63 replies to this topic

[AbsUserName]

Y U no like lights, PGI???

[WarHippy]

What exactly are you talking about?

[CDLord HHGD]

WarHippy, on 28 January 2016 - 02:00 PM, said:

What exactly are you talking about?

This and if you're complaining about the Arctic Cheetah, well, it was coming....

[AbsUserName]

as a preliminary discussion, let's list some of the most egregious:

-1 - Leg damage from friendly collisions! (the mech computer auto moves friendlies before collisions...?)
0 - Heat damage is more severe on lights (xl side torso destruction; less hp, but same heat damage)
1 - External double heat sink are worse (smaller engines = worse heat dissipation);
2 - Small laser doubled heat
3 - Hard point starvation (Commandos anyone?)
4 - Legged speed shoud be half max speed
5 - MG and flamer aren't useful weapons even up close (they do 2 dmg on battletech with 90m range)


EDIT: (1) grammar. (2) added point 0 and 5, (3) added point -1.

Edited by AbsUserName, 03 February 2016 - 01:56 PM.

[CDLord HHGD]

AbsUserName, on 28 January 2016 - 02:03 PM, said:

as a preliminary discussion, let's list some of the most egregious:

1- External double heat sink are worse (smaller engines = worst heat dissipation);
2- Small laser doubled heat
3- Hard point starvation (Commandos anyone?)
4- Legged speed shoud be half max speed


EDIT: grammar

1. Read: Arctic Cheetah
2. What's a Small Laser?
3. Duh, it's a Light mech.
4. No change in this for a loooooooooooooong time.

[FupDup]

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

1. Read: Arctic Cheetah

A pretty large number of lights have to deal with sub-250 engines being crap, not just the Hankyu. The smaller the light mech, the worse the shafting gets. Slow lights are also smacked by it especially.

A few slower mediums like Vindis and BJs (most variants) also get hit by it.

Sub-250 engines not having all 10 heatsinks on the inside is one of those construction rules that sucks balls.

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

2. What's a Small Laser?

It's an Inner Sphere weapon that has been bad in Tabletop and PGI didn't care enough to make it viable for MWO.

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

3. Duh, it's a Light mech.

If you think lights need to have skimpy hardpoint counts, I bet you'd crap your pants if the Piranha light mech got added...

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

4. No change in this for a loooooooooooooong time.

It's still a crappy system.

Edited by FupDup, 28 January 2016 - 02:14 PM.

[CDLord HHGD]

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 02:10 PM, said:

A pretty large number of lights have to deal with sub-250 engines being crap, not just the Hankyu. The smaller the light mech, the worse the shafting gets. Slow lights are also smacked by it especially.

I equip quite a few sub-250's, even downgrading from 250's. Just can't have it all at once.

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 02:10 PM, said:

A few slower mediums like Vindis and BJs (most variants) also get hit by it.

I see quite a few BJs out there that seem to work very well.

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 02:10 PM, said:

If you think lights need to have skimpy hardpoint counts, I bet you'd crap your pants if the Piranha light mech got added...

12 ballistics don't scare me. It won't have the tonnage to do anything but MGs. Maybe a larger caliber or two.... As for hardpoint starvation or hardpoint inflation. I don;t have a good solution, but the one we got is crap and I do think there are lights with too many....

[FupDup]

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:24 PM, said:

I equip quite a few sub-250's, even downgrading from 250's. Just can't have it all at once.

If you pick a 250+ engine you actually do get to have it all at once. You get more speed, and more agility, and more heat efficiency thanks to having a full set of 10 engine TruDubs. You also get more critslots to build with, which allows some builds to install more tech upgrades to save some tonnage (and thus cancel out the "heavier weight" of the larger engine).

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:24 PM, said:

I see quite a few BJs out there that seem to work very well.

They have pretty big quirks to make that happen...

cdlord, on 28 January 2016 - 02:24 PM, said:

12 ballistics don't scare me. It won't have the tonnage to do anything but MGs. Maybe a larger caliber or two.... As for hardpoint starvation or hardpoint inflation. I don;t have a good solution, but the one we got is crap and I do think there are lights with too many....

The lights with the most hardpoints are actually the lights that came stock with that many weapons (e.g. Firestarter), so you can't remove them.

There are a number of lights that are get pooped on by the system, like the Spider 5V and Commandos, which sit at the bottom of the barrel in terms of usefulness to their team...

[AbsUserName]

The heat damage is more severe on lights. This is even worse because lights usually are XL engine equipped.

For example: if the mech is sustaining 5 dmg/s of heat damage, a Firestarter side torso explodes after 16 dmg (3-4 seconds), while an Atlas side torso explodes after 42 dmg (8-9 seconds). The firestarter is destroyed (xl engine), while the atlas keeps on fighting (std engine).

[AbsUserName]

Besides the small laser being 2 heat instead of 1, the other lights weapons are hardly usable: the Machine Gun and the Flamer (never mind the hard point starvation).

The MG and flamer do 2 damage with 90m range in Battletech. The Ember, for instance, would do 8 dmg per machine gun hit (almost an AC10, in a 35 tonner). The FS9-A could do 16 dmg with 8 flamers.

But alas, the list of weapons of choice of the lights is severely reduced: the medium laser, small pulse laser. The small laser is too hot, the MG and flamer are of little use.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

The problem with small lasers isn't really their heat, it is more you can't mount enough of them to matter to begin with (then maybe we could talk about heat).

[FupDup]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 28 January 2016 - 03:04 PM, said:

The problem with small lasers isn't really their heat, it is more you can't mount enough of them to matter to begin with (then maybe we could talk about heat).

