11 replies to this topic

[Shivaxi]

I know PGI has been talking about making it take longer to kill mechs. One of the big issues is the heat scaling right now. It's just way too high, allowing people to fire for way too long, putting out ridiculous amounts of damage that shouldn't even be possible. There's an old thread that went into detail about this here:

http://mwomercs.com/...-heat-capacity/

Granted it's a little outdated cause that's when poptarting was a huge thing, but the principle still applies. People have these ridiculous high alphas and are able to strip a mech in seconds. That shouldn't be possible in a MechWarrior game. Normally a mech would only alpha all weapons in a dire situation as a last stand offensive, and you'd either override shutdown and explode =P or just overheat shutdown and get killed anyway.

So if the heat capacity was lowered to something like 30, that'd solve a lot of the issues with these high alpha mechs people are complaining about like tripple PPC thunderbolts and Firestarters and whatnot. Some of these weapon cooldowns are too quick as well, like PPC's and AC20's, normally take like 6 to 8 seconds to reload and fire again. But in MWO you can fire them within 3 to 4 seconds, especially looking at quirks and modules, etc. Heat capacity at 30 would also allow you to straight up remove ghost heat. It wouldn't be needed.

The most fun I ever had with this game was back in closed beta, before double heat sinks, before endo steel and ferro armor. Back then you couldn't take many weapons, and with single heat sinks you definitely could not alpha or fire constantly like you can today, making brawling a lot more viable. You could run right at the enemy and actually survive for longer than 2 seconds =P. People would loadout with long range and short range weapons, and you wouldn't see them firing both at once. Matches were more balanced and took longer, almost the full 15 minutes many times. This is the kind of play style I'd love to see come back to MWO.

[Suros]

Sorry to necro this, but I fully agree with it. It makes no sense to take a light into battle when it can be half or fully destroyed in just 1-2 alpha strikes where the enemy merely ducks back into the cover and cools back off. Alpha strikes cannot be fixed by simply adding an arbitrary penalty. At the moment, brawling is dead, scouting is massively dangerous, and alpha striking is done around 75% of the time. (That was the case even with penalties up.)

The only reason I enjoy the Mechwarrior game series is because of how its armor system works and how you have drawn out battles with giant robots. Under the current system, a brawl will have dead people in 5-15 seconds flat. Not even close to what I used to enjoy.

[IraqiWalker]

Yet my lights wither hails of fire that would down three atlases, and I'm not talking about HSR problems here. I'm talking about proper maneuvering.

I love TT, but if we wanna get down to it. TTK in TT was even worse. a 12 mech battle would last about 90 seconds total.

Not to mention that there are dozens, upon dozens of mechs built to be fully heat neutral.

As for brawling, I will say this:

On Alpine Peaks, Brawling is difficult. On Viridian Bog, it can be difficult. Everywhere else, it works just fine.


EDIT: Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't mind increasing TTK, but citing flawed sources doesn't help the argument.

Edited by IraqiWalker, 22 June 2015 - 11:52 PM.

[Suros]

IraqiWalker, on 22 June 2015 - 11:45 PM, said:

Yet my lights wither hails of fire that would down three atlases, and I'm not talking about HSR problems here. I'm talking about proper maneuvering.

That doesn't exactly work when you happen to stick your nose out to something like a Nova and he's able to dump 48 damage into a light without suiciding. I always thought the purpose behind a large stack of weapons in TT was being able to keep firing while other weapons sat on cooldown. With heat the way it is, it makes far more sense to fire everything and go hide while somebody tries to figure out how to get by with half a mech left.

My point is, sometimes there is no dodging because you either don't know they're there (gauss/high alpha to the back), or you get trapped by a mess of clumsy teammates who won't let you move to a safe location. When alpha striking has no real danger to it, it basically always makes sense.

[IraqiWalker]

Suros, on 23 June 2015 - 10:39 AM, said:

That doesn't exactly work when you happen to stick your nose out to something like a Nova and he's able to dump 48 damage into a light without suiciding. I always thought the purpose behind a large stack of weapons in TT was being able to keep firing while other weapons sat on cooldown. With heat the way it is, it makes far more sense to fire everything and go hide while somebody tries to figure out how to get by with half a mech left.

My point is, sometimes there is no dodging because you either don't know they're there (gauss/high alpha to the back), or you get trapped by a mess of clumsy teammates who won't let you move to a safe location. When alpha striking has no real danger to it, it basically always makes sense.

That's more the player's fault, and his team's fault. Not the game's fault. The Daily Whine Thread (one of the best threads in these forums) is chock full of stories of times we get stuck because our team is too dumb to give us room to back out. Then again, we also have access to Seismic sensors, and UAVs to help us see what's behind corners. A pilot that flanks right, should be rewarded for it.

On the other hand, mechs that have loads of weapon don't alpha often, and in fact do cycle through them to avoid over-heating. The Nova is a great example of that. It can't fire all 12 lasers. It'll kill itself with one alpha.

I think what you want is slower cycle times on weapons. Or a reduced heat cap. The alpha strikes are fine. They're working right. However, a better solution to the REAL problem is not heat caps, or slower fire rates, or an alpha cap. None of those address the real problem:

Instant, pinpoint, accuracy. This is the real problem we have here. There's only one reasonable solution that I've found for it (and that's after scouring these forums for the last 2+ years):

Scaling convergence, impacted by movements speeds. (We already have half of that implemented in the game already)

Cone of fire is absolutely silly, and eliminates aiming skill.

Feedback and recoil COULD be worked in, but they don't address lasers at all.

Scaling convergence handles all the problems, plus it makes the "Pinpoint" Elite skill actually functional again (it hasn't functioned ever since they made convergence instant).

