31 replies to this topic

[oneproduct]

Well, everyone is doing it and I'm bored, so here's my "great balance suggestion" thread which can be explained quite succinctly by the title, but I encourage you to read on.

High alphas paired with convergence are a problem that most people are aware about.

This generally comes in three forms:
1. Laser vomit
2. Heavy ballistics. Mostly gauss, but sometimes AC20, and often in pairs.
3. A mix of the above

SRMs are not desirable because they don't have good convergence and because the high damage to heat ratio they offer is not relevant enough due to the efficiency of cooling.

Quite simply, I think that the removal of DHS paired with giving ballistics very limited ammo would help solve a lot of problems. And yes, I understand that in lore clans don't have SHS at all, but just for the sake of discussion, please pretend they could have them for a moment. EDIT: apparently some clan mechs do have SHS.

So what happens if you have only SHS? For laser vomit builds, you either have to reduce the alpha of your vomit or live with the fact that you're going to be able to vomit far less frequently, hopefully to the point that it's not really viable.

For mix builds (#3 from above), you reduce some of your DPS and probably have to rely on just firing your gauss for some periods of time, which is a healthy behavior (not always alpha striking).

Builds that are exclusively based on ballistics will generally not see their DPS reduced, so relatively speaking they will be more powerful. However, this could be kept in check by limiting how much ammo you're allowed to bring.

This would match the tabletop vision of ballistics more closely (I've never played TT and I don't think it's a good idea to try to base balance on TT, however in this one regard I think they do something right). If you look as Sarna, most mechs bring woefully small amounts of ammo, often only a single ton of ammo per ammo based weapon.

Because SHS would make lasers poor choices for DPS, ammo based weapons would be valuable for giving you the DPS you need for your first few skirmishes (enough to help secure a kill or two), after which you would run out of ammo and have to rely on backup weapons.

This also makes it so lasers are closer to what they were designed for: long term, reliable weapons that are too hot to be consistent DPS.

If SRMs were more desirable due to energy weapons being less effective, there are a lot of light and medium mechs who have generally unused missile slots they could use to help cope with energy only builds being less viable.

For mechs that only have energy slots, you simply have to be reasonable and not use every energy slot and bring more heatsinks instead. That, and take advantage of the fact that enemy mechs with ammo based weapons will lose their punch as they start running out of ammo while you keep yours, making you more useful as the game drags on.

At the moment, people generally bring so much ammo for their ballistics that they usually don't run out of ammo during a match except in odd situations where their team is stomping and their survival time is far above normal. Having a limit on ammo would make ballistics good supplements for SHS limited energy weapons without being overpowered due to everything else being so hot.

Edit: not that credentials necessarily make my suggestions any more valid, but I'm a programmer at Ubisoft who worked on Far Cry 4, so I worked with the Cry engine every day for years and I regularly interact with and provide feedback to game designers as part of my day to day work.

Edited by oneproduct, 13 August 2015 - 10:38 PM.

[Pjwned]

While removing DHS could possibly be interesting with various other additional tweaks (sort of...maybe) the one issue that stops the idea dead in its tracks immediately is...clan mechs.

How are you going to handle clan mechs if DHS are gone? Obviously the answer would not be to leave IS mechs out in the cold while clan mechs retained their DHS because that would cause the biggest shitstorm of complaints ever (for good reason) and removing clan mechs at this point is obviously out of the question.

Additionally, ballistics are already pretty heavy and nobody would use them in MWO if the ammo per ton was closer to Tabletop ammo values since laser vomit is already pretty attractive as it is.

[oneproduct]

I think that I predicted and addressed both of your points quite well in my opening post.

Firstly, I said that clans would have SHS as well. I know in the lore they don't have them at all, but it would be good for balance and it wouldn't be the only lore-related thing that the game currently doesn't follow.

Secondly, if SHS were all that were available then laser vomit would be far less attractive, so even if ballistics had low ammo, they would be very useful because of the DPS they would provide that energy weapons would no longer be able to.