I would want to try something like a combination of reducing the heat and speeding up the cooldown, which would let them deal some quick low-heat damage in very close range.

A slightly shorter beam might also be in order, since the IS ML got its beam shortened a long time ago but the SL stayed the same.

[Lupis Volk]

So what in the light department has been nerfed?

[Khobai]

light mechs are supposed to be bad. theyre bad in tabletop too.

whats bad is people thinking lights were ever supposed to be good.

im not saying lights shouldnt have an important role to play in the game. by all means they should. but that role should not be combat and no one should ever expect a light to beat an assault 1v1. thats dumb. Scouting/electronic warfare should be a crucial role and sadly its not.

game also needs a ticket based respawn system so it can cost mechs appropriately based on their tonnage. when mechs die your team should lose tickets equal to the mech's tonnage. that makes the death of light mechs worth less than assault mechs which is how it should be.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 03:06 PM, said:

I would want to try something like a combination of reducing the heat and speeding up the cooldown, which would let them deal some quick low-heat damage in very close range.

A slightly shorter beam might also be in order, since the IS ML got its beam shortened a long time ago but the SL stayed the same.

Ideally, the Flamer would be the super DPS weapon at that range instead of the SL, while the SL would be the knife fighting alpha-esque weapon, but since we can't have nice things, I suppose making SL into super DPS short range weapons is fine.

Khobai, on 28 January 2016 - 03:07 PM, said:

light mechs are supposed to be bad. theyre bad in tabletop too.

Are we really going to have this argument again, they aren't bad especially given their BV. Besides that, this is a copout answer nor is it a sound reason to keep lights bad. Not sure how I feel about the current status of lights outside the Oxide (which is nuts), but they don't feel quite as dangerous as before the rebalance.

[FupDup]

Khobai, on 28 January 2016 - 03:07 PM, said:

light mechs are supposed to be bad. theyre bad in tabletop too.

whats bad is people thinking lights were ever supposed to be good.

im not saying lights shouldnt have an important role to play in the game. by all means they should. but that role should not be combat and no one should ever expect a light to beat an assault 1v1. thats dumb. Scouting/electronic warfare should be a crucial role and sadly its not.

game also needs a ticket based respawn system so it can cost mechs appropriately based on their tonnage. when mechs die your team should lose tickets equal to the mech's tonnage. that makes the death of light mechs worth less than assault mechs which is how it should be.

The weight class imbalances in TT were because of a few reasons:

1. Because TT was played primarily by old men who like their games to be "real war," and "real war" is not balanced in any way...or fun for that matter.

2. TT allows team setups to be asymmetric in numbers, meaning that you could have a small group of elite units or a large group of cannon fodder. In MWO, both teams are hardlocked to 12 players, which means this approach is impossible.

3. Also, TT let you control multiple units at the same time. This means that if one of your cheapo units died, it wasn't a big deal because you could have a whole army left over. But in this game, every player only gets a single unit at a time, so having each individual unit not suck popsickles is a lot more important.

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 28 January 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

Ideally, the Flamer would be the super DPS weapon at that range instead of the SL, while the SL would be the knife fighting alpha-esque weapon, but since we can't have nice things, I suppose making SL into super DPS short range weapons is fine.

The question this raises is, where does the SPL fit into all of this? At the moment its higher damage and shorter beam kind of already fit it into the alpha-ish role.


Flamers might be able to be some kind of "utility" weapon rather than raw DPS if PGI let them overheat targets instead of the user...

Edited by FupDup, 28 January 2016 - 03:21 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 03:13 PM, said:

Flamers might be able to be some kind of "utility" weapon rather than raw DPS if PGI let them overheat targets instead of the user...

Most lights can barely afford firepower, let alone utility, which is why I feel like Flamers can't really be a utility weapon. Maybe if they were to add plasma weapons utility weapons could be useful?

Not really sure about how to really make the balance between SPL, SL, and Flamers interesting and fair though with regards to roles.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 28 January 2016 - 03:16 PM.

[FupDup]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 28 January 2016 - 03:16 PM, said:

Most lights can barely afford firepower, let alone utility, which is why I feel like Flamers can't really be a utility weapon. Maybe if they were to add plasma weapons utility weapons could be useful?

I don't have any personal issues with Flamers being turned into DPS'ers, I just think it might make balancing the SPL vs SL a bit trickier because of narrowing down the pool of niches available (e.g. there's alpha and there's DPS, what else is there?).

Range might be a possible factor, but then that raises the question of how it compares against the ML/MPL when the range gets too far out...

Edited by FupDup, 28 January 2016 - 03:19 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

FupDup, on 28 January 2016 - 03:17 PM, said:

I don't have any personal issues with Flamers being turned into DPS'ers, I just think it might make balancing the SPL vs SL a bit trickier because of narrowing down the pool of niches available (e.g. there's alpha and there's DPS, what else is there?).

Well if the SPL could be turned into a PPFLD weapon there could be a better distinction but not many would probably be ok with that >_>

That way you would have the FLD - Burst - DPS roles filled.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 28 January 2016 - 03:20 PM.

[FupDup]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 28 January 2016 - 03:19 PM, said:

Well if the SPL could be turned into a PPFLD weapon there could be a better distinction but not many would probably be ok with that >_>

I've had my own little fantasy of turning the Clan ER Micro Laser into PPFLD to make up for having less than half the damage of an ERSL. It would certainly be funny, yet probably not overpowered at all because it's so little damage at really really close range. It would give Novas and the like a new option to boat the crap out of...