardpoints is the TDR-9S stock mech, which only has medium lasers and flamers in its torsos and thus having torso hardpoints smaller than (ER) PPCs would be easily justified. Want to boat the crap out of ER PPCs because of its excessive quirks? Fine, but the torso mounted PPCs would be penalized, or at the very least you wouldn't have 3 PPCs all on 1 side at max effectiveness.

Quote

I'm okay with hardpoints based on size, I just don't really like the missile tube mechanic getting dragged over to other weapon types. If the hardpoint ain't big enough, you just don't get to use that gun.

That's so un-necessarily restrictive though, meanwhile sub-optimal performance is obviously a consideration but you can still equip the weapon there if you want to. Additionally, the idea is not to penalize the weapons so much that they're practically useless, but obviously there would still be a penalty.

Quote

As said earlier, though, we need to rebalance the weapons themselves before we start to limit which mechs get to use which weapons.

I definitely agree with weapon rebalancing, though I'm not sure if it's totally necessary to do that before hardpoint sizes.

Quote

On a side note, now that you mention Omnipods I think that sized hardpoints might actually be a nice way to differentiate battlemechs from Omnimechs...

For example, most of us can figure out that a Clan battletech, with full Clan tech and the customization of a current IS battlemech, would probably be overpowered as ****. With sized HP's, there might be a reason to use that Clan Omni instead of the Clan BM. The same goes with IS BM's versus IS Omnimechs (the latter of which are really terrible in most cases).

That is interesting, but I don't see IS omnimechs or clan battlemechs happening any time soon so I'm not going to think about it much personally.

Edited by Pjwned, 07 June 2015 - 08:10 PM.

[CDLord HHGD]

I support sized hardpoints!

[Serberk]

Sized hardpoints could be a reality for one reason: we have so many mechs that they overlap already too much.

All combination of hardpoints is possible now. If you have enough mech in your garage you can make all builds you want. Any future mech that will be released is going to be the same as one that you already have. Yes, quirks can make difference, but they can't release only mechs with extreme quirks (i hope!).
If they want to sell, they have to offer something that you don't already have, so giving each mech more definite build (as sized hardpoint limit the range of possibilities) give PGI more possibilities in marketing future mechs.
Sometimes having more is having less!

[Decadre]

Here's my crazy idea.

Size the hardpoints for starters. Dump ghost heat as implemented. Change the rules behind the targeting computer (TT rules have long ago ridden a train out of here).

Using the DRG-1N as an example, the stock version comes with
AC/5 (RA), LRM(CT), ML(LT), ML(LA)

My targeting computer rules would state that a mech can only handle without a penalty (or upgrade) the same number of weapons as the stock mech. I would apply this to each subcategory (Ballistic(1), Energy(2), Missile(1)) as well.

So a DRG-1N can handle 4 mounted weapons before incuring a penalty. My thoughts are that only the weapons mounted in addition to the stock # incur a cooldown penalty.

The DRG-1N in stock config comes with 2 ML, but 3 Energy mounting points. Remove the LRM10 and add a ML. The third ML will incur a cooldown penalty that only to itself.

A Targeting Computer equipment piece would be added (likely always 1 slot, perhaps increments of .5 ton) that add the ability to add weapons beyond the stock number without cooldown penalty.

The Ghostheat problem would be addressed by using hardpoint sizes. Any weapon can be mounted in any hardpoint, however for each size that you go over the limit, a ghost heat penalty is incurred.

Hardpoint sizes are determined by the following. Empty hardpoints can never be greater than a hardpoint in the location with a stock weapon. The DRG-1N has a ML in the LT and an empty Energy hardpoint there. That empty hardpoint would be a Medium sized hardpoint.

I'd likely make all stock hardpoints regardless of the stock mounted weapon large hardpoints.

Hardpoint in locations without a stock weapon would be a design call.

