82 replies to this topic

[MauttyKoray]

Wanna know the difference between a SL and a MG? Use any mech that has 1E and 1B hardpoints, try to keep the quirks as low as possible. Launch Testing Grounds on a map, look for a mech with a fair sized cockpit (Hunchback is a good one) and stand 30m from it while aiming at the cockpit from straight on. Shoot at it with the SL until it blows up, now relaunch with at least 2-3 tons of MG ammo and do the same thing.

You'll notice a few things (by the way these use stock armor so they should go down pretty quick):
1. The SL takes down the target in a fairly decent amount of time (I used the Hunchback).

2. The MG takes a ridiculous amount of time. In my tests, the MG spread as well, ending up rarely ever even hitting the cockpit (AT 30 METERS!) and instead took out the CT.

The cockpit ended with red dark reddish/orange armor still while the CT blew and even then it took around 2000 rounds to do so (that's an entire ton of ammo on a stock mech, under armored by quickplay standards!). So that's 1.5 tons in which 3 small lasers could take its place, and lets face it, 3 SLs on most mechs (even with all those DHS calculations people have been doing) takes a LOT to overheat a mech.

The comparison of the SL and MG itself is completely idiotic to begin with, as you're comparing an energy and ballistic weapons dependent on different restrictions but doing so while seemingly ignoring these factors.

[Mcgral18]

LordNothing, on 13 February 2016 - 07:22 PM, said:

because std machine gun as a crit seeking weapon is useful. i want a different ballistic weapon (under a couple tons) to chew up armor. then i can mix and match and have a good time.

If MGs were useful, they would be used (see, Ember Era).
They are not, currently.

The Gauss is the superior Crit weapon, laughably, while also being better at Killing.

[MauttyKoray]

Mcgral18, on 13 February 2016 - 07:33 PM, said:

If MGs were useful, they would be used (see, Ember Era).
They are not, currently.

The Gauss is the superior Crit weapon, laughably, while also being better at Killing.

This, Gauss crit needs to be toned down, it does, keep them as they are for damage, but the crit on these are ridiculous especially with dual builds which basically wrecked weapons all the time.

As for the MGs, they're great crit weapons, HOWEVER, the combination of MINIMAL damage, ammo requirements, BALLISTIC SLOT USAGE, and to top it all off a Cone of Fire?! The only realistic use is by boating them, which means you need multiple ballistic slots and most mechs with enough to effectively boat them are then lacking in the number of Energy or Missile slots needed to produce enough damage to first strip the ungodly amount of armor that people normally put on their mechs. In contrast to multiple mixed laser builds, large ACs/multi-AC builds, LRM/SRM boats, or combination builds that more effectively make use of hardpoints, slots, and/or tonnage? The Machine Gun, as well as the flamer, are literally the MOST USELESS weapons in this game, more so even than a TAG or NARC which don't even do damage.

Edited by MauttyKoray, 13 February 2016 - 07:57 PM.

[Cabusha]

The "good crit seeking weapon" thing is crap since Clan was introduced. Free case in every location means cascading ammo explosions only exist on IS mechs. Half the chassis you see in game at Clan, so why bring a weapon that's only good when a mech is almost dead, and only on mechs that account for 1/2 the targets. Add in the short range and face tanking needed to use them, and they're crap.

Before Clans, I used to run a MG Spider with a MPL. I would surgically snip at the lightly armored legs of heavies and assaults with the MPL, then go one a MG murder spree with 4xMG and crit out the legs until the ammo exploded. It was glorious. Today, it's crap. Other weapons deal more reliable damage and kill faster, before mgs can do their work.

Edited by Cabusha, 13 February 2016 - 08:39 PM.

[pbiggz]

mogs01gt, on 12 February 2016 - 01:53 PM, said:

Machine guns were used on mechs for infantry. We have no infantry so machine guns shouldnt exist.

What do you mean by "mech grade weapon"?

In the very earliest BT versions, there was no infantry or armor. There WAS machine guns, which were a close ranged alternative to the AC2. The narrative that Machine guns MUST be useless against other mechs, because they have to be relegated to countering non-existent infantry is simply false, and any hard core TT fanboy who spreads this fallacy should be ashamed of himself, for he spreads lies about his precious tabletop game.

[wanderer]

Prosperity Park, on 13 February 2016 - 05:34 PM, said:

Hey, I'm not the one asking for a 1/2 ton, 1 slot heatless weapon to be as good as a 1/2 ton, 1 slot weapon that produces heat.

Honestly, in TT an MG isn't equal to an SL.

Small lasers are one heat and three damage, MG's are zero heat (and require ammo) for two damage. On the other hand, MWO SL's are able to pinpoint damage and deal full damage to armor, while MWO MG's are spread damage and...well, you know.

