220 replies to this topic

[Solis Obscuri]

Necromantion, on 09 September 2015 - 10:04 AM, said:

You cant really have a soft lock in a video game that works reliably. Basically all we would end up with is a lock with potential splash damage rolls.

MW3 did it pretty well. I didn't like everything that game did, but the approach to guided SRMs was pretty good. So were the recoil penalties on alpha strikes.

Khobai, on 10 September 2015 - 02:38 PM, said:

Yep exactly. SRMs should be 100% dominant inside their range bracket. No other weapon should even come close except maybe the AC20.

Yeah, no. I like missiles, but I feel no desire to return to the days when facehugging the enemy with CPLT-A1s was the the optimal strategy under all circumstances. There are plenty of other weapons meant to be effective in close brawling range, and they shouldn't be ninja-nerfed to make one weapon type "dominant" over all others.

That said, I wouldn't be against giving SRMs a bit more of a "soft cap" on range, sort of like LRMs have. Just give them a max flight time before the engines stop burning and they gradually arc into the ground or something. (This would have the added amusement factor of trying to lob SRMs at improbable trajectories to hit distant targets, a la the AC/20 "bowling ball cannon".)

[EAP10]

If I could change SRMs, I would probably do something like this:

IS

Reduce range to 200, but make the projectiles alot faster.
When misslies go outside 200 meters, they don't explode but start going way off course, until they hit something. When I say going off course, I mean spiraling around in the basic direction you fired them. Buff damage to 2.8. Increase spread a tiny bit. Increase heat. Bigger visual explosions.

Clan:

Have a very quick stream affect, a little less time in between than of c lrms, but greatly reduce spread. Make the damage for them at 2. Increase range to 300 meters. Keep the spiraling but make it not as crazy. Reduce screen shake drasticly. Reduce heat a tiny, tiny bit. .2 splash. Bigger visual explosions.


I think this would help put the weapon systems in their own place, C-SRMs being more accurate but less damaging and not so front loaded, and IS SRMs being very effective at closer ranges, with much higher damage.

(Edit: another system instead of spiraling may be to just make the engines cut, as someone above said.)

Edited by EAP10, 23 September 2015 - 12:29 PM.

[Lightfoot]

Did you notice that around January 2015's first patch LRMs had their cone of attack reduced? Prior to that point they pretty much followed the launch trajectory to the target and after that you had to be within 15 degrees of dead-on to score a Center Torso hit. I call it the newb bubble, makes it so new players don't even need to torso twist away from a missile impact. It's like most mechs got LRM magnets stuck in their shoulders. At that point LRMs became garbage and players stopped complaining about being LRM'ed because the chances of being killed by LRMs pretty much disappeared.

Edited by Lightfoot, 23 September 2015 - 12:52 PM.

[TWIAFU]

Gas Guzzler, on 09 September 2015 - 09:35 AM, said:

Buff to SRMs get a thumbs up in my book.

You just got my SRM 20 Griffin excited.

[aniviron]

I'm a bit baffled by all the people that keep saying clan SRMs are fine. If that's the case, where are all the clan mechs with SRMs?

Gonna quote myself from a couple pages back, because it's relevant again it seems.

aniviron, on 09 September 2015 - 01:50 PM, said:

I am, of course, on board with SRM buffs. SRMs are in a terrible state, they're a rare sight on the battlefield, and for good reason. The options are, as everyone says, damage buff, spread reduction, and velocity increase, and probably two of these three are needed to make SRMs useful again.

I have to disagree with people saying clan SRMs are totally fine though. Sure, they should probably remain at a damage disadvantage compared to IS SRMs, though personally I prefer lower velocity missiles, as it fits more with the character of clan weapons being harder to use. But it's not like C-SRMs are seeing tons of use on the battlefield, and even if lasers get more nerfs, you're not going to start seeing C-SRMs, it will just be back to ballistics for the clans.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a clan SRM boat, or even loadouts that leaned on SRMs for part of their firepower? When was the last time you saw a Mad Dog, at all? When you did see that Mad Dog, can you tell me with a straight face it was using SRMs instead of SSRMs?

Sure, the TBR and SCR do okay with SRMs, but they excel with every weapon system because of their hardpoints, hitboxes, speed, and endo/ferro, and even then they're far better as ballistic boats than missile carriers. Every other mech that can take SRM loadouts- the MLX, KFX, ADR, SHC, MDD, HBR, SMN, WHK, EXE, and DWF do not, because clan SRMs are just bad. Even if lasers were viable for none of these mechs, they would still use PPCs or ballistics instead, every single one.

