76 replies to this topic

[Kraftwerkedup]

But how can you get PGI to believe us when most of them are Tier 4, and barely actually play the game?

You play 6,000 + matches of this game, you start to know more about it than the people who make it.

[Slepnir]

As long as there is an unrestricted mech lab there will NEVER be weapon balance.

mech are allowed to take weapons they were never able to carry with bigger engines than they should have(most IS light mechs don't actually go any faster than clan they usually top out around 120kph. since everything is supposed to be slower the dragons top speed of 97kph was a big deal for TT and role warfare). making it very easy for comp players to switch over to boating whichever weapons are the current meta when the former get nerfed.

MW4 attempted to control this through sized hard points and fixed engines, MWO has tried ghost heat, projectile speed and so on.

[FupDup]

Khobai, on 28 September 2015 - 04:18 PM, said:

Well the MG, SPL, and Flamer should all be roughly equal weapons.

The question is how do you differentiate them enough to make them all useful?

SPL is already the one that has an upfront "alpha strike" damage value, so that one is taken care of.

MGs vs Flamers could be about heat vs ammo, maybe involve range. Perhaps retain "secondary" mechanics like a small heat increase on the Flamer's target and some modest "crit seeking" bonus to MGs.

[Khobai]

Quote

As long as there is an unrestricted mech lab there will NEVER be weapon balance.

I dont agree with that.

The problem is more PGIs desperate adherence to battletech weapon values.

They cant fix weapons like the AC/2 because they remain insistent that the AC/2 HAS to weigh 6 tons.

The argument is that it will screw up stock mechs... but pretty much no one uses stock mechs... except for those stock mech nutters which are a tiny minority.

I would rather see the AC/2 be a useable 4 ton weapon (rather than 6 tons) and have a handful of battletech purists cry than have the AC/2 continue being utterly useless. Or at the very least they should add the Light AC/2 to the game. Leave the AC/2 as is to appease the purists and everyone else can use the Light AC/2.

Theres so many different ways PGI could bring better weapon balance to the game and they just refuse to do it.

Edited by Khobai, 28 September 2015 - 04:30 PM.

[Lyoto Machida]

Slepnir, on 28 September 2015 - 04:20 PM, said:

As long as there is an unrestricted mech lab there will NEVER be weapon balance.

mech are allowed to take weapons they were never able to carry with bigger engines than they should have(most IS light mechs don't actually go any faster than clan they usually top out around 120kph. since everything is supposed to be slower the dragons top speed of 97kph was a big deal for TT and role warfare). making it very easy for comp players to switch over to boating whichever weapons are the current meta when the former get nerfed.

MW4 attempted to control this through sized hard points and fixed engines, MWO has tried ghost heat, projectile speed and so on.

We have an unrestricted mechlab so let's just leave the balance as is? Seems like a bad train of thought to me.

Khobai, on 28 September 2015 - 04:25 PM, said:

I dont agree with that.

The problem is more PGIs desperate adherence to battletech weapon values.

They cant fix weapons like the AC/2 because they remain insistent that the AC/2 HAS to weigh 6 tons.

The argument is that it will screw up stock mechs... but pretty much no one uses stock mechs... except for those stock mech nutters which are a tiny minority.

I would rather see the AC/2 be a useable 4 ton weapon (rather than 6 tons) and have a handful of battletech purists cry than have the AC/2 continue being utterly useless. Or at the very least they should add the Light AC/2 to the game. Leave the AC/2 as is to appease the purists and everyone else can use the Light AC/2.

Theres so many different ways PGI could bring better weapon balance to the game and they just refuse to do it.

The tonnage is fine (for now)...why not adjust heat, ammo/ton, cooldowns, etc???

Nah, let's just leave it alone and hope people forget the AC2 ever existed...

[Slepnir]

Lyoto you missed my point-the unrestricted mechlab IS the problem and it shouldn't be left as it is.

As for fixing AC 2s the tonnage is fine, the dismal range(it's one of the longest ranged weapons in the game, or at least it is spposed to be) and cooldown time is the problem.

Make it close it to what it used to be and people will use it again.

[DivineEvil]

Everything across the board can be restored to TT values, and then balanced by Cooldown values alone, since it's the only parameter which is certainly should not be original at any circumstances. Everything else should be balanced trough other means (different Internal Structure / Heat Capacity values).

Edited by DivineEvil, 28 September 2015 - 05:48 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

The tonnage is fine (for now)...why not adjust heat, ammo/ton, cooldowns, etc???