[YakkSlapper]

SMG's being scary in 'computer battletech' go way back to its origins in crescent hawks inception/revenge, load a locust with smg's, run up behind a battlemaster, kneecap them in seconds for highest salvage/pay, (flank anything really)NEXT!

[El Bandito]

Still fondly remember mugging Assault mechs in a dark alley with my 11 MG Summoner in MW4 urban maps. Thanks to a functional collision system, I kept them pressed against a corner and stripped them of their armor, while they struggled like a nun trying to protect her virginity.

MGs certainly were mech killers back then.

Edited by El Bandito, 14 February 2016 - 12:36 AM.

[LordNothing]

Mcgral18, on 13 February 2016 - 07:33 PM, said:

If MGs were useful, they would be used (see, Ember Era).
They are not, currently.

The Gauss is the superior Crit weapon, laughably, while also being better at Killing.

i use them. got 5 kills with my arrow in a match last night (hero runs for the event), 4 were entirely due to my machine guns. only one required softening up with my 3 large lasers first. after 2 or 3 shots, some armor is opened up, which is around the time you are overheating, apply machine guns and that target will be dead before you can fire your lasers again. i have a kit fox and had a spider which were both good at the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

also the gauss is a bad example. because its crit chance is just a small bonus on its overall effect. when you think of its cool down attached to that crit chance it seems miniscule in compairison. where you have multiple machine guns applying frequent dice rolls to bust up your stuff. i also think its really unfair to compare one of the heaviest weapons in the game with one of the lightest. the mgs and the ammo to use them is going to be less than the gauss ammo alone.

also slot usage is a non issue because many mechs have inflated slots (in one section) just to make machine gun and ac2 builds viable. 2 slots is usually sufficient in an arm and 3 in a torso are enough to run a triple ac5 build. bansh 3e has 4. and thats nice if you have some machine guns to back up lasers. its certainly not great for boating ac2s (there are better mechs for that). frankly the 3e is best used to carry heavy guns and light lasers.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 February 2016 - 06:13 AM.

[Karamarka]

LordNothing, on 13 February 2016 - 07:22 PM, said:

because std machine gun as a crit seeking weapon is useful. i want a different ballistic weapon (under a couple tons) to chew up armor. then i can mix and match and have a good time.

umm no.

MG is garbage. if you play with MG u probably do under 200 damage.

[Trauglodyte]

What I don't understand is why people are so against buffing the MG. Paul aside, what are you worried about? The BJ- Arrow is the only mech, aside from the one Jager, that can run 6 MGs. Is the thought of a 65 ton mech running around with MGs blazing that worrisome to you? It can't be because of Small Lasers because mechs that are able to boat them already can where as, like I indicated above, you can't boat MGs. This isn't a situation where we pro-MG types are trying to make them better than Small Lasers. We just want MGs to actually work. For all I care, take away the +crit concept - it doesn't work anyway because the critical hit system isn't in game and if you're doing less than 0.1 damage per shot, you'd need a 20-50X multiplier for it to do anything (I don't remember the current MG crit multiplier). Even then, my goal of shooting you with my weapons is to kill you. It IS NOT, nor has it ever been, to remove your armor, remove your weapons, and then, if I feel like it, removing your body parts. I want to punch you in the face and get you out of the game so that I can move on. I want to hurt you and kill you as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you don't have the opportunity to kill me and/or anyone on my team. If I'm operating under the guise of trying to strip mechs, I'm doing my team a great disservice because it is slow - this game isn't predicated upon "slow".

[Funkmaster Rick]

Wintersdark, on 12 February 2016 - 03:56 PM, said:

Yeah, but there's all kinds of stupid things in the books. A hell of a lot of REALLY stupid things that, if you wanted to start taking passages out of the novels as guidelines for how the game should work, things would go really sideways really fast.

I feel like this point needs more attention brought to it. A variety of authors have worked on BT novels over the years. Not all of them necessarily had a firm understanding of military tactics or mechanical/structural engineering.

[Amsro]

mogs01gt, on 12 February 2016 - 01:44 PM, said:

Well, machine guns were rarely used vs mechs in Lore. So why should they even exist in MWO?

You post this all to often and fail to even check to see that in fact they are good vs mechs and AMAZING at taking out infantry small machinery, as a HALF TON weapon should be. Those are some serious sized bullets.

