385 replies to this topic

[Karl Streiger]

Another story what was supposed to be a cheap increase in game time for the board game also worked for mwo.
During CB i had a Atlas 2 PPC's 2 MLAS 1 Gauss 300STD - a killer in capable hands or you. With new beta and ES and DHS i was able to upgrade the Lasers into a LPL and add 2 SRM6. Again enough for it's time - well it was only average and it had the firepower of a current Dire Wolf A.
And current DWF A. has only pop guns given the full abillity of this chassis.


But consider the base mechanics of mwo were designed around the power of Close Beta mechs

Edited by Karl Streiger, 26 October 2015 - 11:10 AM.

[JigglyMoobs]

the only real problem with pinpoint in the game right now is that due to a combination of latency and short burst time IS pulse lasers and occasionally other lasers seem to do instant focused front loaded damage that is impossible to spread

-all other "problems" can be effectively mitigated by -skill-

but lazors are instant and pinpoint! but no, they have a long burn time during which you can react.

but ballistics and er ppcs! but they have travel time and take time to aim, so if you are not standing still, they are not a problem.

but the lights, think of the lights! but lights are even faster and harder to get converged hits on.

but -mistakes- were made.

yep, that's the real problem. people made -mistakes- and want pgi to take away the trauma.

the funny thing is the complaints about pinpoint and fld have actually made the game harder over the last year. why? because it forced pgi to switch from a ballistics ppc meta where only certain people can react and shoot very quickly to a laser meta where anyone can get shots on you.

in terms of piloting skill, most of the people playing have gotten -better- af avoiding and spreading damage. but Meta complaints made things -harder- by leading to changes that resulted in laser meta apocalypse that is taking place today. today, you can still avoid damage with skill, but -mistakes- are more costly.

if you don't like this, forget pinpoint, because we will never agree.

forget clunky terribad obscure mechanisms, because they are awful and the tryhards will still learn to use them better than you because they -try hard-. Duh.

just dial back the laser meta, increase is burn durations, and you'll all be a lot happier.

PS- does anyone remember that before the advent of midrange laser vomit, one of the good builds was actually an -srm- tbr? That in the midst of omg ppc gauss too stronk Meta, that closing with the enemy and brawling with spread damage weapons was actually viable? That the optimal medium included an srm shadowhawk and other things that specialized in hit and run brawling? What happened to them? On yea, now any tier 4 pilot can point a crosshair their way and press a button, that's what happened.

Edited by JigglyMoobs, 26 October 2015 - 12:13 PM.

[Surn]

Give each engine a power rating and make weapons use that power. Have a reserve of energy like jump jets, powered by the eNgine rating...which is sHared witH movemeNt.

[Kmieciu]

Right not, the main problem is high damage laser alpha.
I like simple solutions: increase the laser burn time by 10% across the board.

[Old-dirty B]

Cap ammount of weapons equipped, could be set per weight class or even per mech.

[Kjudoon]

What i cannot fathom is how so many are unwilling to deal with this issue head on and their solutions are just a painkiller to treat cancer. It stops the hurting but does not address the cause.

[Ragnahawk]

Just fix the laser burn time.

[Kjudoon]

Laserburn time is not the issue. The fact that this is going on witb clan mechs after a significant increase in burn time proves that. It is about all df weapons hitting the sMe location without error.

We have a SLIGHT correction of this in place currently with ac drop. But when you boat the same weapon the drop is irrelevant. It only breaks up the combination of ballistics and energy a little but not enough. Spread needs to happen to prevent this from continuing. No amount of increased armor or increased burn time fixes that. Those are the painkillers. Not the cure.

[Airu]

I still think heat caps need to be reduced by atleast 2 times on all mechs, and the cooling rate increased by the same value.
That way performing alpha strikes more than once will turn you into supernova, but controlled group fire will be cooled much faster. Therefore, if you want to apply all the damage you carry on your mech - you will be forced to invest more time, unless supernova, that means no more pick over the hill -> alpha -> hide ->repeat. You would need more exposure time to use all the weapons.

Also, make heatsinks dissapate heat more, but add less heat capacity. So if you want heat neutral laser boat, you would need lots of heatsinks, but less lasers. No more 6LL/8-10ML alphas.
Currently, my spider 5V going at 170kph sometimes loses all st armor just by getting scratched with 2-3 laser alphas from enemy mechs

Edited by Airu, 26 October 2015 - 07:03 PM.

