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Asides from the reality that even the toughest mech in this game, should die VERY QUICKLY, if it's being fired on by the whole enemy team at the same time, there is something to be said for making mechs more survivable in a normal sense, when battles are on more even footing. There are things that are present in the table top game that still have not been implemented in MWO that could aid in creating this increased TTK, without overly messing with things like engine crits and the like.
Specifically I am talking about the way the game handles critical hits. As you all may see when you build a mech, the slots a mech has will regulate what you can mount on a mech and in conjunction with tonnage and hard points serve well to differentiate mechs from each other. But something these slots managed to do in the table top game was also moderate damage and regulate the likelihood of critical systems being destroyed. It was because of the slot system that things like Endo Steel Structure and Ferro Fibrous Armor could have a value beyond the rather minor armor increase for slightly lesser weight of the later. Most agree the value of the former is quite good though.
In the original game, the slots taken up by ferro-fibrous armor, as well as endo steel structure are valid hit locations. Locations which had nothing in them "empty" were invalid, resulting in one randomly determining again what sensitive item in an area took damage or was destroyed. So if you filled an area with those dynamic armor (ferro fibrous) or dynamic structure slots (endo steel), those bulky items/structure could more likely take hits than a single line item like an ammo bin, or a weapon system. Arm and leg actuators also served as valid hit locations which further reduced the likelihood of losing critical systems when armor was pierced, which meant mechs survived longer once each location lost armor, until all the structure was gone... which increased TTK. Without these systems being valid hit locations, some of their functionality has been lost, leading to people not feeling that something like ferro-fibrous is worth it's 14 slots of lost space, in turn for a tiny amount of extra tonnage.
MWO ignores ferro/endo slots, so if for example you are building a mech with ammunition in one slot in the arm and a large laser which takes two slots, damage going into that arm once the armor is pierced is 50% going to hit the ammo and 50% going to hit the large laser, because it's two items in there. The original game system would have made this much less likely either would be hit, because shoulder, upper arm, lower arm and hand actuators all would be valid targets, as might have been ferro or endo structure. Because the large laser took two whole slots, it would be slightly MORE likely to be hit than any other component, but not nearly as likely as it is now in MWO. If ferro had 2-3 slots in that arm, it actually might have been more likely to have taken the hit. To increase TTK, exploring opening up more locations and categories of things to absorb crits may be a very effective means of improving the game's TTK issue.
I do get why it was not done initially and still may seem overly difficult to some... many would have argued that when a hand actuator or an upper arm actuator is destroyed, there must be an actual system in place to degrade the damaged mech's performance, so that at least that one arm does not work so well once that actuator has been impacted. Well we do have this system in place already in what they do with builds of mechs in general that are lacking lower arm actuators and the like. Increasing levels of limiting the aim reticule based on what was damaged. Such systems already exist and would further help in immersion in some very real ways... as a mech lost it's armor and had more damaged components, it's performance degrades, but add on systems like ferro fibrous and endo steel actually contribute to the survivability of mechs in significant ways when you have them buffering critical locations.
At present, the only ones who can actually do this buffering effectively are gauss carrying mechs incidentally. They have non explosive ammo, so can fill up slots in their mechs with 1/2 ton ammo parcels so that rather than there being for example, only a gauss rifle in a side torso, it's really a gauss rifle and multiple slots filled with a few gauss rounds. This padding greatly decreases the likelyhood that the "critical" weapon in a component is the one randomly hit, because it gives many other "items" to randomly be selected as the target... and the number of slots of any given weapon is not at all weighted in MWO's system. Thus a mech with a 7 slot gauss rifle in it's side torso, standard engine and a bunch of ammo could either be 100% chance of a critical hitting it's gauss if no ammo was there... 50% if only one slot was stored there of ammo, 33% if two tons of ammo was stored there. In this example, if using an XL engine, three more slots are occupied in the side torso by engine, but they are not valid random hit locations so it just comes down to the gauss being one location, and the two other slots of ammo being two more locations, breaking it down to a simple one third, one third and one third likelihood of each valid item being hit.
Lets say somehow you were doing this same build with a mech using a standard engine, so you had that guass in a side torso with 5 additional open locations. Even though the guass takes up 7 slots, it's no more likely to be hit than any other item in that side torso location due to how they've coded MWO. So at present, one could take those 2 slots of ammo in the side torso from the previous example and split them into half ton incremenets, so they fill up 4 slots more... even put an additional .5 ton of such ammo in, making the whole torso filled up with a gauss and x5 one-half ton gauss ammo items. This makes it only a 16.6% chance that the gauss rifle would be hit by a critical (BOOM) vs. 33% when it is un-padded, or less padded. So you can see, the critical hit table and how it is treated makes a great deal of difference to survivability in situations and builds. As would allowing Ferro Fibrous and Endo Steel to act as critical padding. As would also allowing items like actuators to work as critical padding, even without consequences to their destruction.
Edited by Mad Porthos, 15 January 2016 - 01:46 PM.