Nah, let's just leave it alone and hope people forget the AC2 ever existed...

nah the tonnage isnt fine.

in fact theres no real ballistic weapon that bridges the gap between the AC/2 and the machine gun. which is a problem.

there need to be more ballistic weapons in the 1-4 ton range so light and medium mechs have some other options.

[Nightshade24]

First of all we need to cover some bases.
"Why are things the way they are?"

Mechwarrior is based of the popular franchise known as Battletech which the whole lore, universe, mechs, weapons, factions, etc came from. However the thing is most of BT revolves around Table Top, a turn based table top game with pen and paper at hands and so on. As you can see mechanics work much more differently and what ballance there was at first- when the clans came in with the lore intention of being very powerful, things faulted. They corrected things and made a balance system of basically giving the IS a number advantage. 5 clans vs 8 inner sphere, 10 clans vs 12 inner sphere, 15 clans vs 18 inner sphere, etc. In short the inner sphere have more lances (4 mechs) then the clans have stars (5 mechs).
You also got the fact that armoured vehicles, hovercraft ,submarines, ships, dropships, warships, tanks, humvees, half tracks, trucks, infantry, battlearmour, mines, quad mechs, melee, etc are all part of battle tech

This is why we got useless weapons like machine guns and flamers which are devastating towards infantry but not much to anything else. Or how the 'scatter' shot for LBX is useless for most people, while in TT it was good against infantry, small vehicles, and aircraft. etc...



So this means many ties of TT to FPS is very odd and had to be cut. Things like heatscale is a popular request people want to be in MW: O (things like when you are 80% heat capacity you start moving slower, 90% is much slower and may have ammo explode or shutdown, etc...) or other features. but the thing is MW: O is quite unique when compared to TT. Things like mechlab is completely new so to say and many other things.

Fire rate has been increased quite a lot. armour has been doubled, ammo got slightly increased. etc. to make it much more friendly for a FPS game because an AC 2 firing every 20 seconds would get boring fast- do not even dare to think how long it would take to reload an AC 20...



So now we know why some things are how they are, why PPC's do not require ammo or why a machine gun has such a bad range.

Now the point of how hard is it to ballance weapons? well the thing is they take a long time because not because it takes like 6 months to learn how to change the number 1 to a number 2 for some weapon but instead it is to see if it is really the weapons fault, or is it the mechs that use them fault. Thar or is it just because lights are very common all the sudden or people do not use ECM often or what and what happens if they buff this weapon, for eg if the AC 2 is bad and they increased it's DPS and decreased heat... They take time to see if it really needs help or not. To be honest only 1 weapon in game needs a lot of help that you may not care of the other weapons- the flamer. The problem is the flamer is useful in lore for being able to kill infantry, we got no infantry to kill in this game and it makes a lot of heat for barely affecting the enemy... the machine gun in this regard of pure DPS is better.

It is kinda hard to improve things like MG's, LBX, Flamer, (more flamer then the others). hence why I think it is taking forever to improve them ... that and MG used to be OP in MW: O due to macro abuse to get a higher DPS then it should. it used to be 1.0 dps but now it's 0.8 because a macro can virtually double or triple it before... but anyway... I do hope to see the flamer good soon... they said they were going to fix it before firestarter is released...

Edited by Nightshade24, 28 September 2015 - 06:57 PM.

[Wintersdark]

Nightshade24, on 28 September 2015 - 06:56 PM, said:

Now the point of how hard is it to ballance weapons? well the thing is they take a long time because not because it takes like 6 months to learn how to change the number 1 to a number 2 for some weapon but instead it is to see if it is really the weapons fault, or is it the mechs that use them fault. Thar or is it just because lights are very common all the sudden or people do not use ECM often or what and what happens if they buff this weapon, for eg if the AC 2 is bad and they increased it's DPS and decreased heat... They take time to see if it really needs help or not. To be honest only 1 weapon in game needs a lot of help that you may not care of the other weapons- the flamer. The problem is the flamer is useful in lore for being able to kill infantry, we got no infantry to kill in this game and it makes a lot of heat for barely affecting the enemy... the machine gun in this regard of pure DPS is better.

It is kinda hard to improve things like MG's, LBX, Flamer, (more flamer then the others). hence why I think it is taking forever to improve them ... that and MG used to be OP in MW: O due to macro abuse to get a higher DPS then it should. it used to be 1.0 dps but now it's 0.8 because a macro can virtually double or triple it before... but anyway... I do hope to see the flamer good soon... they said they were going to fix it before firestarter is released...

