26 replies to this topic

[Void2258]

The gap between machine guns, at 0.5 tons, and AC/2s, at 6 tons, is simply too large. Far far too often your options are to mount a machine gun, no matter how inappropriate it is for the build or mech, or to not use ballistic mounts. Sometimes this is an interesting choice, but often it is no choice at all. The comparison to tabletop falls flat, since machine guns (and flamers, but there are plenty of light energy weapons) are meant for use against infantry and tanks, which are not even in this game.

Especially on light mechs, we end up with mechs that are either nonviable or only viable as 'vultures' (come in on a kill at the last minute and use MGs for crits) and spend the rest of match doing nothing. A good example is the LCT-1V, which is loaded with essentially useless ballistic points (not surprising since canonically the 1V was made to engage infantry). Even in those mechs that end up mounting ACs by mounting almost nothing else, such as Urbies, the ammo is so limited due to the weight of the ACs that they can barely do anything during a match.

There is simply currently no midweight option for ballistics, and no amount of tweaking of the machine gun is going to make it viable except for kill securing. It might work out in the tabletop, when you have more to worry about that just mechs, but this is not the tabletop.

Edited by Void2258, 09 September 2015 - 10:27 AM.

[DeRazer]

It already exists in Lore: http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Light_Rifle

[Juodas Varnas]

DeRazer, on 09 September 2015 - 11:04 AM, said:

It already exists in Lore: http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Light_Rifle

A weapon that is COMPLETELY ineffective against Battlemechs.
(I'm serious. It doesn't deal any damage against them in TT. Rifles get -3 damage against mechs, if i recall correctly, so Light rifles deal 0 damage, Medium rifles deal 3 and Heavy rifles deal 6)

Edited by Juodas Varnas, 09 September 2015 - 11:44 AM.

[Spleenslitta]

Juodas Varnas, on 09 September 2015 - 11:43 AM, said:

A weapon that is COMPLETELY ineffective against Battlemechs.
(I'm serious. It doesn't deal any damage against them in TT. Rifles get -3 damage against mechs, if i recall correctly, so Light rifles deal 0 damage, Medium rifles deal 3 and Heavy rifles deal 6)

There is a way to make rifles effective against mechs. It involves keeping the heavy penalty against armor but increasing either critical hit chances or internal structure damage.
Usefull Rifles Without Breaking Lore Too Much.

Unfortunatly PGI will probably never even look at it because rifles is obsolete tech.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

I'd simply fix MGs, making them actual projectile shooters! They are currently hit-scan with built-in CoF.

Allow them to keep the 0.80 DPS, and reduce or remove their extra Crit Damage and Chance so I'd start at:

0.50 Damage per Projectile
0.63 Cooldown
350 to 650 m/s Velocity
800 Rounds per Ton (so yes, 400 damage per Ton is also restored)
96 Rounds per Minute
90 M Full Damage, with Max Damage Range at 240 M

If that works with quirks and Weapon Modules, then great; otherwise the base Damage per Projectile and Cooldown can be increased as needed to boost the weapon as necessary.

[Void2258]

Fiddling with the machine guns doesn't fix the huge weight gap. There should be options between 'weighs nothing' and 'weighs as much as the heaviest beam weapon'.

[Hoffenstein]

Make MG do as much damage as AC/2 over the same period of time, but drop the range back to 90 meters of sadness.

[Spleenslitta]

Void2258, on 09 September 2015 - 04:01 PM, said:

Fiddling with the machine guns doesn't fix the huge weight gap. There should be options between 'weighs nothing' and 'weighs as much as the heaviest beam weapon'.

I agree. We need an alternative. Other than my version of the rifles we got light AC's but that's further into the timeline.
MG arrays is just a better alternative to standard MG's. We need something a light mech can comfortably carry while still having weight to spare for backup weapons.

[VinJade]

Locust 1V, one of my favorite mechs to use in normal BT style games, nothing screams humiliation by dropping an Atlas with one, lol.

the key to using MGs is when & when not to use them & how to use them.

Spiders & other Lights in the correct hands can cripple or destroy a medium to heavy mech in this game.
I cannot remember the Player's name but I seen one on my side cause hell for an enemy Mad Dog using a Spider I think it was.


now granted I am not that good with Low end lights and MGs but you shouldn't dismiss them as being poor.

I remember back in the early 90s when a friend of mine once called MGs, Flamers & small Lasers "door stops" not "real" weapons.

I always viewed them as pure secondary weapon systems to use when you need to or up close.

To be honest the problems with AC 2s & 5s is the fact they they don't have min ranges(which they should have).

Remember in the TT games the AC 2 was nothing more than a glorified MG with range as they both do the same amount of damage but one is the closest weapon with the range of LRMs but inaccurate up close.

its the same with AC 5s, they was glorified Medium Lasers that weight more, longer range, has explosive ammunition, and inaccurate up close.