So go ahead, buff IS SRMs, they need it badly. But don't pretend that clan SRMs are okay, especially given that when all the weight is totaled, the clan weight saving doesn't come to much. Compare the following MDD-A and CPLT-A1. Both have identical loadouts of 6 ASRM6, both have maxed armor, both come with a 300 engine. The only real tradeoff is that the MDD gets better cooling and the CPLT gets jumpjets. Sure, clan SRMs come out slightly ahead, but the difference between these mechs doesn't imply to me that the C-SRMs should rest at 2.0 damage while IS SRMs get 3.0.

[Maxx Blue]

Missiles have a fundamental problem in this game that Ghost Heat never fully addressed. How do you make one or two missile racks useful without making 6 of them OP? The reality of this game has been that Missiles have generally had a threshold where, if you could mount that many, they could be viable. If you couldn't, they were largely wasted hardpoints. I would say that currently that threshold is 4 for SRM's and probably between 3 and 4 for LRM's, and has been for a while. With that many missile hardpoints, you can generally make a somewhat effective mech with SRM's or LRM's as your primary weapon. It won't be as good as a laser mech, but it should allow you to put enough damage on a mech in a reasonable amount of time to be useful.

Right now, the most missile-heavy mechs have 6 missile hardpoints (unless I didn't figure the options for an OmniMech correctly.) So, the boaty-est Missile mech has 50% more hardpoints than a viable one. Lets say you just buff SRM's so that now 3 hardpoints is viable. Well, now you have mechs that can fit 100% more launchers than a viable mech, and being able to carry twice the firepower of a viable missile mech could easily get into OP territory.

So, if you want to buff MIssiles so that a mech with three or four launchers is not just viable, but good, you probably also need to come up with a way to make sure taking more than that number of missiles doesn't add very much to your firepower. If you want two missile hardpoints to be useful, then the firepower dropoff will need to start even earlier. I don't like Ghost Heat as the be-all-end-all to deal with boating. I'd rather we had other ways to make firing off 6 SRMs at once no more effective than firing off 4.

[Khobai]

Quote

Yeah, no. I like missiles, but I feel no desire to return to the days when facehugging the enemy with CPLT-A1s was the the optimal strategy under all circumstances.

except it wasnt?

during that specific period of the game, when SRMs were super overpowered, there were four distinctly different mechs that were ALL viable.

Raven-3Ls, Catapult-A1s, Atlas-DDCs, and Cataphract 3Ds.

The meta back then was more varied then at ANY other point in the game since. You had sniping, brawling, strong lights, and the atlas was actually a decent mech. Catapults countered atlases, snipers countered catapults, atlases with streaks and streakapults countered lights, and lights countered snipers with PPCs. the meta was full of diverse counterplay... unlike the current diseased meta of longrange laser vomit and gauss, where the best counter is even more laser vomit and gauss.


Besides buffing SRMs hardly means making them overpowered again. Why does it have to be one extreme or the other with you? Why do SRMs either have to be useless or overpowered in your mind? That is a ridiculous way of thinking.

Again... strong SRMs are a crucial part of bringing brawling back to the game. Without them theres no way for brawlers to really dominate inside that 270m range bracket.

Quote

I'm a bit baffled by all the people that keep saying clan SRMs are fine. If that's the case, where are all the clan mechs with SRMs?

Using lasers and gauss. Clan SRMs ARE fine. But Clan lasers/gauss are out-of-whack overpowered by comparison. If you nerfed lasers/gauss down to where they should be youd see Clan SRMs get used more.

short range weapons should be outdamaging long range weapons. not the other way around. since increasing TTK is favorable to lowering TTK more that means the ideal solution is nerfing long range like lasers/gauss to the point where clan srms are viable again.

Edited by Khobai, 23 September 2015 - 03:31 PM.

[zagibu]

Khobai, on 23 September 2015 - 02:58 PM, said:

The meta back then was more varied then at ANY other point in the game since.

I haven't played back then, but shortly after the poptart nerf, balance was pretty good, too. We didn't yet have clan tech and IS quirks. Everything felt pretty viable (as long as you brought one of the better mechs, mech to mech balance was still off, Dragons being useless, etc. Oh, and SRMs were even worse than now.).

Edited by zagibu, 23 September 2015 - 03:11 PM.

[dwwolf]

SpiralFace, on 09 September 2015 - 09:59 AM, said:

Missiles are the one weapon family that I firmly believe is where MWO took a backwards step from its predecessors.

I still firmly believe that as a whole, the entire way MW4 and the Battletech Firestorm Sim pods handle the Missile family is very supperior to what we have right now in the game.

There was so much depth in the system that was still accessible to the players.

