82 replies to this topic

[Past]

RVN-4X is cursed for me spent tons of Cbills making it a twin AC2 build when it had big ballistic range quirk then shortly after removed that. Just recently Spent a ton of Cbills remaking it as a twin ERLL build due to the energy range quirk and now that's gone. Time to just give up and sell it was pretty lousy even with the long range.
Though i did really like it when it had the ballistic range quirks AC2 was over 1KM effective with the range module good times.
They aren't adding in anything extra quirk wise for the ones that lost range are they?

[FupDup]

Past, on 18 February 2016 - 05:22 PM, said:

They aren't adding in anything extra quirk wise for the ones that lost range are they?

There was a rumor/speculation that they would, but judging from the past...the answer is lolno.

Maybe if you use something derpy like an Artemis LRM20 on that Raven, the Quirk Gods will give you +5% faster missile cooldown? And then revoke it a few patches later...

[Sereglach]

Instead of taking the logical, elegant, and simple route, PGI instead went for the absolute most convoluted type of answer they possibly could. Why not just make it a beam duration weapon with a 4.75 second cooldown, at that point? This "solution" is utterly ridiculous. I'm just . . . floored.

Fixed, flat values to provide modest damage, heat damage, and heat generation are all that are needed. Seriously, something akin to 1.0 DPS, 1.0 Heat DPS, and .5 HPS would fix everything, there'd be no exploits and there'd be a reasonably balanced weapon that can utilize the constant stream-fire mechanic the weapon system has.

I'm almost starting to think that the Flamer code must be lostech, like the LBX code. Seriously, there's no other logical explanation for this convoluted system to remain in place.

I'm sorry, PGI, but I can't support this or acknowledge anything done to the Flamer since this patch as a "fix". The visual effect is a decent improvement . . . considering the goal is to remove the "flamer blindness" that existed. Otherwise this whole debacle is a joke. The weapon is now going to be sentenced to death, again.

[veedubfreak]

I guess flamers being useful was cutting into the lrm/large laser meta too much. I mean, god forbid someone gets within 100m of a mech and has the ability to do 0 damage but heat up the opponent.

For real though, this game has the most incompetent developers I have ever seen.

[Cranky Puppy]

This FLAMER LOOKS LIKE CRAP...PURE CRAP VISUALLY......

THE OLD ONE WAS MUCH BETTER...YES I KNOW ITS CAPS...BUT THE OLD ONE LOOKED LIKE A WW2 FLAMER THROWER WHICH WAS COOL. IT ALSO BLINDED THE ENEMY SO IT HAD DUAL PURPOSE.

PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK....AND ADD THE HEAT EFFECT.

[WANTED]

Cranky Puppy, on 18 February 2016 - 06:32 PM, said:

This FLAMER LOOKS LIKE CRAP...PURE CRAP VISUALLY......

THE OLD ONE WAS MUCH BETTER...YES I KNOW ITS CAPS...BUT THE OLD ONE LOOKED LIKE A WW2 FLAMER THROWER WHICH WAS COOL. IT ALSO BLINDED THE ENEMY SO IT HAD DUAL PURPOSE.

PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK....AND ADD THE HEAT EFFECT.

This! Heard it was for FPS issues but please...don't believe that. The blinding effect never ever bothered me. I can't even remember a game this was a factor really. Please bring that good looking flamer FX back.

[Mcgral18]

Wintersdark, on 18 February 2016 - 03:57 PM, said:

On the user, not on the target.

Flamer effects on the target are flat rate but it doesn't matter, because that rate is high, so you heatcap an opposing mech in just a couple seconds regardless.

Heat on the firing mech does increase, but it really should: It's pretty mild initially allowing you to heat cap someone and hold them there for a little while, but it prevents you from just locking them down forever.

Here's how it works just holding down the trigger with a single flamer burning (chainfire == firing one flamer constantly)



Each flamer is inflicting a flat 4.5 heat per second. You can see how the heat gain lingering effect works too, as I pause after heating up then fire the other two flamers.

Actually, it's incremental for both target and shooter.

Shooter starts at 1 H/s (same as old) and increments at 4.75s (old was 6.something)
Target starts at 4.5 H/s (old was ZERO H/s) and increments at 3s (same)

See:


Whale starts with something like 6.61 H/s dissipation to the 4.5 of the Flamer...but that doesn't keep it at bay
93 heat cap

[Navid A1]

Sky Hawk, on 18 February 2016 - 03:58 PM, said:

Yee! Hot-Fix! MWO Patch without a Hot-Fix is like,.... a 12 vs 12 match, without a single DC-er..... it is not MWO anymore...



Beside that.. I think, Flamers generating too mutch heat on a target... Overheating 60-100 tonnes of steal and other stuff in just some seconds? Thats just crazy.. even a nuclear reactor couldn't do that... and a 1 tonne Flammer can? Really?