[Lugh]

Void2258, on 09 September 2015 - 04:01 PM, said:

Fiddling with the machine guns doesn't fix the huge weight gap. There should be options between 'weighs nothing' and 'weighs as much as the heaviest beam weapon'.

Allow MGs to be mounted in Arrays wherein 1 single array can hold 2-4 MGs.

Of course the more the array weighs the more MGs you get. And also some free ammo, because!

[Spleenslitta]

VinJade, on 09 September 2015 - 09:57 PM, said:

now granted I am not that good with Low end lights and MGs but you shouldn't dismiss them as being poor.

I remember back in the early 90s when a friend of mine once called MGs, Flamers & small Lasers "door stops" not "real" weapons.

I always viewed them as pure secondary weapon systems to use when you need to or up close.

They become incredibly powerfull in the later parts of the match since there are so many exposed internals.
An MG bullet has 39% chance to crit a single component, 22% for double crit and 6% for triple.

And the crit damage is pretty awesome when you concider the MG's firerate. it does 1350% damage when it crits.
That single MG bullet can do 1.08 damage to a component. Most components has 10 hitpoints but with that firerate and critical hit chance it chews through big equipment like an AC20 within seconds.
If you got 3-4 MG's that AC20 just needs a brief touch from them to be destroyed.

As for what you said about AC2/5....Pardon me but do you think the AC2 is a powerfull enough weapon to get a minimum range nerf on top of it's current problems?
It has a facetime of 3.6 secs to do 10 spread damage. An ER PPC has can do it instantly with pinpoint damage and be ready to do it again in 4 secs.
ER PPC has a cooldown module making the firerate even closer. The AC2's also has a heat problem.

I've tried all the AC2's and none of them can compete with the ER PPC which has about the same range, weight, crit slot usage when AC2 ammo is taken into account.
UAC2 is the closest to being usefull as a standalone weapon. Many will say you just need to boat the AC2 to make it usefull.
Guess what? Not all mechs can boat such heavy weapons comfortably.

A Kit Fox can get one AC2 and enough ammo to last through the match. But because of the long facetime it would be better of using an ER LL or ER PPC instead.

Edited by Spleenslitta, 10 September 2015 - 09:46 AM.

[Koniving]

(If you don't care about fluff/lore, etc., skip to (TL;DR), otherwise read through.)
The difference between rifles and autocannons lore-wise, is that rifles are single shot tank-cannons with longer reload times. Autocannons are fully automatic machine guns of high calibers.

For the best comparative differences: A medium/heavy Rifle is effectively the cannon on a main battle tank. An AC/2 is akin to a faster firing autocannon mounted on an Infantry Fighting Vehicle (or APC, armored personnel carrier). Lore-wise, the slow-firing, high-kick nature of a tank-style cannon causes a number of issues (rate of fire is horrifically limited while moving, otherwise the machine could fall over. Best if used while stationary and braced) (single shot nature means hit or miss, unlike autocannons which are more spray-and-align; akin to how MWO's lasers work). The list goes on. The rapid fire of the ACs, minimal recoil in comparison, accurate functionality while moving, etc. puts a lot of favor on ACs.

That said.. MWO screwed us by doing single shot ACs. The practicality and exchanges of "Rifles" are pretty out the window without a gimmick like the higher effectiveness against non-armor.

But this doesn't rule out lighter ballistics.

There are the Light AC/2 and Light AC/5.

Digging a little farther into ACs, it is revealed that there are a theme to AC sizes. AC/2s range in caliber from 25mm (LBX-2) to 90mm. AC/5s go from 40mm to 120mm. AC/10s have the caliber range of 80 to 120mm with the typical being 100mm. AC/20s go up to 203mm (and even this is not a single shot). Lets take a look at the ACs.

If an AC/5 and an AC/10 use 100mm ammunition, and for the heck of it lets say that the AC/5 does oh, I dunno, 2 shots to get 5 damage that's 2.5 damage per shot to get 5 damage per firing allotment in MWO. Just like our Clan AC/5. An AC/10 using the same ammunition caliber and size would then have to fire 4 shots at 2.5 damage to get 10 damage. The Clan AC/10 in MWO fires 3 shots, and thus it is a higher caliber rather than an identical one. Most AC/10s are just improved AC/5s with a faster loader and no jam chances in normal operation (where Ultra AC/5s are lighter, more space efficient designs that do the same thing with a jamming risk).

So what are the caliber sizes of light ACs? Smaller. And if you take the information I just gave you about the AC/5 and AC/10, you know that light versions AC/2s and AC/5s are thus... smaller caliber versions. They shoot smaller bullets, and yes in a firing sequence it would get you the same damage. In tabletop and lore, so would an MG if you're close enough for the bullets to hit hard enough and to land that many bullets on target in roughly the same area.