2 Damage same as the AC/2 in lore. So why should they not do 2 damage in MWO?

[Deathlike]

Trauglodyte, on 14 February 2016 - 01:39 PM, said:

What I don't understand is why people are so against buffing the MG. Paul aside, what are you worried about? The BJ- Arrow is the only mech, aside from the one Jager, that can run 6 MGs. Is the thought of a 65 ton mech running around with MGs blazing that worrisome to you? It can't be because of Small Lasers because mechs that are able to boat them already can where as, like I indicated above, you can't boat MGs. This isn't a situation where we pro-MG types are trying to make them better than Small Lasers. We just want MGs to actually work. For all I care, take away the +crit concept - it doesn't work anyway because the critical hit system isn't in game and if you're doing less than 0.1 damage per shot, you'd need a 20-50X multiplier for it to do anything (I don't remember the current MG crit multiplier). Even then, my goal of shooting you with my weapons is to kill you. It IS NOT, nor has it ever been, to remove your armor, remove your weapons, and then, if I feel like it, removing your body parts. I want to punch you in the face and get you out of the game so that I can move on. I want to hurt you and kill you as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you don't have the opportunity to kill me and/or anyone on my team. If I'm operating under the guise of trying to strip mechs, I'm doing my team a great disservice because it is slow - this game isn't predicated upon "slow".

You are forgetting the 6MG King Crab.

I'm sure there's a case of food poisoning somewhere.

[pbiggz]

El Bandito, on 14 February 2016 - 12:21 AM, said:

Still fondly remember mugging Assault mechs in a dark alley with my 11 MG Summoner in MW4 urban maps. Thanks to a functional collision system, I kept them pressed against a corner and stripped them of their armor, while they struggled like a nun trying to protect her virginity.

MGs certainly were mech killers back then.

Ah but you see, that wasn't 11 machine guns, that was actually 44 machine guns (assuming you were using clan).

Mechwarrior 4 has machine gun arrays, something I feel we should have had in MWO from the beginning.

IS machine gun arrays had 3 built in machine guns and weighed in at 1.5 tons. Clan machine gun arrays had 4 machine guns and weighed in at 2 tons.

See, while there is not weight savings, thats not the operative part of machine gun arrays. The important part is that you cram many more machine guns into single hardpoints than you otherwise would if you were forced to take the single machine guns.

There's simply no good reason to have single machine guns in this game. Arrays make the weapon system usable, and the increased tonnage makes them far easier to balance.

[wanderer]

If MG's effectively took up 1/2 a ballistic hardpoint, they'd still be useless...

...but you could mount up to 12-14 or so to run next to that flamer Nova.

You could even compare two MG's to an SRM-2. A third of the range for none of the heat.

[Deathlike]

pbiggz, on 14 February 2016 - 03:38 PM, said:

Ah but you see, that wasn't 11 machine guns, that was actually 44 machine guns (assuming you were using clan).

Mechwarrior 4 has machine gun arrays, something I feel we should have had in MWO from the beginning.

IS machine gun arrays had 3 built in machine guns and weighed in at 1.5 tons. Clan machine gun arrays had 4 machine guns and weighed in at 2 tons.

See, while there is not weight savings, thats not the operative part of machine gun arrays. The important part is that you cram many more machine guns into single hardpoints than you otherwise would if you were forced to take the single machine guns.

There's simply no good reason to have single machine guns in this game. Arrays make the weapon system usable, and the increased tonnage makes them far easier to balance.

Well, the thing is with MW4 is that it made sense given the hardpoint system it used (because, single MGs would take up more slots unnecessarily as a consequence).

[PocketYoda]

Why add weapons to a game PGI and then nerf them into oblivion....

kinda pointless adding them in the first place then..

[mogs01gt]

Wintersdark, on 13 February 2016 - 04:46 PM, said:

1) Novels are, insofar as Battletech goes, not canon in terms of what weapons and such do. Battletech is. Various authors all have (sometimes wildly) different ideas of things, most of which are based 100% on what that author thought sounded cool in his scene.
Battletech rules clearly show a machine gun does the same damage to a mech as an ac2.
2) "most of the slugs going wide as he sprayed in an arc 60 degrees in front of his 'Mech.The few that hit bounced like peas off the side of an elephant."
60 degree arc. Only a few shells hit. This is, in Tabletop parlance, a miss. In MWO even with high damage machine guns would be the same. Get hit by just a couple bullets out of a 60 degree spray and you're not taking any damage of note.
Try it. Take a triple ac2 mech. Spray rapidly across 60 degrees. Even if a shell from each hits, you're probably doing two damage to each of three facings. One would scoff at that as shells bouncing off your armor (which is essentially what happens when even ac20 shells hit mech armor without penetrating)
You're basically drawing a really sketchy conclusion from a mostly missed spray and pray shot in a novel written by some random dude.
On the other side of the debate?
Rules with actual numbers that show the machine gun (just one) does exactly the same damage as an AC2 assuming a hit.
Really, you have zero legs to stand on here.

We'll agree to disagree.

I dont care about TT and you guys dont care about Lore.

[man du]

Mcgral18, on 12 February 2016 - 01:58 PM, said:

You know, half ton weapons designed to remove armour?

this is how I imagine my locust!