You know that 1 ton flamer is actually ejecting super heated plasma directly from the mech reactor right?

in other words... its not the flamer that is heating up the target... its a freakin fusion reactor doing it. Think of the flamer as a 1 ton nozzle!

[Wintersdark]

Mcgral18, on 18 February 2016 - 07:46 PM, said:

Actually, it's incremental for both target and shooter.

Shooter starts at 1 H/s (same as old) and increments at 4.75s (old was 6.something)
Target starts at 4.5 H/s (old was ZERO H/s) and increments at 3s (same)

See:


Whale starts with something like 6.61 H/s dissipation to the 4.5 of the Flamer...but that doesn't keep it at bay
93 heat cap

Thanks for the correction; my bad, and I stand fixt.

WANTED, on 18 February 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

This! Heard it was for FPS issues but please...don't believe that. The blinding effect never ever bothered me. I can't even remember a game this was a factor really. Please bring that good looking flamer FX back.

Yeah, it wasn't about fps, it was because of the blinding. And yeah, that was stupid: just like the nerf back a while to the AC2 when people were stagger firing it so they added ghost heat. It wasn't actually making the AC2 any better, but people freaked right out about it and that just had to be "Fixed".

veedubfreak, on 18 February 2016 - 05:57 PM, said:

I guess flamers being useful was cutting into the lrm/large laser meta too much. I mean, god forbid someone gets within 100m of a mech and has the ability to do 0 damage but heat up the opponent.

For real though, this game has the most incompetent developers I have ever seen.

You sincerely think this breaks flamers? Really?

They still work fine, you just can't hold someone at heat cap for more than ~20-30 seconds or so...

If you still haven't killed someone in that time, then maybe you should just back off and try a different approach.

[Kozenger]

Wintersdark, on 18 February 2016 - 08:01 PM, said:

They still work fine, you just can't hold someone at heat cap for more than ~20-30 seconds or so...

If you still haven't killed someone in that time, then maybe you should just back off and try a different approach.

Keeping someone at heat cap for 30 seconds is working fine ? I'm glad you aren't in charge of balance. If you want to back to table top like everyone else seems to want to the default behavior of a flamer was two damage and ZERO heat to the target. If all parties agreed you could change it to two heat and zero damage to the target. Not both. This massive heat spike and "heat locking" stuff while doing damage is just absurd.

Allow us to affect the environment with flamers. Set fires to trees or patches of ground that allow you to shape the battle field and gain a tactical advantage. Maybe you can raise the ambient heat of an area that's blasted with a flamer. Make a small section of a cold map into a normal map or a normal map into a hot map. Something else other than LAWLALWLAWLOLOL!!111!! you can't shoot any weapons.

[FupDup]

Kozenger, on 18 February 2016 - 08:24 PM, said:

Keeping someone at heat cap for 30 seconds is working fine ? I'm glad you aren't in charge of balance. If you want to back to table top like everyone else seems to want to the default behavior of a flamer was two damage and ZERO heat to the target. If all parties agreed you could change it to two heat and zero damage to the target. Not both. This massive heat spike and "heat locking" stuff while doing damage is just absurd.

The amount of damage they do right now is virtually zero.

To be exact, it's 0.1 DPS.

Let's use the TT value for comparison. 2 damage with a 10 second cooldown (turn duration) results in 0.2 DPS.

Thus, the Flamer does HALF of the DPS it dealt in TT.

But wait, there's more. MWO has doubled armor and structure across the board. In fact, many mechs have MORE than double armor and/or structure via quirks. As such, this means that all damage values are essentially "cut in half" because they have to drill through twice as much (or more) health points. For example, a single Gauss Rifle in TT was about as powerful as twin Gauss in MWO.

So, this means that with doubled armor/structure accounted for, Flamers deal only 1/4 of the damage they dealt in TT. And to add more fuel to the fire (pun intended), they also spread this damage all over via DoT instead of concentrating it into a single hit location like TT.


TL;DR: MWO Flamers deal massively lower damage than TT Flamers, and TT Flamers were weak to begin with... Right now our Flamers are great for the heating up part, but useless for damage.

Edited by FupDup, 18 February 2016 - 08:50 PM.

[Shiney]

I can walk on Lava in my Mech - 700 to 1,200 °C (1,292 to 2,192 °F).
Gasoline burning 900 to 1,250 °C

So, a similar effect as lava. How come lava and flamethrowers aren't similar in effect?

[Void Angel]

FupDup, on 18 February 2016 - 04:12 PM, said:

No, it really should not.

For balancing, they can increase the static heat per second value on the shooter to be closer to the HPS on the target if need be. Or, they could reduce the HPS on the target instead. Or meet somewhere in the middle.