(TL;DR)
Thus: If an AC/5 fires 1 shot to get 5 damage in MWO, a Light AC/5 should fire 2 or 3 shots.
If an AC/2 fires 1 shot to get 2 damage in MWO, a Light AC/2 should fire 2 shots.

[wanderer]

Rifles are the simple, straightforward solution. They already exist in the entire 3025+ timeline (heck, they predate the Battletech AC.).

MWO armor is double that of TT, so you halve the damage reduction for rifle fire (from 3 to 1.5) from TT as well.

Voila. All rifles are now useful vs. Battlemechs and lighter chassis have options besides the MG for ballistic use.

[VinJade]

@Spleenslitta
to be honest the AC shouldn't have any heat problems as it is the coolest in terms of heat of all the Auto Cannons.
As to the min range they destroyed the PPC's usefulness up close by making it do zero damage with in it's min range when it should have only affected it's ability to hit not loss of all damage.

it's the same with the AC 2 & 5 as the closer they are the more inaccurate they was making them harder to hit things with, but no damage potential was lost.

that was put in place as a balancing effect because of their range which more or less matched the LRMs in range.
I haven't used AC 2's in game but they should come close to matching LRM range.

back to MGs, I wish I was good with lights and MGs as I hate the fact that any lights with ecms can hide from radar even up close making the MG running Lights extremely powerful/useful.

[Spleenslitta]

Sent a PM to Paul with a link to my version of the Rifles inside on the 9th. But he hasn't logged on....

VinJade, on 10 September 2015 - 09:28 PM, said:

@Spleenslitta
to be honest the AC shouldn't have any heat problems as it is the coolest in terms of heat of all the Auto Cannons.
As to the min range they destroyed the PPC's usefulness up close by making it do zero damage with in it's min range when it should have only affected it's ability to hit not loss of all damage.

it's the same with the AC 2 & 5 as the closer they are the more inaccurate they was making them harder to hit things with, but no damage potential was lost.

that was put in place as a balancing effect because of their range which more or less matched the LRMs in range.
I haven't used AC 2's in game but they should come close to matching LRM range.

back to MGs, I wish I was good with lights and MGs as I hate the fact that any lights with ecms can hide from radar even up close making the MG running Lights extremely powerful/useful.

I've tried both the IS AC2 and Clan LBX / Ultra AC2. Their performance is abysmal. I'm not talking about the kinda thing that makes IS players cry foul when they see the range, damage and light weight that Clan lasers have.
(my personal opinion is that Clan/IS lasers are pretty well balanced actually.)

The AC2 has such poor performance that it's impossible to make it work without monster cooldown quirks or boating 4 or 6 of them at the same time.
But you'd be far better off getting a couple of Gauss rifles instead.

I've taken advantage of the Light mech ECM combo for a long time to tickle injured slow mechs with my MG's.

[VinJade]

@ Spleenslitta
well their damage should be poor, they are after all just a heavy long range Machine Gun and nothing more than that. however I feel they should increase the range to almost match the LRMs.

the only reason anyone normally field these things in the TT game was the new ammunition they now have, such as smart rounds which gives them a bonus to hit, rounds that deal more damage, or the rounds that have a better chance of doing internal damage.

outside of that they are poor weapons that was only really useful in level one play.

as to the GR, I hate mwo counter parts and will never field them.

[Void2258]

Well the other option would be to drop the weight on AC/2s to make them more worth it by more accurately reflecting their utility in their weight. But now that I have said this I fully expect to be jumped by a huge number of people who any divergence from the tabletop rules as blasphemy regardless of whether it hurts MWO or not.

[Spleenslitta]

Void2258, on 11 September 2015 - 04:17 AM, said:

Well the other option would be to drop the weight on AC/2s to make them more worth it by more accurately reflecting their utility in their weight. But now that I have said this I fully expect to be jumped by a huge number of people who any divergence from the tabletop rules as blasphemy regardless of whether it hurts MWO or not.

Unfortunatly PGI seems reluctant to touch weight no matter what since they want to stay as close to the lore whenever they can.
Relax...i'm definitivly not a Tabletop fanboy.
The only way to decrease the weight is to increase ammo per tonn and so indirectly make it weigh less since you need less weight in ammo.
Right now an AC10 has 20 shells per tonn and that's 200 damage per ammo tonn.
AC2 has 75 shells per tonn thus having 150 damage per ammo tonn. I suggest 100 shells per tonn of AC2 ammo.

It seems PGI is extremely reluctant to touch weight and crit slots.
They have made some adjustments to weapons with damage, range, heat, ammo however.
All the weapons have received huge adjustments firerate and ammo per tonn compared to what was in the TT game.
In the TT game one turn was 10 seconds....Thankfully they did not do that.