Ideally if there were two equivalent mechs, one with only lasers and one with a mix of ballistics and lasers, then the one with the mixed loadout would win in a shootout if they were both fresh due to having superior DPS, but would then perform worse after that due to having expended his ammo. That's the balance of ballistics: better DPS (not alpha!) for early fights when I have ammo, worse DPS once I'm out.

However, as you said, this would just be the basis of the changes. Other tweaks should obviously be considered, but I think the combination of removing DHS and limiting ammo would provide a strong foundation. I suppose the heart of the problem is that energy weapons were originally based around SHS. When DHS were introduced, it simply made energy weapons better and non/low heat based weapons worse (not necessarily bad) relatively speaking.

Also, just as an example of ammo usage, currently I generally bring two tons of ammo for an AC5, 2.5 for a gauss and 3 for an AC20 and that generally lasts me the whole round. Cutting this in half (just an arbitrary amount as an example) and having it last half the round is not unreasonable, particularly if you start being a bit more conservative with your ammo and saving it for when you know you have a clean shot. For reference my K/D ratio on serious mechs (I play a lot of dumb mechs like Orions and Awesomes) is around 2.5, so the amount of ammo I bring is sufficient to support that kind of kill ratio.

Edited by oneproduct, 13 August 2015 - 09:39 PM.

[Matthew Ace]

I'm not going to kid you, I understand the intentions behind your suggestions, but I dislike it and would prefer other approaches, especially those that are more lore-friendly, such as heat penalties beyond automatic shutdown at 100%.

There are a number of clan mechs that uses SHS in lore; they just don't exist in MWO (or not yet). The Piranha, for example, has 10 SHS, but 2 cERML 1 cERSL 12 MGs. There are more than that, I'm sure of it, but I'm at work so I can't go on Megamek to take a look.

There are also a number of Mechs in lore that uses both DHS and ballistics, how do you intend to address that?

And why not just reduce the damage on energy weapon or reduce heat cap? Why not just raise chance of ammo explosions to make, at least IS Mech pilots, reconsider stuffing their mechs full of ammo instead of making their builds a little more balanced?

Edited by Matthew Ace, 13 August 2015 - 09:54 PM.

[bad arcade kitty]

that's a silly idea

you wouldn't get anything except nerfing everybody, ballistics is nerfed with low ammo, lasers with low heat, so? mixing won't get more desirable at all if you make both ingredients worse... mixing is desirable only if it gives some advantage from this mixing, people would rather get a few dhs instead of using an immense ammount of their tonnage for ac with few shots to shoot while their lasers are cooling; if anything it could kill ballistic boating at all, lol, they already starve on the ammo, while keeping the laser boating alive

on a side note, i don't see any reason from the game design point why they should make people use mixed builds, what for, how they are 'healthier' or 'better' except that they are described in the lore, the game ideally should encourage both boating and mixing for the most build diversity and therefore possibilities to have fun; forcing people to use ballistic + energy mixes only neither looks healthy nor possible when we have a ton of energyboats around

Edited by bad arcade kitty, 13 August 2015 - 09:49 PM.

[oneproduct]

@MatthewAce
Thanks for the feedback. This was just one idea that seemed simple to implement and fairly lore friendly, at least compared to IS TT builds, with clans having primarily DHS it works out less well, which I admitted. For clan mechs that have both DHS and ballistics I don't see it being any different. They'd just have SHS and ballistics and could still be quite fine.

Reducing damage on lasers is not great because if you just have a few lasers as backup weapons, they should still be viable. Laser vomit is the only problem. Adjusting the heat cap is a possibility, but I think it's more fun to allow energy based, high heat alpha strikes to still exist, just to have very long cooldown periods between them, making them more rare. The fact that SHS raise the heat cap by a smaller amount than DHS also does reduce the heat cap though, so it would cause what you suggest in that sense.