[DustySkunk]

The return of convergence solves so many problems in this game... it boggles the mind. Seriously.

What was it Russ said? That convergence was taken out because it would confuse people that their weapons weren't hitting exactly where their aiming reticle was instantly? Come on. We're not idiots (mostly).

Sounds to me like one of the forced IGP mechanics (a la 3PV, etc.) made to make the game more mainstream and "approachable." This is a relic from IGP which we could do without.

I'm going to post the convergence topic again on the town hall thread for the 25th. I suggest anyone else who wants to see convergence go away do the same.

For convenience:
http://mwomercs.com/...e-25th-6pm-pdt/

Edited by DustySkunk, 23 June 2015 - 02:59 PM.

[IraqiWalker]

DustySkunk, on 23 June 2015 - 02:50 PM, said:

The return of convergence solves so many problems in this game... it boggles the mind. Seriously.

What was it Russ said? That convergence was taken out because it would confuse people that their weapons weren't hitting exactly where their aiming reticle was instantly? Come on. We're not idiots (mostly).

Sounds to me like one of the forced IGP mechanics (a la 3PV, etc.) made to make the game more mainstream and "approachable." This is a relic from IGP which we could do without.

I'm going to post the convergence topic again on the town hall thread for the 25th. I suggest anyone else who wants to see convergence go away do the same.

For convenience:
http://mwomercs.com/...e-25th-6pm-pdt/

Removing convergence for those reasons was the right move. However, what we need is multiple reticles. One for each arm. The problem with convergence is that it slowed down the arm movement, but we had no indication of where the arm was actually pointing. So people notice their reticle is pointing at the enemy's CT after a quick turn. They fire, and hits the rock 20 meters to the side of the mech. Having the mouse tied to the CT reticle, while the arm ones hover around it, and indicate where the arms ARE pointing in real time could have fixed that.

(Of course, holding the Left CTRL key would still allow us to switch to controlling the arms independently.)

[DustySkunk]

IraqiWalker, on 23 June 2015 - 03:10 PM, said:

Removing convergence for those reasons was the right move. However, what we need is multiple reticles. One for each arm. The problem with convergence is that it slowed down the arm movement, but we had no indication of where the arm was actually pointing. So people notice their reticle is pointing at the enemy's CT after a quick turn. They fire, and hits the rock 20 meters to the side of the mech. Having the mouse tied to the CT reticle, while the arm ones hover around it, and indicate where the arms ARE pointing in real time could have fixed that.

(Of course, holding the Left CTRL key would still allow us to switch to controlling the arms independently.)

This is a good piece of clarification. You're absolutely right that we would need some indicator of where the weapons would actually be firing.

I guess what I was trying to communicate with my post is my frustration that the decision was made to just simplify the system to eliminate convergence entirely, rather than seeking to improve the system in a manner like you described. I'd really like to see them revisit the idea. It's a long standing pet peeve of mine

[Dakkss]

Reading this made me remember why CB was so different. I totally forgot that Endo and Ferro and DHS and all the rest of it didn't even exist at the time.... I miss the 'old' days .

[Night Thastus]

I've suggested this before. I've suggested the lore heat cap of 30, true doubles with NO additional heat cap, and singles with 1.0 dissipation but high heat cap (due to denser materials used).

I actually got a pretty good response, but the ideas for a better non-ghost heat system have been suggested so many times that no-one cares anymore. We know PGI is never going to change it, and no-one is ever going to be happy.

We gave up.

[Spleenslitta]

Night Thastus, on 27 October 2015 - 04:16 PM, said:

I've suggested this before. I've suggested the lore heat cap of 30, true doubles with NO additional heat cap, and singles with 1.0 dissipation but high heat cap (due to denser materials used).

I actually got a pretty good response, but the ideas for a better non-ghost heat system have been suggested so many times that no-one cares anymore. We know PGI is never going to change it, and no-one is ever going to be happy.

We gave up.

Sad truth is that you're right. PGI doesn't seem to give a damn anymore. They have loads of suggestions on how to replace Ghost Heat.
Some solutions are simple like this one but effective while others solutions are more complicated, but with mechanics that could remove even pure small laser boating.
Take the energy generating engine for example. There have been lot's of threads with this idea.
Then you would have to keep a lookout for your energy production and storage levels in addition to your heat.

Fire those energy demanding lasers too much and you will have to wait 1-2 seconds for the engine to generate enough energy for you to move at full speed.
Have a less energy demanding weapon such as an SRM launcher and you can use that while you get enough energy to fire lasers again.
It really would deal with most of the boating maybe including gauss boats since i think gauss rifles would demand a moderate to high amount of energy to charge.

LRM, SRM, AC and streak boats would still exist but the pure laservomit would be gone or at least they would not be able to fire so often.

[IraqiWalker]

Night Thastus, on 27 October 2015 - 04:16 PM, said:

I've suggested this before. I've suggested the lore heat cap of 30, true doubles with NO additional heat cap, and singles with 1.0 dissipation but high heat cap (due to denser materials used).

I actually got a pretty good response, but the ideas for a better non-ghost heat system have been suggested so many times that no-one cares anymore. We know PGI is never going to change it, and no-one is ever going to be happy.

We gave up.

Except the 30 heat cap is for dissipation after 10 seconds.
I don't think people understand that mechs in TT did not have a 30 point heat cap. They dissipated heat at a crazy level, and unless you sustained over 30 heat for 10 seconds, your mech did not even over heat.

Our heat system is closer to lore application that you guys think. It's one failing is scaling penalties for dancing closer to the threshold.