Quickdraw Crobat, on 14 February 2016 - 12:50 PM, said:
Two points.
- PGI has gone to a lot of work to at least try to make each 'mech roughly equal. At the very least, they've tried to do away with the fact of Battletech that a 20-tonne 'mech is inherently a worse team member than a 100-tonne 'mech (situational modification notwithstanding) because there would be a lot less variety then. If we're measuring everything by raw damage (which I don't think we should, but if we are), then shouldn't the damage number be regardless of tonnage?
- There's a point where you're wasting damage spraying nonvital components to rack up extra numbers. How do you elect to factor this in?
See? This is good argument making. Good points overall. Here's my response.
No matter how hard PGI might try to mitigate things, a 100-ton mech and a 20-ton mech will never be equal. And really, none of the systems in the game are designed to treat them as such. If a 20-ton and 100-ton could be considered equivalent, and capable of equal output, then there'd be no need to enforce team class make-ups or tonnage values. A team of 100-ton assaults and a team of 20-ton lights would be a fair match-up, right?
So no, no matter what PGI does, mechs of different tons should have different expected outputs. That's not to specify their value to the team. A light mech can't output the damage an assault can, but it has value elsewhere. This is why damage is less of a consideration to match score and rewards than it has been in the past. But obviously the degree to which damage output factors into the total value of a mech increases with mech weight. Larger mechs are focused more on damage output and have less value outside that compared to smaller mechs.
In those terms, larger mechs should always be expected to outperform lighter mechs when it comes to damage. And in that category, the heavier you are, the higher your damage output should be. The simple fact is, larger mechs can generally mount a spread of weapons capable of doing higher damage, and are generally more survivable. There is pretty much nothing PGI can ever do to change that. I've long argued against using damage as a primary scoring mechanic, because it undervalues other important team factors... but for assaults, no... damage is your whole goal here. As such, no... expected damage should go up by weight, and the generally accepted notion is that a mech should be built in a way to be able to output 10 damage per ton. That's not to say you'll always score 1000 damage in a 100-ton mech, but you should be trying to hit that mark in order to justify the tonnage investment your team has made into you.
As for the second point, this is actually an argument against the OP's build, and fits into a point I've been making about the inflated damage perception of LRMs. Because LRMs produce so much spread damage, little of the actual damage output goes into strikes that actually result in a mech kill. So when you see 600pts of damage on an LRM mech, it's probably work 300pts of damage on a mech doing direct damage when you consider the actual contribution of that damage to rendering kills.
Now, if you're rocking 600 damage, but are pulling in 3-4 KMDDs at the same time, obviously your damage figures are acceptable, as you're running very efficiently. But there's no doubt, then, that you're contributing. Noone is going to complain about a player "only" doing 600 damage in a 100-ton mech if he's getting the kills to go along with it. You're not going to get that with LRMs. And I do sincerely mean KMDD... I'm very glad the game makes that distinction now. Because it's an entirely different thing to lob LRMs at a mech that's already mostly dead and get a kill. It's a rare thing when you bring a mech down through LRMs alone.
But obviously, if the team felt the OP was contributing properly, you're not going to see them complain about his build. You're not going to complain about an Atlas rocking 4 kills a match.