Higher ammo explosion chance could be okay, but because armor is as thick as it is, you can sometimes spend a good deal of your ammo before the ammo getting critted is a real concern. Plus you can do things like put ammo in your legs or head in mechs that are generally shot in the torsos, which helps avoid that risk in ways that you can't normally in TT as the ammo seems to generally be placed in torso or arm sections near the weapon itself.

@bad arcade kitty
Nerfing everybody is what most people desire, no? That's why people complain about TTK being too low and wanting a heat scale rework, right?

And you do get an advantage by mixing, as well as advantages for boating:

1. Lasers only = you'd have to remove some lasers to add heat sinks instead, which would reduce laser vomit to more sane alpha strike amounts. And even if you add a few heatsinks, you'd be a bit cooler, but still too hot to have consistently high DPS. E.g. a single ML generates 1.03 heat per second, and removing it for a SHS only provides 0.1 heat dissipation per second, so going from 4 MLs to 3 MLs + 1 extra SHS wouldn't be enough to have a high DPS all energy build.

2. Laser + ballistics = good DPS in the short term, and reasonable DPS when ammo runs out and you fall back to laser only

3. Ballistic only = great DPS in the short term, but then no back up weapons when you run out of ammo. Let's say two equivalent mechs get in a brawl, one with all lasers and one with all ballistics. The ballistic one would probably win, but then be low on ammo. Does it matter that he's low on ammo? No, because if he had gone for lasers instead he might have simply died in his brawl, so it wouldn't matter that his lasers have infinite use. It is perfectly acceptable to run out of ammo if it means you won a fight you normally would have lost. In fact that's the whole premise of limited resources as a game balancing mechanic.

It is healthy in that it reduces alpha pinpoint damage when either mixing or going full ballistic, as lasers don't have flight time and ballistics do, which will mean damage will have a higher tendency to spread around which helps solve the pinpoint convergence problem that people talk often talk about.

It is also healthy in that it's a good idea to have some people with full ballistic or mixed laser + ballistics to do good DPS for early fights but then also have some energyboats to do cleanup once people start running out of ammo. It's like many of the quotes you see in Sarna, for example this one about the all energy crab: "its all-energy weapons payload was suitable for long-range missions without the prospect for resupply."

I would also generally argue that mixing weapon types is healthy from the point of view that the best solution being using only one weapon type is not entertaining in terms of game design/balance and in terms of player enjoyment regarding viable builds. If you want to boat you can, and there are certain advantages to it, but mixing weapons should also be a viable option.

You can see some good examples of this in Halo.
1. Energy weapons are good vs shields and bullets are good vs health. In terms of damage efficiency, there are reasons to use both, but if you want you can still use all energy or all bullet.
2. Sniper rifles in Halo are really good but are balanced by having limited ammo, and once you use it all you return to backup weapons.

Edited by oneproduct, 13 August 2015 - 10:51 PM.

[bad arcade kitty]

dunno about most of people, it seems that most of people are fine about ttk but there are some very vocal individuals who are, well, vocal; hopefully pgi don't pay much attention to the forum whining, people whine all the time

[Rushmoar]

Well I just don't like the idea. Think what we need is a heat scale rework all together. Plus wait and see what this new rework in balance PGI has in store for us. To be honest this just sounds like another band-aid like quirks are atm. They help IS mechs the most but doesn't address the core problems of the game. Like the same out dated skill tree that is used for light and assaults. Same tree for a 20 ton mech and a 100 ton mech. What's that all about?

Edit: I don't mind not following lore or TT rules but would like some thing different in this case. Also remember we get 2X bonus on the basics once we elite our mechs and that is just too general of a bonus. A mech that can boat more heat sinks will still get a bigger bonus over a mech that can't reguard less of DHS or SHS. For example a Clan mech can boat more heat sinks than their IS counterparts with simular builds because of the crit space they take up.

Edited by Rushmoar, 13 August 2015 - 10:21 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

it seems that most of people are fine about ttk

actually polls were conducted and most people said ttk was too low.

pgi has even admitted ttk is too low.

