163 replies to this topic

[White Bear 84]

sycocys, on 27 January 2016 - 04:48 PM, said:

Totally. Solkaine and me were bored last night so we dropped into group queue.

Called "uav d5 cnt reach" and within 2 seconds that thing was out of the sky.

Called "fsr g8 line" - and immediately 2 lights barreled that direction and eliminated him.

Think we lost 1 match, minimal communication but people actually wanted to do the things needed to support a chance at victory. Might actually end my days of solo drops.

You know that prior to the last few months, most of our guys would prefer pug drops cause of the pain of losing over and over to organised groups, particularly some of the 12man groups. Not that all the guys were bad, just the teamplay and coordination was a bit off.. :/

But after a introspective assessment of teamplay and abilities, where I basically said to the team to consider each loss, not as a loss, but as a means to improve, the group came together well and now we rake in some good quality victories quite consistently - lo and behold everyone is loving group drops all of a sudden, skills are improving and we are getting more and more numbers in our drops!

The best part of it? You know that the games can be 110% more consistent because everyone in the groups you launch with usually work together, and you know, you just don't get that same experience in pugs very often.

Edited by White Bear 84, 27 January 2016 - 05:40 PM.

[Wolfways]

cSand, on 27 January 2016 - 02:31 PM, said:

I think LRMs are in a good spot.

No, they're terrible.

Quote

I would like to see the 6x lrm 5 go away though, because constantly firing lrms is stupid. Give all LRMs packs the same cooldown and reload as the rest of the LRMs, or give ghost heat on LRM 5s

PGI need to encourage LRM players to carrying bigger stacks rather than constantly streaming out 5 packs (as hilarious as that is)

I agree with this though. Bigger launchers should be preferred instead of streaming LRM5's.

Imo, this is what LRM's need.

Nerf indirect-fire by making it so you need to have TAG, NARC or UAV to be able to target mechs behind cover.
Increase missile speed.
Give all launchers the same reload time.
Remove the incoming missiles warning (which imo is the thing that makes Long Range Missiles useless).
Make LRM's fire and forget (Permanent face-time is a killer)
Increase ammo/ton (LRM's have way too much wasted ammo) or make them more accurate.

No spam, no need to worry as much about indirect-fire, and LRM's might occasionally be useful at long range (but probably not).
I'd love to know how pgi are going to add IS ELRM's when the current Extra range module is pointless.

[Escef]

cSand, on 27 January 2016 - 02:31 PM, said:

Give all LRMs packs the same cooldown and reload as the rest of the LRMs, or give ghost heat on LRM 5s

LRM5s already have ghost heat. On both clan and Spheroid sides.

[Fiona Marshe]

cSand, on 27 January 2016 - 02:39 PM, said:

No, but he has a good point about when you get into a close battle with someone and can't even enjoy the duel, cause 4 other guys on your opponent's team are doing all the work for him.

It's called teamwork...

[WrathOfDeadguy]

LRMs are annoying, and I severely dislike the way PGI made it so easy to deliver indirect fire (which should also be way more inaccurate)... but that in itself doesn't make the weapon system effective. I don't think I've died even once to LRMs on Highlands- I've seen lots of them, but avoiding them really is as easy as "get into trench, turn 90 degrees, run along trench." If you're still taking missile fire after that, then find the spotter- quickly- because they're likely very close if they can see you inside the trench. Shoot the spotter, stop the missiles. Are you hurt? Yeah, but not any worse than you would be if you got the bad end of a direct-fire trade.

Seriously, though, they're not that dangerous. They're the least efficient weapons in the game on a damage-per-ton basis, because of both damage spreading and missed shots due to loss of lock or hard cover between shooter and target. They have a huge dead zone which puts LRM-dependent builds at a crippling disadvantage against... well, anything that can close the distance and engage at less than 180m. They take a significant amount of time to kill even a light 'Mech, you get an audio/visual warning splash in your cockpit when the enemy fires them at you, and because they take so long to reach their targets you have ages to break LOS and avoid at least most of the incoming ordinance. If you can't do that, then you're badly out of position, and would have likely met a gruesome end sooner rather than later anyway the moment someone with a more powerful direct-fire config drew a bead on you.