SRM's still dumb fired when you didn't have the reticle over anything, but they allowed for "soft locks" to happen when you fired the weapon system where the reticle scored a direct hit scan hit on triggerpull.

Soft locking allowed SRM's to actually "home in" on their targets, but only corrected their coarse about 30-50 degrees, so at longer ranges, they became more useful, they spread the damage around the mechs more evenly because the spread adjusted when you where soft locked (but still remained tight if you dead fired.)

Streak SRM's where still valid despite soft locking because of the "safe fire" (didn't fire unless you where guaranteed a lock,) and they had infinite turn radius unlike the limited arcs of SRM's that where soft locked.

LRM's still funcitoned similarly to what you see in MWO, but they ALSO had a soft lock option, where if you pulled the trigger when the reticle is over the mech without a hard lock, the missiles would still "seek" the mech as long as you KEPT direct line of sight with the mech. If you broke LOS, your missiles would loose their lock with no chance of getting it back.

Hard locks where only really for a much higher chance of "guarnateed hits" even if the mechs sought cover behind terrain.

NARC's weren't some silly status, they where an actual beacon that attached to the mech. A mech that was narced had a PHYSICAL beacon on a mechs location. (blinked and everything.) It allowed faster hard lock times, and for soft locks, it granted soft locks to LRM's and SRM's with them only needing to have the reticle in the general vacinity of the narc beacon to get a lock, not physically on the model (Think the range you see the lock reticle on LRMs right now, but only for instant trigger pull ONLY when a mech was NARCed.)

ECM prevented hard locks just like in MWO, but the SOFT LOCK option was always there if you had direct line of sight, and if you had the SKILL to aim and fire at the precise moment your reticle is on the mech.

The MWO system for all their missile systems is so dull by comparison.

Small launchers are useless with their current stats, Large launchers are dead weight because of their spread, and the whole system itself while simple is SOO dependent on binary counters that it just makes the entire weapon family dull by comparison.

I REALLY wish they would integrate more of the depth you saw in the missile systems of the MW predecessors. Because right now, its a fairly dull system in comparison, and probably the only spot where I feel MWO has gone backwards in progress from what MW games have done before it.

Poster wins thread.
Personally I have posted about a SACLOS like option for SRMs where you have to keep the reticle on target for the SRMs to gain limited guidance. All lore is clear on the subject ...SRMs have ( limited ) guidance. Currently they behave like MRMs.What happens when MRMs are introduced withe the current system ?
Personally I think we could go to missile swarms as a trackable entity with the gfx and number of missiles as a graphical function. Then just do a quick n dirty missile hit table. If it enables SRMS or MRMs to work over the current 18 srm salvos ,where the poor server has to track each missile. AMS could just reduce the amount of rolls on the chart and the number of missiles that the system draws.

Imagine how well hit scan is going to work for MRMs with the system as its now.......

[Karl Streiger]

dwwolf, on 24 September 2015 - 02:40 AM, said:

Poster wins thread.
Personally I have posted about a SACLOS like option for SRMs where you have to keep the reticle on target for the SRMs to gain limited guidance. All lore is clear on the subject ...SRMs have ( limited ) guidance. Currently they behave like MRMs.What happens when MRMs are introduced withe the current system ?
Personally I think we could go to missile swarms as a trackable entity with the gfx and number of missiles as a graphical function. Then just do a quick n dirty missile hit table. If it enables SRMS or MRMs to work over the current 18 srm salvos ,where the poor server has to track each missile. AMS could just reduce the amount of rolls on the chart and the number of missiles that the system draws.

Imagine how well hit scan is going to work for MRMs with the system as its now.......

Well i would do it in the same way. instead of firing 5-20 or 2-6 missiles those systems would fire 1-4 or 1-3 missiles. each with an accordingly modified damage and splash damage increase.

The SSRM could stay as it is - so the difference between a SSRM 6 and the guided SRM 6 - 6 hits of faster missiles vs 3 hits of slower missiles - same distribution - the same for the LRMs.


A complete alternative approach could be to use ballistic paths - no guidance
Like the Clan ACs - the LRM uses ripple fire - and is accelerated for > 500m after that it follows the ballistic curve - and don't looses much of its damage per hit.
So you can "saturate" areas indirect at maximum distance.

The MRM - would simple burn out faster - with lower velocity

Edited by Karl Streiger, 24 September 2015 - 02:50 AM.