When we went from 8v8 without clan tech or modules/quirks to 12v12 with clan tech and modules/quirks it significantly increased the amount of focus fire, range, and rate of fire of weapons. As a result TTK plummeted. Thats pretty much indisputable and most people recognize that theres a problem with TTK now.

Not to mention the laser vomit imbalance where CERML and CLPL have similar firing characteristics but arnt part of the same ghost heat category; thats a major contributor to low TTK. Gauss/PPC and AC5/PPC had the same exact problem, and both combos were eventually nerfed because of it... but PGI obviously hasnt learned from past mistakes. Ghost heat does NOT work unless all weapons with similar firing characteristics are placed in the same ghost heat group.

Edited by Khobai, 13 August 2015 - 10:23 PM.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

Better off simply adjusting Heat Capacity.

Reduce the gifted 30 to 14, have DHS give 1.0 Capacity like SHS.

And then allow DHS to have 0.2 base Dissipation.

[bad arcade kitty]

Khobai, on 13 August 2015 - 10:11 PM, said:

actually polls were conducted and most people said ttk was too low.

i hope you realize it's almost like in that joke that an internet poll showed that 100% of people use the internet; most of those who is attracted with such threads/polls (it was an unofficial poll too, i suppose), it's disgruntled players

most of the good players who i read on the forum/chats think that ttk is not bad

[Lugin]

A very pointed reminder: ammo is already low relative to TT.
Remember how armor and internals are doubled? Ammo, for the most part, is not.

The only ammo that now keeps pace with the doubled health? IS AC/10.

Relative damage potential (per ton of ammo) vs TT
AC/2: 83.3%
AC/5: 75%
IS AC/10: 100%
C AC/10: 75%
AC/20: 70%
Gauss: 62.5%

Worth noting all LRMs are at 75% relative damage potential, and SRM 2/4 are all at 50% (6 is at 55.5%).

[oneproduct]

bad arcade kitty, on 13 August 2015 - 10:02 PM, said:

dunno about most of people, it seems that most of people are fine about ttk but there are some very vocal individuals who are, well, vocal; hopefully pgi don't pay much attention to the forum whining, people whine all the time

Very true, but sometimes there's a legitimate reason why people complain, so you shouldn't ignore all of it. My aim was to address some problems which seem to be generally accepted as problems, but as you said it may just be problems brought up by a vocal few.

Another goal was to suggest something rather simple to change. I also thought it was a pretty good idea because it's basically how the tabletop game worked before advanced tech: IS mechs had only SHS and carried low amounts of ammo.

Rushmoar, on 13 August 2015 - 10:11 PM, said:

Well I just don't like the idea. Think what we need is a heat scale rework all together. Plus wait and see what this new rework in balance PGI has in store for us. To be honest this just sounds like another band-aid like quirks are atm. They help IS mechs the most but doesn't address the core problems of the game. Like the same out dated skill tree that is used for light and assaults. Same tree for a 20 ton mech and a 100 ton mech. What's that all about?

Edit: I don't mind not following lore or TT rules but would like some thing different in this case. Also remember we get 2X bonus on the basics once we elite our mechs and that is just too general of a bonus. A mech that can boat more heat sinks will still get a bigger bonus over a mech that can't reguard less of DHS or SHS. For example a Clan mech can boat more heat sinks than their IS counterparts with simular builds because of the crit space they take up.

I would be interested in better heat scale penalties, but it still doesn't solve things such as ballistic boating, which limited ammo helps to address. Also, if both sides just had SHS, then both IS and clan would be able to boat equivalent amounts of heat sinks because they'd just be 1 crit slot.

I also very much agree that the skill trees could use some work, generally to the effect that I find heavy/assault mechs to be too agile. They could have interesting tankiness quirks or such instead. But honestly, I would probably prefer to not have a skill tree at all. Less interesting, but more fair?

Praetor Knight, on 13 August 2015 - 10:16 PM, said:

Better off simply adjusting Heat Capacity.

Reduce the gifted 30 to 14, have DHS give 1.0 Capacity like SHS.

And then allow DHS to have 0.2 base Dissipation.