Full disclosure: I don't have modules on most of my 'Mechs. I own two Radar Deprivation modules and about 90 'Mechs, and I don't always remember which chassis I left them on, let alone to move them to the one I'm using at any given time. I hardly ever drive my ECM 'Mechs, and I think I have a grand total of two 'Mechs with AMS. If LRMs were OP, they should be my #1 cause of death, but I think they get me maybe once every other week... and it's always my own fault. Got impatient or overconfident and went somewhere I shouldn't have. Let myself get surrounded and the missiles just happened to get the killshot amid five other damage sources chewing my bits off. That kind of thing. No big deal... thirty seconds or so of a lot of loud and colorful language directed at the monitor, a quick facepalm, then I grab another beer and try not to do the same dumb thing twice in a row. It doesn't take being a 1337 meta tryhard to avoid messy missile massacres... hell, I freely admit I'm a potato and the only reason my PSR increases at all is because it's basically an XP bar. If I can manage to stay out of the rain most of the time, you can too.

It's hard to admit error, but you really should not be dying frequently to LRMs unless you are doing something seriously wrong. Be it your positioning, or how you react when you take LRM fire, there's a cause to be found somewhere and you will have a much better time of it once you figure out what that cause is. If it is too difficult to pin down where the problem is in the chaos of the moment, then I'd recommend recording your matches and watching the ones where LRMs kill you later on, after you've cooled off a bit. There's no reason why you can't learn to evade and break locks...

...so that you can move on to complaining about OP laservomit like the rest of us do.

[Hearseguy]

surgetank, on 27 January 2016 - 02:27 PM, said:

The time has come for lrm mechs to be nerfed as its spoiling any one to one battles. take Polar map as a example its a pure Lrm map which is a shame as it could be a great map but as it stands you have little change of a good brawl due to never getting close. ok you say use ECM and AMS but its no use against so many lrms boats i was on the map the other day and the opposing team had 4 lrm boats and just about killed all my team.This is not fun anymore.

Get one of these (ecm & ams mods) it'll keep you from having an aneurysm due to lurms.

[InspectorG]

Wolfways, on 27 January 2016 - 05:25 PM, said:

It is? I never have any problems breaking locks on Polar, or any map....and we need more big, "open" maps like Polar.

'problem' as many players perceive it as such. Me, i know how to avoid LRMs.

[Imperius]

I'm sick of these threads, I'm going to make a blacklist of users that create them.

[pyrocomp]

Wolfways, on 27 January 2016 - 05:35 PM, said:

I agree with this though. Bigger launchers should be preferred instead of streaming LRM5's.

There is AMS for that. Perfectly works against small volleys streaming and not so effective against bulks. Single AMS almost completely negates one NxLRM5 boat on chainfire. When there will be more AMS then there will be less LRM5s.

[Lyoto Machida]

Sounds like a "L2P" issue, OP. Keep working at it and you'll figure it out eventually.

Or you can continue with your current method and hope PGI fixes it:

[Bonger Bob]

Wolfways, on 27 January 2016 - 05:35 PM, said:

.........

Increase missile speed.
Give all launchers the same reload time.
Remove the incoming missiles warning (which imo is the thing that makes Long Range Missiles useless).
Make LRM's fire and forget (Permanent face-time is a killer)
Increase ammo/ton (LRM's have way too much wasted ammo) or make them more accurate.

......................

way to go on overkill of bad ideas to fix something that's not broken.

with these ideas your throwing lore out the window, making lurms even easier to use than they are already and increasing the potential damage that people will yield over the duration of a match.

better idea : AMS / ECM / don't stand in the open getting wet to complain that it rained / use cover.

lrms are at about the most non-broken stage they've been at to date.

and polar is great, its got plenty of cover in long winding channels that make it easy to close on the enemy, the major thing that does separate it from most of the other maps is you get 10x the punishment for standing in open ground as the missile boats can still shoot from the valleys they sit in to take cover.

Edited by Bonger Bob, 27 January 2016 - 06:45 PM.

[Druarc]

Only time I've seen them rule on this map was when 1/2 team decide to charge across open middle of map, it was carnage.

[Zoid]

nitra, on 27 January 2016 - 02:43 PM, said:

Solution for LRM Boats :
SHOOT THE UAVS FOR CRYING OUT LOUD !!!

Holy **** this. I get 3+ UAV kills every single game. I've just stopped taking 'mechs that don't have lasers because I know if I'm not shooting them down, they're not getting shot down.

LRMs are actually slightly useful against good players now, which means they absolutely wreck the legions of bads.

Edited by Zoid, 27 January 2016 - 07:00 PM.