So reconfiguring the DRG-1N to replace the AC/5 (likely Med Ballistic) with an AC/20 would incur a heat penalty. This assumes that it could be mounted and that it would go in the "extra" hardpoint

Edit: Better example would be that in the LT, you could mount 1 LL or PPC in the stock hardpoint. The extra hardpoint would be able to mount a SL, SPL, ML, or MPL without a heat penalty. Mount another LL or PPC in there and it incurs a heat penalty.

Edited by Decadre, 09 June 2015 - 08:32 AM.

[Almond Brown]

It has been done and the results are in. It simply shrinks the number of "meta" based Mechs that will get used by the Community. As it is now, if it fits, load it. Then deal with GH, range balance, CD etc etc but that is the Pilots choice. With a sized HP restriction system, only those Mechs with the preferred weapons load outs, and then will be further diluted down to those with high mounted, preferred weapons, will see any real sustained use.

P.S. The Dragon 1N can't carry a AC20, and even if it could, carrying one already provides an added automatic heat penalty btw.

[Decadre]

Almond Brown, on 09 June 2015 - 08:41 AM, said:

P.S. The Dragon 1N can't carry a AC20, and even if it could, carrying one already provides an added automatic heat penalty btw.

That's why I said " That assumes it could be mounted..."

Right back at ya.

And since you read that wrong, did you also miss that I stated that I wouldn't limit what you can put where ever you want?

I would only apply penalties to mounting weapons in certain locations beyond the stock number and extra hardpoint size limitations.

So, a dual AC/20 Jaeger would have ghost heat issues.

The Dual AC/20 King Crab would have none since both AC/20s are stock mounted and designed to be there.

Edited by Decadre, 09 June 2015 - 09:00 AM.

[1453 R]

I've posted this same argument to sized-hardpoint people many, many times in the past. Enough so, in fact, that I'm just going to boil it down to a bare skeleton because I am sick of typing out the entire thing in every fresh sized-hardpoints thread that comes along. ERGO:

1.) Sized hardpoints destroys customization ("don't want to play the stock weapons? GET A DIFFERENT 'MECH, FOO")

2.) Customization is good (despite what the bone-stock-only 3025er TT guys say)

3.) Ergo, sized hardpoints destroys good.

4.) Destroying good is bad.

5.) Ergo, sized hardpoints are bad.


Will that suffice, or do I need to do the entire thing again here, too?

Edited by 1453 R, 09 June 2015 - 09:15 AM.

[Maxx Blue]

I've said it before, but why not say it again: Sized hardpoints won't fix the issue of some mechs being overpowered. They will just change WHICH mechs are overpowered. Quirks are probably more effective at normalizing the capability of all of the various mechs than sized hardpoints are. That is not to say quirks are perfect, just a more effective tool for dealing with geometry differences and other general balance issues between mechs.

That said, I wouldn't mind if we got sized hardpoints. It would make some of the builds I use now impossible (regardless of whether they are any good), but I would still find a way to have fun.

Honestly the biggest thing sized hardpoints would do would be to give PGI another tool to induce people to buy more mechs. There are a decent number of mechs that are functionally identical right now, but with sized hardpoints, it might be easier for them to get people to buy more chassis by differentiating them more. If they don't all support the same builds, you need more mechs to keep up with what is 'hot'. Of course, Quirks can do some of that as well, but hardpoints are less likely to be tweaked and changed over time.

[darkchylde]

Sized hardpoints was the way to go from the start.

[Telmasa]

Sign me on for sized hardpoints. It would solve so many problems, like how the Summoner is absolute crap and always will be.

70 tons for a maximum of 5-6 hardpoints, with only 20 'free tons' of space (unless you skimp armor, which is suicidal), will always be inferior to every other clan mech - UNLESS, the Summoner happens to have huge-size hardpoints and can mount anything as opposed to other Clan mechs which have limited-size hardpoints and thus are limited to smaller weapons.