Exponential increase over time is an absolutely, positively dumb mechanic

The idea is to avoid situations where a 'mech can be locked down indefinitely by another player, while still having the flamer do something of note. Doing some rough theorycrafting, it seems difficult to set flamers to a value that will prevent excessively long lockdown times, and yet still allow the flamer to be useful for a wide variety of builds and tonnages. Take a hypothetical case where you built a 65-ton Mech around flamers. With a heat cap of over 81 points, you can estimate the time to overheat pretty easily if you assume the 'mech is only firing flamers; lets take the old tabletop values as a base. For our hypothetical Thunderbolt (pretending it has no energy heat gen quirks,) you'd be potentially firing 5 flamers at 3 hps per: this yields a shutdown time of roughly seven seconds (I can't find the USB to charge my graphing calculator.) At the same time, those 5 flamers would have imparted ~70 points of heat to the target - easily enough to incapacitate and internally damage most 'mechs if we jumped our target in a firefight, but wait, there's more! We don't have to fire all of those flamers all the time: once our target starts slowing his weapon fire, we can just guesstimate his heat per second cooling and switch to the appropriate number of flamers. In most cases, two should do the trick - this extends our available burn time, and heaven help anyone who shuts down in front of us! One roast of long pork, coming right up!

A 35-ton Mech will give us similar results on a smaller scale (~5 seconds to overheat and ~50 points of heat imparted,) though not a linear one (the Jenner is better/ton,) but the effects on the target will not scale linearly. Currently, having low-heat weapons is a good thing when dealing with flamers (you'd need a heat capacity of over 150 to safely fire an ERPPC at max flamer-heating,) but linear heat won't care about that as much: what will matter most, defensively, is heat-efficiency - scaling inversely with heat generation via firepower. So a 'mech that really has a lot more heat sinks than it needs is going to be better against flamers - and worse against everything else. I'm not sure this is good for balance, overall.

The current scaling heat system is there to allow for reasonably powerful heat effects from flamers without their totally overpowering their targets. There may be other and/or better solutions (or not,) but it's a thought-out mechanic with a specific purpose in mind, not an inherently stupid idea.

[Kozenger]

FupDup, on 18 February 2016 - 08:42 PM, said:

The amount of damage they do right now is virtually zero.

To be exact, it's 0.1 DPS.

Let's use the TT value for comparison. 2 damage with a 10 second cooldown (turn duration) results in 0.2 DPS.

Thus, the Flamer does HALF of the DPS it dealt in TT.

But wait, there's more. MWO has doubled armor and structure across the board. In fact, many mechs have MORE than double armor and/or structure via quirks. As such, this means that all damage values are essentially "cut in half" because they have to drill through twice as much (or more) health points. For example, a single Gauss Rifle in TT was about as powerful as twin Gauss in MWO.

So, this means that with doubled armor/structure accounted for, Flamers deal only 1/4 of the damage they dealt in TT. And to add more fuel to the fire (pun intended), they also spread this damage all over via DoT instead of concentrating it into a single hit location like TT.


TL;DR: MWO Flamers deal massively lower damage than TT Flamers, and TT Flamers were weak to begin with... Right now our Flamers are great for the heating up part, but useless for damage.

Why don't you do all that math for the heat generated then tell me it isn't absurd.

[Void Angel]

FupDup, on 18 February 2016 - 08:42 PM, said:

TL;DR: MWO Flamers deal massively lower damage than TT Flamers, and TT Flamers were weak to begin with... Right now our Flamers are great for the heating up part, but useless for damage.

I hate to break it to you, man, but ("Tabletop justification for MWO balance" problem aside) if you were dealing damage with a flamer in Tabletop, you weren't imparting heat, and vice versa. You could switch back and forth every time you fired, but you couldn't do both. Unfortunately, MWO doesn't support "ammo switching" yet, so we're stuck with either heat, or damage, or a non-Tabletop hybrid system of some kind.

[Wintersdark]

Shiney, on 18 February 2016 - 08:53 PM, said:

I can walk on Lava in my Mech - 700 to 1,200 °C (1,292 to 2,192 °F).
Gasoline burning 900 to 1,250 °C

So, a similar effect as lava. How come lava and flamethrowers aren't similar in effect?

It's not a flamethrower in the sense of flamethrowers we have right now. It's venting superheated plasma directly from the mech's reactor, not just shooting burning napalm.

Void Angel, on 18 February 2016 - 09:00 PM, said:

I hate to break it to you, man, but ("Tabletop justification for MWO balance" problem aside) if you were dealing damage with a flamer in Tabletop, you weren't imparting heat, and vice versa. You could switch back and forth every time you fired, but you couldn't do both. Unfortunately, MWO doesn't support "ammo switching" yet, so we're stuck with either heat, or damage, or a non-Tabletop hybrid system of some kind.