Increasing the AC2's damage would make it come out of the damage equals caliber theme they got going right now...i don't think PGI will go for that.
Increasing range wouldn't do much neither. The reason is that the AC2's spread of damage right now at long range is very big when the target moves.
Big explosions from the AC2's tiny shells hide the target so it's harder to hit it repeatedly.
Huge firing flashes when you fire an AC2 close to the cockpit can have a blinding effect too. I tried using an AC2 in the side torso on a Kit Fox.
That makes the firing flash cover 1/3 of the screen everytime it fires...so you get these colored spots floating in your vision.

Shell velocity is allready at 2000 which is the same as the gauss slug. It's fast enough to hit at long range.
So they got the firerate and heat left. The AC2 has 1 heat for 2 damage while the AC5 has 1 heat for 5 damage so the AC2 is kinda hot among the AC's.
Lowering heat would help somewhat but it cannot save the AC2. They could give it 0 heat and it would still be a bad weapon.

So that leaves us with the Firerate. It currently has 0.72 cooldown between shots. That's 3.6 secs to do 10 damage.
IS PPC has 4 secs cooldown to do 10 pinpoint damage.
That long facetime with all the spread damage is what kills the AC2's popularity. If we had 0.25 or 0.35 or 0.5 firerate it could be saved.

* 0.5 is kinda low but if the heat was lowered to half it could become usefull....maybe....ok i kinda doubt it.
* 0.35 looks like a good middleground. 1.75 secs to fire 5 times for 10 damage. The AC5 has 1.66 secs cooldown between shots.
* 0.25 is kinda high but if they left the heat the way it is the AC2 would be chained by it's heat production. So it would be a weapon best used in bursts.
Pardon me for the textwall.....but i could have been totally merciless and done this instead.
Clan/is Ac2 Fix Without Touching Heat Or Weight.

VinJade, on 10 September 2015 - 09:28 PM, said:

I haven't used AC 2's in game but they should come close to matching LRM range.

You haven't used AC 2's but you know they suck in the TT game and so they must suck in MWO too?
Pardon me but this ain't the TT game and how can you have an opinion on a weapon you haven't even tried?

VinJade, on 11 September 2015 - 01:07 AM, said:

@ Spleenslitta
well their damage should be poor, they are after all just a heavy long range Machine Gun and nothing more than that. however I feel they should increase the range to almost match the LRMs.

the only reason anyone normally field these things in the TT game was the new ammunition they now have, such as smart rounds which gives them a bonus to hit, rounds that deal more damage, or the rounds that have a better chance of doing internal damage.

outside of that they are poor weapons that was only really useful in level one play.

as to the GR, I hate mwo counter parts and will never field them.

I'm okay with their damage being like potato cannons. I'm completly okay with their range, weight, crit slots, velocity of the shells.
I can even handle the heat. But the low firerate is what's the problem here.
The AC2 can't compete with weapons that weighs the same such as the PPC's. Do not say they are supposed to be bad weapons because they were bad in the TT game.
That's just.....well. I'll just say no more Vinjade. There is no way to talk sense into someone who believes the TT game values makes perfect sense in an online shooter game.

Edited by Spleenslitta, 11 September 2015 - 08:40 AM.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

I'd rather give AC/2s more ammo per ton. AC/10s got boosted to 200 damage per ton, so I'd do the same for AC/2s.

Then I'd reduce the HPS on AC/2s to match the HPS of AC/5s, so a value of 0.60 should be a good value to get close to or be superior to.

This can be done in a few ways:
first method is simply reduce the Heat value,
second allow the AC/2 to have a burst function with a longer cooldown to raise damage while keeping each projectile at 2 damage each,
with the last simply raising Damage per Projectile, while extending cooldown to keep the 2.78 DPS.

[Spleenslitta]

Praetor Knight, on 11 September 2015 - 08:40 AM, said:

I'd rather give AC/2s more ammo per ton. AC/10s got boosted to 200 damage per ton, so I'd do the same for AC/2s.

Then I'd reduce the HPS on AC/2s to match the HPS of AC/5s, so a value of 0.60 should be a good value to get close to or be superior to.

This can be done in a few ways:
first method is simply reduce the Heat value,
second allow the AC/2 to have a burst function with a longer cooldown to raise damage while keeping each projectile at 2 damage each,
with the last simply raising Damage per Projectile, while extending cooldown to keep the 2.78 DPS.

I once tried to suggest something very similar in a thread but unfortunatly there was a guy who meant halving the heat would fix the AC2 with no need for further adjustments.
I called this idea Burst Fire Limitations.
Clan/is Ac2 Fix Without Touching Heat Or Weight.