[Kjudoon]

Lowering the cap and increasing heat dissipation does nothing to functionally change or fix the problem of too much damage in one spot. All it does is slow... Slightly... the speed of alphas. You are still having surgical instagimps. The ttk will be minorly increased... Very minorly but once again it is a cancer hiding behind painkillers.

[Karl Streiger]

You can type until your fingers are bloody.
When ever this Topic appeared you hit a wall of ignorance - the same answers through the deck all the time - it started when there wasn't even a game.
Anyhow i know why i sitting in t4 for a reason - game time. I have several issues with mwo hindering me to get further (my builds, don't know the maps or the 0815 approach to the maps)
But firing and hitting a target - i don't see anything that need skill to do that. Even when its not the perfect trained precision of power gamers its enough to know that shoting in MWO is like to use any clicker game.
The difficulty is never the usage of the mech - and this is the pitty - with generic allround weapons those meta mevhs are to play with the same style - like any other FPS the mech is the smallest part in the skill needed for mwo

[Rem Norton]

It's a madnes! If high damage from alpha stricke make problemms for you, you chose wrong game!

[oldradagast]

Kmieciu, on 26 October 2015 - 01:43 PM, said:

Right not, the main problem is high damage laser alpha.
I like simple solutions: increase the laser burn time by 10% across the board.

And then the Gauss rifle will become more dominanent.

It is not about specific weapons. It is about the ability to put tons of damage almost instantly on a single component at long ranges.

We've been on this merry-go-round before:
- PPC is too powerful because you can alpha people with it. Ok, nerf the PPC until it is nearly useless, as it is today
- Dual AC20's are too powerful because it's 40 points of pinpoint damage. Ok, ghost heat happens
- Gauss is too powerful because it can pair up with PPC's for lots of pinpoint damage. Ok, add a charge time to Gauss, nerf the PPC, and de-sync the speeds
- Now, it's lasers that are too powerful because they can put too much damage too quickly on one location... where have I heard that complaint before?

We can keep nerfing individual weapons, sure - except all that does is make the weapon useless if NOT boated. Meanwhile, the meta just shifts to whatever the next boatable long-range, pinpoint weapon may be. Until THAT issue is addressed, and ALL pinpoint weapons are reigned in with a logical and consistent mechanic that makes it harder to put tons of pinpoint damage on a target at long ranges, the game will never really be balanced.

Edited by oldradagast, 27 October 2015 - 03:22 AM.

[Greyhart]

yes the problem is not lasers per say.

It is that if you can X damage reliably on 1 component at range then that is the best option in the game.

The meta will always be maximum amount of damage on one part at furthest range.

what is needed is balance of damage over time or damage over distance

[Brandarr Gunnarson]

Well, lasers, and especially Clan triple-threat laser (that is, range, damage and tonnage are all better than IS counterpart) are a problem and their relationship to heat need to be fixed, I firmly believe this.

BUT, people don't like cone of fire? Ok! I have an alternative!

How about pinpoint accuracy in a multi-point targeting and reticle system? That is to say: what if we gave different hardpoint locations different points in the reticle which they always hit?

So, for example, if I have 2 arm mounted weapons (1 in each arm), 1 right torso mounted weapon and 1 center torso mounted weapon my reticle would look something like this:

[o Xxo] Where the big "X" is where my CT mounted hits, the small "x" is where my ST mounted hits the "o" on either side are where my LA/RA mounted weapons hit, respectively.

If I alpha, nothing hits the same place. If I group/chain fire, I can adjust my aim to hit the same spot.

If those people who SAY they are skilled, actually are, this will affect them little. But it will solve the alpha problem AND retain pinpoint accuracy!

[Widowmaker1981]

Brandarr Gunnarson, on 27 October 2015 - 04:25 AM, said:

Well, lasers, and especially Clan triple-threat laser (that is, range, damage and tonnage are all better than IS counterpart) are a problem and their relationship to heat need to be fixed, I firmly believe this.

BUT, people don't like cone of fire? Ok! I have an alternative!

How about pinpoint accuracy in a multi-point targeting and reticle system? That is to say: what if we gave different hardpoint locations different points in the reticle which they always hit?

So, for example, if I have 2 arm mounted weapons (1 in each arm), 1 right torso mounted weapon and 1 center torso mounted weapon my reticle would look something like this:

[o Xxo] Where the big "X" is where my CT mounted hits, the small "x" is where my ST mounted hits the "o" on either side are where my LA/RA mounted weapons hit, respectively.

If I alpha, nothing hits the same place. If I group/chain fire, I can adjust my aim to hit the same spot.

If those people who SAY they are skilled, actually are, this will affect them little. But it will solve the alpha problem AND retain pinpoint accuracy!