It isn't hard to improve MG, Flamer, or LBX's. All can be improved very easily. Fully fixed? Like LRM's, that's complicated because of how they work. But improving, say, an LBX AC10 is as simple as firing faster, doing more damage per pellet, generating less heat, etc. Improving bad weapons is trivial.

MG's where nerfed because they were bugged, and when the hitreg fixes went in they did way more overall damage. The nerf put them back to the overall damage output they had before the fix (though due to how crit damage works they ended up doing slightly less crit damage, so it was still a loss).

It had NOTHING to do with macros. There has never been a point in this game where macros have allowed you do output more damage with anything. Not once.

[Mcgral18]

Wintersdark, on 28 September 2015 - 07:11 PM, said:

It had NOTHING to do with macros. There has never been a point in this game where macros have allowed you do output more damage with anything. Not once.

Supposedly there was, but I never got it working.


It tapped the trigger more than 10 times per second, causing more than 10 bullets per second to be fired. Allegedly.

Again, I never got it working.

[Nightshade24]

Wintersdark, on 28 September 2015 - 07:11 PM, said:

It isn't hard to improve MG, Flamer, or LBX's. All can be improved very easily. Fully fixed? Like LRM's, that's complicated because of how they work. But improving, say, an LBX AC10 is as simple as firing faster, doing more damage per pellet, generating less heat, etc. Improving bad weapons is trivial.

MG's where nerfed because they were bugged, and when the hitreg fixes went in they did way more overall damage. The nerf put them back to the overall damage output they had before the fix (though due to how crit damage works they ended up doing slightly less crit damage, so it was still a loss).

It had NOTHING to do with macros. There has never been a point in this game where macros have allowed you do output more damage with anything. Not once.

Improving the damage of an LBX 10 is really what that thing needs? Besides the fact the 10 in it's name also means 10 damage nad it's supposed to do the same total damage as an AC 10 we are already stumbling on problems maybe people will disagree, that and making the LBX 10 a 1 ton less, 1 crit slot less AC 10 that does the same damage up to 600 meters and then also still does additional spread damage and crit chance due to the damage increase isn't the most best way to fix a weapon and remove the only thing it has unique over the AC 10 being the spread. I would rather thing a crit chance boost, heat reduction, and velocity change would be in order as well as slightly decreasing the spread, especially in the LBX 2 and 5.

Wouldn't the MG be the least effected due to hit reg issues because the fact it's a DPS weapon? for instance if it fires 10 times and 3 of those shots do not count due to hitreg, it still has 7 hits, fire a PPC once and it doesn't count, that's a lot of wasted heat and damage.

[Mcgral18]

Nightshade24, on 28 September 2015 - 07:26 PM, said:

Improving the damage of an LBX 10 is really what that thing needs? Besides the fact the 10 in it's name also means 10 damage nad it's supposed to do the same total damage as an AC 10 we are already stumbling on problems maybe people will disagree, that and making the LBX 10 a 1 ton less, 1 crit slot less AC 10 that does the same damage up to 600 meters and then also still does additional spread damage and crit chance due to the damage increase isn't the most best way to fix a weapon and remove the only thing it has unique over the AC 10 being the spread. I would rather thing a crit chance boost, heat reduction, and velocity change would be in order as well as slightly decreasing the spread, especially in the LBX 2 and 5.

Wouldn't the MG be the least effected due to hit reg issues because the fact it's a DPS weapon? for instance if it fires 10 times and 3 of those shots do not count due to hitreg, it still has 7 hits, fire a PPC once and it doesn't count, that's a lot of wasted heat and damage.

The LB10x fires 10 projectiles; you could make each projectile deal 1.2 or 1.4 damage without issue using that logic.
Or increase the Crit Dam Multiplier to keep them as Crit Weapons (where even the LB2x could Crit items effectively).

For the MG, the excuse was a "Hitreg Fix" that wasn't. They nerfed the MGs by 20% straight up damage for no reason, without touching the 3M CoF.