And heat is more interesting than damage, as it adds depth to our mech combat. We have plenty of short range damage dealing energy weapons.

[Void Angel]

WANTED, on 18 February 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

This! Heard it was for FPS issues but please...don't believe that. The blinding effect never ever bothered me. I can't even remember a game this was a factor really. Please bring that good looking flamer FX back.

That's a matter of graphical settings - if you like things to be pretty, flamers could totally blind you, just like LRMs from the right (or wrong) angle.

[Wintersdark]

Kozenger, on 18 February 2016 - 08:24 PM, said:

Keeping someone at heat cap for 30 seconds is working fine ? I'm glad you aren't in charge of balance. If you want to back to table top like everyone else seems to want to the default behavior of a flamer was two damage and ZERO heat to the target. If all parties agreed you could change it to two heat and zero damage to the target. Not both. This massive heat spike and "heat locking" stuff while doing damage is just absurd.

Realistically, you're not going to keep someone at heat cap for 20-30 seconds - I was making a point, not saying that's what should happen.

Basically, you'll never have that opportunity. It just doesn't happen if people in the match aren't utterly stupid.

And THAT was my point. If you haven't accomplished what you set out to very quickly, you're not accomplishing anything.

As such, this change, while *technically* a nerf to flamers, is only really a nerf to a flamer exploit. They still work just fine at what they are intended to do.

They're totally not OP. I see some around, and they have impact, but they're not dominating the battlefield. 90m max range is a severe limitation.

Quote

Allow us to affect the environment with flamers. Set fires to trees or patches of ground that allow you to shape the battle field and gain a tactical advantage. Maybe you can raise the ambient heat of an area that's blasted with a flamer. Make a small section of a cold map into a normal map or a normal map into a hot map. Something else other than LAWLALWLAWLOLOL!!111!! you can't shoot any weapons.

Would be awesome, but probably technologically infeasible (maps not being designed to support that). Not to say it'd be impossible, but more work than they're willing to put into flamers right now.

Void Angel, on 18 February 2016 - 09:04 PM, said:

That's a matter of graphical settings - if you like things to be pretty, flamers could totally blind you, just like LRMs from the right (or wrong) angle.

Or autocannon fire, or even laser fire. It wasn't a problem, IMHO. But whatever, I don't care much either way.

[FupDup]

Void Angel, on 18 February 2016 - 09:00 PM, said:

I hate to break it to you, man, but ("Tabletop justification for MWO balance" problem aside) if you were dealing damage with a flamer in Tabletop, you weren't imparting heat, and vice versa. You could switch back and forth every time you fired, but you couldn't do both. Unfortunately, MWO doesn't support "ammo switching" yet, so we're stuck with either heat, or damage, or a non-Tabletop hybrid system of some kind.

I never intended to take the position of "TT justification," because in such an event Flamers would have to be nerfed back into near uselessness (they were extremely bad against mechs in TT, they could do a little damage or heat but nothing that posed a threat).

And really, doing 0.1 DPS at the same time as imparting heat is pretty strange to think of as "out of line." 0.1 DPS is pretty much nothing at all, even when used against a 20 ton mech with stock armor values.

The TT rule of dealing either 2 damage "or" 2 heat, for 3 points of heat on the user, made Flamers utterly crap. Even if they dealt both 2 heat and 2 damage simultaneously in TT, they would have still been hard to justify in mech vs. mech fights.

Damage and heat at the same time is a non-issue, especially when the damage value is nearly nonexistent.

It also just doesn't even make sense for separate "heating modes." If something is hot enough to melt off mech armor, why wouldn't it increase the target's heat at all? And on the other hand, if something is hot enough to increase the mech's internal heat level from the outside, why wouldn't it be hot enough to cause some harm to the outside armor?

Edited by FupDup, 18 February 2016 - 09:08 PM.

[Tarogato]

Past, on 18 February 2016 - 05:22 PM, said:

RVN-4X is cursed for me spent tons of Cbills making it a twin AC2 build when it had big ballistic range quirk then shortly after removed that. Just recently Spent a ton of Cbills remaking it as a twin ERLL build due to the energy range quirk and now that's gone. Time to just give up and sell it was pretty lousy even with the long range.
Though i did really like it when it had the ballistic range quirks AC2 was over 1KM effective with the range module good times.
They aren't adding in anything extra quirk wise for the ones that lost range are they?

You never need range quirks for AC/2 anyways. Stock standard AC/2 has 720m optimal... how often do you legitimately find yourself shooting at mechs from beyond 720m? What AC/2 benefits from the most is cooldown, velocity, and heat gen.