I'm curious as to what made you choose 14 in particular. Is there some combination of weapons that fits that perfectly? Or was it just a random example?

Lugin, on 13 August 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

A very pointed reminder: ammo is already low relative to TT.
Remember how armor and internals are doubled? Ammo, for the most part, is not.

The only ammo that now keeps pace with the doubled health? IS AC/10.

Relative damage potential (per ton of ammo) vs TT
AC/2: 83.3%
AC/5: 75%
IS AC/10: 100%
C AC/10: 75%
AC/20: 70%
Gauss: 62.5%

Worth noting all LRMs are at 75% relative damage potential, and SRM 2/4 are all at 50% (6 is at 55.5%).

While it is indeed lower, the problem compared to TT is that you can bring as much ammo as you want, which essentially makes people never run out of ammo and makes builds that rely primarily on things such as double gauss problematic in terms of low heat, consistent, pinpoint damage.

Edited by oneproduct, 13 August 2015 - 10:34 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

i hope you realize it's almost like in that joke that an internet poll showed that 100% of people use the internet; most of those who is attracted with such threads/polls (it was an unofficial poll too, i suppose), it's disgruntled players

most of the good players who i read on the forum/chats think that ttk is not bad

Again, then why did PGI admit TTK was too low and that they were looking into ways of improving it?


and whats the difference between an internet poll and "most of the good players ive read on the forums"

both are samplings of the forums. except a poll is relatively unbiased compared to having to take your word for it.

youre basically saying a poll conducted on the forums is wrong but unsubstantiated comments made by players on the forums are right. That is such a huge logical fallacy...


I mean it doesnt take a genius to figure out that if you increase the number of players in a game, increase the range of weapons, and increase the rate of fire that people are going to die faster. Of course TTK is lower. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply wrong.

Edited by Khobai, 13 August 2015 - 10:46 PM.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

oneproduct, on 13 August 2015 - 10:28 PM, said:

I'm curious as to what made you choose 14 in particular. Is there some combination of weapons that fits that perfectly? Or was it just a random example?

Basically the original scale has the first shutdown at that value, 14.

Here is a table for SHS using the original scaling and adds the rules for heat up to 50 excess heat, translated to 2.5x P&P values when 10 seconds per turn is factored for the values.
Also, Dissipation in this table is calculated at 2.0x from the original values. At 2.5x that takes SHS to 0.25 and DHS at 0.5 Dissipation.

[oneproduct]

Ah, quite interesting. I would definitely like to see things like that in the game.

I do still think the idea of SHS and low ammo would be quite good in addition to it though. It is also quite true to TT, at least as far as IS mechs go.

Though SHS are not generally true to clan mechs, usually there's more IS mechs to deal with the superior clan tech, but since there's not it would just be a way to make the clan tech less good so IS can cope.

[Hades Trooper]

OP, no just no, armour was doubled and yet ballistic only got 50% extra ammo for there already behind the 8 ball and u wantto reduce there ammo more? thats not gonna stop a high alpha, bad idea, truly bad, lasers are the issue not ac/20

SHS is worst idea of all

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

The heat scale needs a SERIOUS retune.

Heat is practically non-issue in this game, and frankly hasn't been an issue since Mechwarrior 3 when coolant flushes were introduced. [granted it BECAME an issue once you flushed all your coolant, but still.

Sadly, I feel no mainline game has gotten it right without siginifigant modding. I think the last time I saw a good heat scale was for an online mod for 3025 era battletech games using Mechwarrior 4 mercs, and even it wasn't as good as it could have been.

There's no reason this stuff should still be limited. the technology is here, figure it out game devs.

