15 replies to this topic

[Dino Banino]

I've seen multiple threads now talking about the need to increase cooldown times for long-range weapons, so that they play like long-range weapons and restrict brawling capabilities.

Some people have proposed interesting ideas, some of which I agree with.

Here's my idea, but it still isn't perfect. It would ONLY apply to Energy weapons.

NOTE: Since Clan weapons rely on increased range over IS weapons, this formula should help balance Clan and IS Energy weapons with increased cooldown times for Clan energy weapons.

Weapon Range / 100 = NEW Weapon Cooldown (Old Cooldown Time)

A few examples:

> Medium Laser >> 270m / 100 = 2.7 (3)
> C-Med Laser >> 405m / 100 = 4.05 (3)

> Large Laser >> 450m / 100 = 4.5 (3.25)
> ER-Large Laser >> 675m / 100 = 6.75 (3.25)
> C-ER-Lrg Laser >> 740m / 100 = 7.4 (3.25)

You should get the idea after the given examples.

The only problems I could see are:

1) Pulse Lasers would arguably be more powerful than they currently are.

> Small Pulse Laser >> 110m / 100 = 1.1 (2.25)
> Medium Pulse Laser >> 220m / 100 = 2.2 (3)

2) The ER-PPC would be nerfed with a cooldown of 8.1, UNLESS the projectile speed is increased substantially; OR, PGI uses the canon range of 690m (6.9 cooldown).

As a result, the formula would have to serve as a baseline, and not a final product.

Edited by Archangel Dino, 04 October 2015 - 06:56 AM.

[Hunchening]

Do not forget durations.

Your proposed Clan ER Large has a 8.9s recycle because of that.
The Clan ER Medium at 5.2s


Longer is fine, but getting past 7s is probably too far. If the ERPPC was effective at the optimal range (like the Gauss) it could stand to have a 6-7s cooldown, if and only if it was effective at that range.

Edited by Hunchening, 03 October 2015 - 07:56 AM.

[Dino Banino]

Hunchening, on 03 October 2015 - 07:56 AM, said:

Do not forget durations.

Your proposed Clan ER Large has a 8.9s recycle because of that.
The Clan ER Medium at 5.2s


Longer is fine, but getting past 7s is probably too far. If the ERPPC was effective at the optimal range (like the Gauss) it could stand to have a 6-7s cooldown, if and only if it was effective at that range.

Duration times could always be tweaked. A 1.5 on the ER-Lrg Laser is too much anyway. But thank you for acknowledging that.

Mind you, the ONLY weapon that would be more than 7 is the ER-Lrg Laser. (Unless we want to take into account the non-canon ER-PPC of 810m)

Edited by Archangel Dino, 03 October 2015 - 08:06 AM.

[Khobai]

Not a good idea.

The AC/2 would end up being the slowest firing weapon around. When it needs to be one of the fastest firing weapons. While CSPL would fire absurdly fast and do 6 damage each time.

Cooldown should be based on more factors than just the range of the weapon. You need to take other things into consideration like the tonnage cost of the weapon, the damage of the weapon, whether its frontloaded or spread damage, etc...

Also making weapons fire slower wouldnt always fix the weapon anyway. Gauss is a good example of this. Gauss is broken because it does 15 damage at long range for minimal heat. Making it fire slower doesnt fix that. Even if Gauss had a 6s cooldown, dual gauss+laser vomit would still hit you like a sledgehammer and take out most of your armor in one hit.

Edited by Khobai, 03 October 2015 - 11:27 AM.

[Malcolm Vordermark]

As a general concept I think making longer range weapons take longer to recycle is a good idea. I think the formula you have would not work, though.

[Lyoto Machida]

Rouken, on 03 October 2015 - 01:01 PM, said:

As a general concept I think making longer range weapons take longer to recycle is a good idea. I think the formula you have would not work, though.

Could be used as a general baseline and then tweaked by PGI for outliers/lesser used weapons.

[Dino Banino]

Khobai, on 03 October 2015 - 11:20 AM, said:

Not a good idea.

The AC/2 would end up being the slowest firing weapon around. When it needs to be one of the fastest firing weapons. While CSPL would fire absurdly fast and do 6 damage each time.

Cooldown should be based on more factors than just the range of the weapon. You need to take other things into consideration like the tonnage cost of the weapon, the damage of the weapon, whether its frontloaded or spread damage, etc...

Also making weapons fire slower wouldnt always fix the weapon anyway. Gauss is a good example of this. Gauss is broken because it does 15 damage at long range for minimal heat. Making it fire slower doesnt fix that. Even if Gauss had a 6s cooldown, dual gauss+laser vomit would still hit you like a sledgehammer and take out most of your armor in one hit.

It is sad to know that people still exist on the forums that are illiterate. If you were able to read, you'd see that I said this would ONLY apply to ENERGY weapons, but thank you for additional constructive feedback. I will take ballistics into account for my formula.

Also, I have stated at the bottom of my post that Clan Small Pulses would INDEED be more powerful. Again, your failure to address my post.

Your statement about Gauss is just gibberish and completely irrelevant as my thread only talks about, once again, Energy weapons.

If you wish to actually read my post and actually have anything of value to state, then please, I welcome open discussion.

Rouken, on 03 October 2015 - 01:01 PM, said:

As a general concept I think making longer range weapons take longer to recycle is a good idea. I think the formula you have would not work, though.

