Rhent, on 03 August 2015 - 08:13 PM, said:
Armor has already been doubled. Internal structure quirks have been added to many mechs that have vulnerable locations. So, no we don't need to double armor or halve damage. The game already takes a long time to kill as it is.
What PGI needs to do is evaluate the damage that weapons put out in one turn, and figure out how to normalize that damage across all mechs AND to remove the double armor. Its not that hard to do that and fix a lot of the issues. It would mean weapons that fire often would do a lot less damage compared to weapons that fire a lot less for a focused shot.
The damage for heat that AC's put out is way, way, way out of whack as are most weapons compared to TT. A turn in TT is 10 seconds (source Sarna:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/BattleTech).
Table Top AC/5 = 5 damage every 10 seconds for 1 heat
MWO AC/5 = 30 damage every 10 seconds for 6 heat
Table Top Large Laser = 8 damage every 10 seconds for 8 heat
MWO Large Laser = 27.7 damage every 10 seconds for 27.5 heat
The problem is the designers of MWO Effed up base weapon damage when taking heat into consideration. They should have equalized all the damage across the weapons so that the damage output closely matched TT. They could have changed the fire rate and fractioned off the heat generated and increased the ammo to keep the values in line if they felt that the firing rates are good.
BUT NO.
EDIT: I'm playing MWO now so my LL calc could be off, dragged the formula down in Excel.
99% of what you said is 100% irrelivant to a video game.
10 second TT game turns have no equivilent in the video game.In this video game we have no turns none nadda no turn sequence no turn phases none of what makes a turn sequence relevant in the TT game.
The TTK issue has nothing to do with turns or damage in a turn or scaling damage to a turn because there are no turns in MWo.
What we do have in MWo are a few mechanics that effect TTK and here they are.
Heat Scale : This is an additional "resource" mechanic that has an impact on rate of effective fire and damage output.Our heatscale mechanic works very similarly to a traditional MMO stamina or manna mechanics.In a traditional sword and sorcery MMO if your wizard is out of manna that wizard is incapable of casting spells.With MWo if your mech is past it's heat cap it's shut down and incapable of shooting.
Weapon Rate of Fire also called coold down. another borrowed mechanic from many traditional MMOs a given weapon can only be fired as rapidly as it's coold down period allows. If a weapon does 10 damage every 3 seconds it can only ever deal up to 200 damage a minute.The limitation of the rate of fire makes 200 damage the absolute cap on damage provided by this weapon in a minute of firing.
Armor values also have a traditional MMO analog in that armor is a set value of ablating "health" that is deminished by receiving damage. Armor is in all ways mech hitpoints.MWo's armor mechanics are more nuanced than a health point pool that uses a single value to represent the health of an object in that MWO uses 11 individual locations with discreet values for each location with the added mechanic of several locations potentially mean destruction of the whole (head/center torso/side torsos on I.S. mechs with XL engines)
Convergence is also a factor in determining how quickly a mech can be destroyed.And this leads me to a very important difference between table top Battletech and a Mechwarrior video game.
Battletech uses a very specific set of mechanics to exstend the survival time of a unit in the table top game. Several conditions effect the difficulty of a particular weapon dealing damage to a target.Attackers movement,target movement,distance to target and enviormental effects (trees/smoke or partial cover) all increase the target numbers needed to successfully hit a target.
In addition to each and every source of damage requiring it's very own die roll modified by the previous list of effects to even hit a target each and every distinct damage source requires at least one die roll to randomly determine the body location the damage is dealt to.
The end result is damage is dispersed across a target unit's body locations and not focused on a single location.This makes the total armor value of a unit in Battletech relevant to it's survival time.
However in MWo we have pin point convergence that allows all weapons in a single weapon grouping to hit a single body location on a targeted mech.This has a huge impact on TTK due to MWo having armor mechanics directly derived from the table top game.
The huge problem is having derived armor mechanics that were specificly designed to function within the support structure of mechanics like individual die rolls to hit for each weapon and random hit locations is once you expose those armor mechanics to pinpoint aimed accuracy of large weapon groups (or high damage values) they fail spectacularly.
Where in a TT game enviorment 200 armor provides significant protection to a mech because it's periferal locations (arms and legs) will be hit due to random hit location die rolls in MWO 400 points of armor (double the table top values) really only provides protection equal to the lowest value on a kill location that can be reliably hit with physical aiming. IE the CT of the mech is really it's effective hit points with periferal body locations being occationally obstructions to depleting the CT armor value to kill a target.
In effect if a mech has 60 CT armor in MWo and assuming highly favorable conditions allowing for only 50% of damage applied to hit the CT a mech will need to have only 120 damage applied to it's armor before it's CT value is depleted. This of course means with this example x2 armor values in MWo provides roughly half the protection of normal x1 armor values in table top in regards to survival of a specific mech.
This is further compounded by the simple fact that anyone who fails to hit a mech's center torso less than 50% of the time is a bad shot and most skilled players probably land more in the area of 60-70% of the damage applied to a target to the CT with some of the community aces landing accurate hits upwards of 80% of the time. The effective armor values on MWo battle mechs even with doubled armor values from the table top game are actually receiving the effects of fractions of basic table top armor values.
This is of course only relevant because many of the numbers used in MWo are derived from the Table top game Battletech.Weapon damage and armor values being the derived stats of interest here.
I suppose my point was turns and turn sequences and numbers derived from turns have nearly nothing to do with MWo but my list above does apply.
And since we are talking about armor values and the effectivness of armor values I thought I would point out that currently 2x Table top values in actual practical application is actually more like half to one third table top values because of our capacity to aim large volumes of damage with convergence at ONLY desirable target locations.
10
PGI doesn't think we can handle anything with more depth.
This would actually allow us to get rid of stuff like gauss delay and ghost heat since you'll be simulating an individual hit roll on every weapon you shoot just like in TT, thus increasing both TTK and reward more consistent shooting thus increase skill cap.