[oneproduct]

Hades Trooper, on 13 August 2015 - 11:33 PM, said:

OP, no just no, armour was doubled and yet ballistic only got 50% extra ammo for there already behind the 8 ball and u wantto reduce there ammo more? thats not gonna stop a high alpha, bad idea, truly bad, lasers are the issue not ac/20

SHS is worst idea of all

Just look at people's loadouts. Sure, maybe TT armor values doubled and ammo per ton didn't, but people bring more than double the amount of tons of ammo from TT, so the effective amount of ammo that you can bring more than doubled. Generally speaking, people don't run out of ammo in rounds of MWO but they do in TT. You have tons of evidence of this by the fact that things such as dual gauss builds and LRM boats even exist. You can carry so much ammo that ammo based weapons can be your sole armament and reliably not run out of ammo.

And having only SHS would reduce laser vomit based alphas in several ways:
1. SHS provide less maximum heat capacity than DHS.
2. By reducing cooling, an excessive amount of lasers becomes less viable, either forcing you to take less lasers and more heatsinks, or heavily reducing the frequency with which you can vomit lasers.

At this very moment, what would you think if that laser vomit timber wolf shooting at you had SHS instead of DHS? Do you think that would be competitive vs mixed lasers and ballistics? Laser + gauss mix is already considered superior to pure laser vomit, this would only help mixed builds even more. The difference is that while these mixed builds would become more effective, they would have limited ammo as a dependency and desync of weapon cooldowns and projectile speeds to reduce convergence.

And SHS used to be the only option, both in TT and in MWO and weapon values were originally tuned around SHS, so I hardly think they're the worst idea ever. There are perhaps better ones, and problems with my suggestions which I'd love to hear.

Edited by oneproduct, 14 August 2015 - 02:58 AM.

[Yokaiko]

oneproduct, on 14 August 2015 - 02:41 AM, said:

Just look at people's loadouts. Sure, maybe TT armor values doubled and ammo per ton didn't, but people bring more than double the amount of tons of ammo from TT, so the effective amount of ammo that you can bring more than doubled. Generally speaking, people don't run out of ammo in rounds of MWO but they do in TT. You have tons of evidence of this by the fact that things such as dual gauss builds and LRM boats even exist. You can carry so much ammo that ammo based weapons can be your sole armament and reliably not run out of ammo.

Correct, because this isn't TT where a ton or two of ammo was sufficient, and particularly when you build around ballistics running out of ammo means that you have a mech that is wasting 30+ tons in some cases, an ammo restriction just means no one uses ballistics.

oneproduct, on 14 August 2015 - 02:41 AM, said:

And having only SHS would reduce laser vomit based alphas in several ways:
1. SHS provide less maximum heat capacity than DHS.
2. By reducing cooling, an excessive amount of lasers becomes less viable, either forcing you to take less lasers and more heatsinks, or heavily reducing the frequency with which you can vomit lasers.

It increases laser use, the best heat to damage weapons in the game are lasers (ignoring Gauss of course), they just won't be ERs or LPLs, you will see the revival of the million slas builds that we used in CB.....oh and guass, lots and lots of guass.

oneproduct, on 14 August 2015 - 02:41 AM, said:

At this very moment, what would you think if that laser vomit timber wolf shooting at you had SHS instead of DHS? Do you think that would be competitive vs mixed lasers and ballistics? Laser + gauss mix is already considered superior to pure laser vomit, this would only help mixed builds even more. The difference is that while these mixed builds would become more effective, they would have limited ammo as a dependency and desync of weapon cooldowns and projectile speeds to reduce convergence.

Yeah, because PGI has continually jerked around with clan weapons, missile spread more, ER-PPC only mean very difficult to manage heat, burst fire ballistics that lose teh punch of IS version extremely long burns BEFORE negative quirks etc AND extreme heat.

oneproduct, on 14 August 2015 - 02:41 AM, said:

And SHS used to be the only option, both in TT and in MWO and weapon values were originally tuned around SHS, so I hardly think they're the worst idea ever. There are perhaps better ones, and problems with my suggestions which I'd love to hear.

Builds in CB before DHS were varieties of three things, bunch of slas, dual gauss, gauss + mlas, SRM/LRM boats. Period, no PPC, no LLAS and you only used MPLs on Awesomes.

Edited by Yokaiko, 14 August 2015 - 03:15 AM.