You THINK my formula wouldn't work. Why not? You have given no argument. Using range as a basis for cooldown is very effective.

Edited by Archangel Dino, 03 October 2015 - 01:53 PM.

[Malcolm Vordermark]

Archangel Dino, on 03 October 2015 - 01:38 PM, said:

You THINK my formula wouldn't work. Why not? You have given no argument. Using range as a basis for cooldown is very effective.

Because it is arbitrary and does not take into consideration anything except a weapon's range. The AC20 gets something like a 30% buff while the AC2 goes from a cooldown of 0.72 seconds to a cooldown of 7.2 seconds. Clan ER Mediums gain a second, which sounds about right. However, Clan ER Large gain 4 seconds, which sounds unplayable.

[Lightfoot]

Well up to now and currently MWO is using DHS 1.4 to cause overheat to curtail recycle of long range energy and the Gauss Rifle de-sync charge-up to curtail it's recycle. If they now want to use longer recycles hard coded to the long range weapons the old methods of DHS 1.4 and the Gauss charge-up must go.

MWO suffers from cascading nerfs from many years. DHS 1.4 should have been dropped when they added Ghost Heat for instance. Both are grievous Battle Tech violations, but keeping them both has crippled MWO gameplay. You don't need both.

And your recycles are too long if you look at how previous MechWarrior games used recycle. MW4 and MW3 had a 6 second recycle for an AC20 and an 8 second recycle for a Gauss Rifle and I assure you this was enough to give each it's due range dominance. There seems to be an over-eagerness in MWO to exclude long range gameplay to make brawling dominant. This is bad and will only make MWO a very boring game.

Edited by Lightfoot, 03 October 2015 - 09:32 PM.

[Sug]

Lightfoot, on 03 October 2015 - 09:22 PM, said:

DHS 1.4 should have been dropped when they added Ghost Heat for instance. Both are grievous Battle Tech violations, but keeping them both has crippled MWO gameplay.

Yes, I miss getting one shotted by 6 pcc stalkers.

[Lightfoot]

Sug, on 03 October 2015 - 09:31 PM, said:

Yes, I miss getting one shotted by 6 pcc stalkers.

DHS 1.4 didn't stop 6xPPC Stalkers, in a way it created them by denying players the ability to manage Mech overheating. If you can't stop the mech from overheating with standard Battle Tech load-outs of 3xPPCs why bother trying to avoid the mech shutdown at all? Just load up 6xPPCs and ride the shutdowns that DHS 1.4 was causing to happen to 3xPPCs. That caused PGI to add Ghost Heat which also didn't work. You want players to be able to operate the mech correctly. When they can't play by the rules because they are broken with nerfs, they don't try and you get the 6xPPC Stalker.

By the way, the actual fix for the 6xPPC Stalker and all energy boats is a hard heat cap that causes the mech to explode when a Battle Tech reasonable heat maximum is crossed. Then those heatsinks count and the 6xPPC Stalker only gets one alpha-strike and is gone. All previous MechWarrior games used this and no one complained because it made perfect sense.

[FupDup]

Every time somebody thinks the 6 PPC Stalker was meta, a 4 PPC Stalker kills a kitten.

[Lightfoot]

FupDup, on 03 October 2015 - 09:51 PM, said:

Every time somebody thinks the 6 PPC Stalker was meta, a 4 PPC Stalker kills a kitten.

Yeah, but that's okay according to Battle Tech.

[Dino Banino]

Rouken, on 03 October 2015 - 08:49 PM, said:

Because it is arbitrary and does not take into consideration anything except a weapon's range. The AC20 gets something like a 30% buff while the AC2 goes from a cooldown of 0.72 seconds to a cooldown of 7.2 seconds. Clan ER Mediums gain a second, which sounds about right. However, Clan ER Large gain 4 seconds, which sounds unplayable.

I think I've already mentioned that Ballistics would NOT apply to my formula, so I can't address them.

In terms of my "arbitrary" formula, agreed. I did, however, also state that it isn't perfect, and could possibly serve as a baseline for other modifications. The general consensus IS that longer-range weapons need longer cooldowns. How we go about increasing their cooldown time is critical. I thought that using their range as a base would be a good start.

[FupDup]

Lightfoot, on 03 October 2015 - 09:59 PM, said:

Yeah, but that's okay according to Battle Tech.

Trying to build it in TT won't end well because you can never have enough critslots for the DHS required to keep all 6 of them cooled off.

The TT Clan equivalent (same damage) of 4 CERPPCs and 30 DHS, however, is completely viable and actually pretty OP. The Hellstar even makes this build into a stock mech.

Edited by FupDup, 04 October 2015 - 08:22 AM.

[Y E O N N E]

The concept is sound, but the exact numbers are probably off.

In my own tables, I have the same sort of trend going on: short range has short cool-down, etc., but the formula isn't based on the range itself. Rather, the number is chosen to balance out everything else including size, weight, damage, range, duration, heat, and cool-down. Every weapon has to be equally useful (but not necessarily useful in the same role).

So what we have are IS Small Lasers having the shortest range and highest DPS out of all Small-type lasers, IS ER Smalls having the longest range and worst DPS, and C-ER Small falling somewhere in the middle for both. And, at least by my weightings, they all have the same utility score. This trend continues through Medium, Large, Small Pulse, Medium Pulse, and Large Pulse. And then, on top of that, the larger classes have worse DPS than the smaller classes.