[KrazedOmega]

Alan Davion, on 27 January 2016 - 02:32 PM, said:

LRMs are only really used anymore in tiers 4 and 5. Tier 3 might have some here or there, but tier 1 and 2 you will not see LRMs at all, I guarantee it.

Your guarantee is wrong. I see LRMs in Tier 1 all the time.

[Dingo Battler]

People can accept laser vom compared to LRM spam, because at least its direct fire and they can fight back.

The real problem with LRM is that its feast or famine. Famine on maps like HPG or mining. Feast on canyon and polar.

They need to make LRMs much more rewarding for skill and positioning. Maybe indirect arc-ing fire should be a much larger grouping, with much larger splash, so it ends up as a weak version of airstrike, and direct fire should travel in a straight line with a bit of homing, and much tighter grouping. Toggle key to switch mode. However, seeing as they can't even change LBX to toggle, I don't think this will happen.

[wanderer]

Wolfways, on 27 January 2016 - 05:35 PM, said:

Imo, this is what LRM's need.

Nerf indirect-fire by making it so you need to have TAG, NARC or UAV to be able to target mechs behind cover.
Increase missile speed.

"Please stop LRMs from hitting me in anything but organized teams when I can't shoot the launcher."

Quote

Give all launchers the same reload time.

If they're going to normalize reload times, I'm not gonna mind much. Better normalize clustering damage as well.

Quote

Remove the incoming missiles warning (which imo is the thing that makes Long Range Missiles useless).

I can remember when LRMs didn't have incoming missile warnings. I'd love to see people reacting to chainfired launches at that point.

Quote

Make LRM's fire and forget (Permanent face-time is a killer)

Actually, it's being stupid enough to even try to trade with real direct-fire weaponry at this point, given pinpoint, perfect alphas.

Quote

Increase ammo/ton (LRM's have way too much wasted ammo) or make them more accurate.

Velocity boost. LRMs benefit proportionately the most of all weapons from this, as they have the lowest velocity of any projectile in the game.

Quote

No spam, no need to worry as much about indirect-fire, and LRM's might occasionally be useful at long range (but probably not).

See above. Velocity is a direct part of the effective range on LRMs, so better accuracy means faster missiles means longer effective range.

Quote

I'd love to know how pgi are going to add IS ELRM's when the current Extra range module is pointless.

Higher velocity per missile = better range. Also, if you made LRMs fire-and-forget, so would ELRMs. Nothing like 1250m+ stealth missiles in the air before you even see the 'Mech firing em, right?

[Lukoi Banacek]

LRM BOATS ARE BREAKING THIS GAME


I am not certain...but I think this assertion is patently false.

And no, I don't run many LRM boats (1 of my 192 mechs is a LRM build).

[wanderer]

KrazedOmega, on 27 January 2016 - 07:48 PM, said:

Your guarantee is wrong. I see LRMs in Tier 1 all the time.

That's because you also see Tier 3 players, and hello! I'm one of those missile lobbers.

[Lukoi Banacek]

KrazedOmega, on 27 January 2016 - 07:48 PM, said:

Your guarantee is wrong. I see LRMs in Tier 1 all the time.

I agree.

However, to OP's point....I don't see them breaking the game up there. Or in Tier 4 alt accounts either.

[thehiddenedge]

I feel LRMs are pretty good where they're at right now for what they are supposed to be used for: fire support and softening up targets until your other weapons are in range. They can also help keep an enemy team pinned down. Sure the radar range could be a bit better, and LRMs could be balanced better amongst themselves, but they fit their role.

The problem isn't LRMs, but the people who boat them and are all but useless at close range, and the mentality of players who feel they can hide behind a ridge and "rain death" from afar, because again, they are useless in a direct confrontation. The player on your team who says "hold locks please", that's one less person for the enemy team to shoot at and usually the last one they "mop up". Thank god we don't have Longbows in this game.

Now the REAL problem in this game is the pinpoint laser vomit alpha strikes back to back. The ridiculous heat capacity in this game makes mixed loadouts (you know, like at least 90% of Battletech stock builds) irrelevant and generally a bad idea. Alpha strikes are supposed to be a last ditch effort, not the status quo. Chain firing is currently a rarity, not the norm. Lower the heat capacity overall and we'd see more mixed loadouts. Less boring point and kill and more nuanced, intelligent trades where heat can kill and brawling is a still a thing.