Edited by Mcgral18, 29 September 2015 - 05:39 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Nightshade24, on 28 September 2015 - 07:26 PM, said:

Improving the damage of an LBX 10 is really what that thing needs? Besides the fact the 10 in it's name also means 10 damage nad it's supposed to do the same total damage as an AC 10 we are already stumbling on problems maybe people will disagree, that and making the LBX 10 a 1 ton less, 1 crit slot less AC 10 that does the same damage up to 600 meters and then also still does additional spread damage and crit chance due to the damage increase isn't the most best way to fix a weapon and remove the only thing it has unique over the AC 10 being the spread. I would rather thing a crit chance boost, heat reduction, and velocity change would be in order as well as slightly decreasing the spread, especially in the LBX 2 and 5.

As per Mcgral below, a 1.2 damage per pellet LBX would still be strictly inferior to an AC10 at all ranges beyond 100m, both in terms of useful damage and in terms of internal item crit killing.

The LBX10 already almost never actually does 10 damage, so the "It has a 10 in its name" is kinda irrelevant.

Quote

Wouldn't the MG be the least effected due to hit reg issues because the fact it's a DPS weapon? for instance if it fires 10 times and 3 of those shots do not count due to hitreg, it still has 7 hits, fire a PPC once and it doesn't count, that's a lot of wasted heat and damage.

If it hits 8/10 times overall, it effectively does .8dps. Fix the hitreg, and it does 1dps. Nerf its damage to i80% and its putting .8dps downrange again. I don't agree with what they did, but that's the logic (and it is sound, if stupid)

Whether other weapons are more seriously affected by hitreg isn't relevant. Hitreg was fixed on everything (,or at least whatever that fix encompassed, may have just been lasers, I don't remember).

Still, 1dps MG's where hardly broken. *sighs*

What I don't understand is PGI will jump to smash useful MG's, or nerf mediocre-at-best AC2's, but they'll leave severe weapon balance issues for years - the flamer has never been even mediocre, pulse lasers where all entirely awful for several years.

[Sarlic]

Kraftwerkedup, on 28 September 2015 - 04:19 PM, said:

But how can you get PGI to believe us when most of them are Tier 4, and barely actually play the game?

You play 6,000 + matches of this game, you start to know more about it than the people who make it.

I remember devs having 5+ client builds on each single computer.

Go figure...

I agree that they should play more the live build more often.

[zagibu]

You know, the realy funny part in Mike's statement talking about the 4 hours needed for an XML tweak? Most of this time is building the changes + deployment. Which is done every time we get a patch. So yeah, the balancing tweaks are indeed a piece of cake, and we could have changes every time we get a patch.

[Prof RJ Gumby]

Spoiler

I HAVE A THEORY WHICH IS MINE AND BELONGS TO ME. THIS THEORY OF MINE WHICH IS MINE IS AS FOLLOWS:

I think we (the players) are part of the problem. Part, mind you, I'm not trying to imly PGI is an innocent victim or anything.

BUT

Remember the 'incremental changes' they've started doing earlier this year? It was IMHO a very good idea. They've buffed many of the weakest mechs, sadly not all of them, but many. Twice, as far as I remember. That made the balance gap a bit smaller. Then they've went on to nerf the best mechs, even picked 2 IS ones and 2 Clan ones, probably to avoid bias accusations...

Remember what happened? How our 'community' reacted? Insults, whines, cries, screams resembing those of animals gutted alive, statements of wallet closing, leaving the game, more insults, more whines, more cries...

And why? Because they've nerfed Timberwolf. OMG what a crime to bring the best mech in the game in line. He's still the best btw, only by smaller margin than before. Yeah, there were some screams about the stormcrow, firestarter and stalker too, but they were completely overshadowed by 'don't touch my timber you ********!' crowd.

This was the end of incremental changes. Coincidence?

----
I have no excuses for them not buffing MGs and Flamers. This is a blatant example of outright ignoring the terribly UP weapons for an incredible long amount of time. Heck, any buff would help, they don't even need to be perfectly balanced against everything else, just make them anyhow usable.

BUT

I kinda understand why they're so unwilling to nerf lasers to get them in line. They would need to nerf clan lasers most (guaranteeing shitstorm of wild outcry from quite a number of 'clanners'), and remove/lower best energy/laser quirks from many IS mechs (guaranteeing shitstorm of wild outcry from quite a number of 'IS players').

You can't have balance without nerfing this or that sometimes. But you cannot nerf anything without a massive shitstorm, players leaving and closing their wallets in anger. So what can you do? Well, you can delay the changes until those pissed of with imbalance will grow in number and frustration enough to overscream those 'don't nerf my precious thing you *******!' after balance patch notes.

This day will come, eventually.

Edited by Prof RJ Gumby, 29 September 2015 - 01:49 AM.