And ill just use my Banshee-3M and not have to adapt at all! (because all its weapons are grouped into a tiny cluster on the shoulders). Almost every other mech gets nerfed to hell, and my favourite stays untouched? Im OK with this. Carry on.

[Karl Streiger]

Rem Norton, on 26 October 2015 - 10:09 PM, said:

It's a madnes! If high damage from alpha stricke make problemms for you, you chose wrong game!

As said - wall of ignorance.
So tell me you sane man - do you see any difference between this:

and this:
HBK-4G

and if you see them do you think it is enough - considering how hits are distributed?

[Fire for Effect]

funny that you say pinpoint damage and lasers in the same sentence.

Lasers are NOT pinpoint damage, Lasers are DOTs. These are only pinpoint if both target and shooter are not moving and the target is to stupid to torso twist, in other words its your own fault if only your CT is burned through by lasers because obviously you have
a) not been able to twist.
were moving not fast enough
c) or you are driving a really bad PGI designed mech that is mainly CT on legs (hello jenner) then its actually bad luck that you have bought a lemon.

Lasers are not any problem, because you can, as already said spread the damage and Lasers are already severely limited by heat.

They have roughly tripled to quadrupled the rate of fire without adjusting the damage accordingly (firing 4 times in the same time frame? then dmg is divided by 4 result is damage is more spread). Lasers are some of the few weapons that are actually limited by heat. Most of the other weapons can fire away without problems, so that was the first gimp to lasers, then they made em DOTs next GIMP and to top it off they gave some Lasers absurd burning times that made em actually worthless. So ballistics make massively more damage than in the originally based game and the balance was for the original game.

Next mistake they at least doubled the heat scale. Firing 2 ER-PPC at the same time will normally instantly explode your mech, by doubling the heat scale they made abominations like 6 PPC Mechs possible and for quite some time viable. Many good people left because of that nonsense, and those were people who pay the game that you are playing. Its the die hard fans that rake in the money not the "oh robots cute" guys, the "it a battlemech NOT a robot" guys are who buy the big packs.

To top it of they only doubled the armor which means they have made a severe mathematical mistake from the very beginning.
twiple to quadruple weapon damage and only double armor.... you see anything weird?

TTK is not a problem of lasers, these have always been the bread and butter weapons in BT and Mech Warrior, Lasers are actually underperforming here. Especially weird was their decision to make Clan Lasers hotter right after introducing these. No one complained about the Clan Lasers not even IS people, which made that decision even more weird.

The worst offenders are PPC, Gauss, IS ballistics and Clan Ultra 5. If you wish to increase TTK, tweak these.

Also tweaking heat is a nonissue because the enemy is dead while you are only hot so the right tweak would be simple:
you simply cannot fire PPC and gauss at the same time,
actually you cannot combine anything with either PPC or Gauss. so you would be limited to firing 2 gauss or 2 PPC and then for a second nothing else.

you cannot fire more than 3 IS Large Laser
you cannot fire more than 6 Medium Laser at the same time. you have to wait for a second before you can fire the rest of your same category Lasers.

and so on.

the technical lore reason is: because
(the same reason why ghost heat was introduced instead of simply limiting the amount of weapons that yuo can fire at the same time)

That are your only viable options, anything else means turning the wrong kn.obs and pushing the wrong buttons.

[Helene de Montfort]

The problem with mwo is that they kept the mech armor and structural system (even if they changed values), while introducing pinpoint convergence of all weapons. And guess what, the armor and structural system was never intended to face localized damage. So either they change the armor and structural system (global instead of localized), or they change the convergence system.

And don't come with the "skil" bs, we all know that the current system make it easier for those willing to use illegal macro/targeting mods.

[Hotthedd]

Pinpoint just means that the weapon or groups of weapons all converge to the same spot. A weapon (like lasers) can be pinpoint and hit-scan, DoT.

The alternatives to pinpoint are: spread weapons (missiles, MGs, and LB-X), and splash damage weapons (PPCs).
Another mechanic for weapons is time to target, either instant (hit-scan), fast (Gauss), to slow (LRMs).
Additionally weapons are either Damage over Time, Front-loaded, or Burst-fire.

Pinpoint is better than spread or splash.
Faster time to target is better than slower.
Front-loaded damage is better than the alternatives.

Of course weight, heat, damage, and critical spots are the further modifiers to balance the weapons.

This is why we see so much laser, pulse laser, and gauss rifle boating. There is no downside to firing multiples simultaneously as opposed to chain firing them.