[Black Ivan]

Strangely during the last event weekend I saw many people who sucessfully boated LRMs

[Lightfoot]

Black Ivan, on 24 September 2015 - 02:59 AM, said:

Strangely during the last event weekend I saw many people who sucessfully boated LRMs

I did at first see them, but the odds of getting a score over 200 with LRMs was very slim. Too much ECM usually to get many locks before being crushed by direct fire mechs. My LRM mech has TAG and BAP, but the sad nerfed state of missiles requires too many LRMs to be launched and when most teams have 3-6 ECM mechs you just don't get enough locks. I did my best over the first few days to make LRMs work, but it was really a waste of time. Once I switched to direct-fire weapons I was usually scoring over 300 in any win.

[LordBraxton]

SRMs could do 3 dmg per missile and still wouldnt be very good

In closed beta 300m felt like medium range.

Now 600 is medium, 300m feels like point blank, and the effective ~150m range of SRMs feels like melee.

The brawler is dead, and the clan-heavy-omni-MainBattleMech has sat upon the throne for well over a year.

Personally I'm holding out for the re-balance, but if PGI doesn't shake up the meta in a massive way MWO will be dead to me by 2016

[Chuck Jager]

aniviron, on 23 September 2015 - 01:26 PM, said:

I'm a bit baffled by all the people that keep saying clan SRMs are fine. If that's the case, where are all the clan mechs with SRMs?

Gonna quote myself from a couple pages back, because it's relevant again it seems.

Its because clan cermlas is that much better. 2-3 cmlas on top of srm load outs is easily an extra 100-300 damage. The bonuses for other clan weapons make them superior to taking the srms, but the weight /damage/heat cost is still really good.

[Joseph Mallan]

LRM 5 24.42%
LRM 10 24.58%
LRM 15 17.12%
LRM 20 18.08%

A loss of 7% from 10s to 15s??? WTF

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 24 September 2015 - 08:56 AM.

[Alwrathandabout42ninjas]

Just posted a reasonable damage increase for srm's in the patch feedback thread. Anyone who supports our idea please support it by posting you agree.

[RockmachinE]

I'm glad LRMs are not the terror of MWO they once were, it really made gameplay standoffish and boring. SRMs may need some sort of buff I think, I rarely see them used, in fact I don't know how many honestly still use them.

[Mcgral18]

Still sad.

They make the SadCat Sadder. And the Sadder sadder for that matter.

[Lyoto Machida]

Joseph Mallan, on 24 September 2015 - 08:55 AM, said:

LRM 5 24.42%
LRM 10 24.58%
LRM 15 17.12%
LRM 20 18.08%

A loss of 7% from 10s to 15s??? WTF

I'm not sure how you use your LRMs Joseph, but those percentages are pretty low. I'm guessing you use them for suppression fire and shoot from longer ranges? Longer ranges, meaning 600m and beyond...

This is with Artemis but my percentages are pretty even all around...5s with Artemis seem like a waste of tonnage but I may try them out for the lock time reduction. I've shot 410,000 LRM 15s after the stats wipe and used them for 21 hours (however that is calculated) for what it's worth.

LRM 5 (no Artemis): 43.57%
LRM 10: 40.67%
LRM 15: 40.43%
LRM 20: 37.68%

Contrary to their name, LRMs are best used at short range (200m-400m). That LRM 20 stat bothers me and while 20s are not worth taking, I'm gonna play them until I get that number above 40%.

[Lugh]

Mcgral18, on 09 September 2015 - 10:05 AM, said:

They are; the Dead-Fire SRMs (3 damage) remove that option for more boom.


MWO's SRMs are Dead Fire, but missing 0.85 damage.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/SRM-6 Sorry charlie but the LORE rating for both clan and IS SRMS is 2 damage for 4 heat. for the 6 and 2 damage a missle and 3 heat for the 4s.


So let's make them equal the way they should be.

Lyoto Machida, on 02 October 2015 - 12:39 PM, said:

I'm not sure how you use your LRMs Joseph, but those percentages are pretty low. I'm guessing you use them for suppression fire and shoot from longer ranges? Longer ranges, meaning 600m and beyond...

This is with Artemis but my percentages are pretty even all around...5s with Artemis seem like a waste of tonnage but I may try them out for the lock time reduction. I've shot 410,000 LRM 15s after the stats wipe and used them for 21 hours (however that is calculated) for what it's worth.

LRM 5 (no Artemis): 43.57%
LRM 10: 40.67%
LRM 15: 40.43%
LRM 20: 37.68%

Contrary to their name, LRMs are best used at short range (200m-400m). That LRM 20 stat bothers me and while 20s are not worth taking, I'm gonna play them until I get that number above 40%.

Be sure you take artemis as a lot of that is likely hitting invisible things because of the path width of the cluster.

What they REALLY need to do if find the bug in the HSR code that causes it to flake out and forget any number greater than 12 SRMs fired at one time.

Edited by Lugh, 02 October 2015 - 12:56 PM.