14 replies to this topic

[Xenophontis]

Hi all,

So I decided to play some MWO again, and I am afraid I am a bit lost. I have not played since the Highlander was first released, and I'm not sure what's going on anymore. The UI is a lot different and the whole clan mech thing seems weird. Are they any different? I seemed to have missed out on a lot of changes.

What's a good place/way to get reintroduced to everything? What's considered strong these days? When I quit it was pretty much all PPC poptarting and LRMs were like paper wads. Can I just hop into my old Mech builds or should I run trials again? Trials used to be awful, did they change the basic load outs?

Thanks,

[GRiPSViGiL]

Nothing really has changed concerning gameplay aside from the meta. Things are just as pointless as they ever were. Just use metamechs for builds or figure it out for yourself or just do your own thing. Oh ya there are more mechs but any rational person knows that isn't content.

[Alistair Winter]

Not much of a change. There's more laservomit and SRM or ballistic boating than before. Poptarting and deathballs replaced by firing lines and Nascar (i.e. both teams chasing each others' tails) in the solo queue.

Highlanders went from being some of the best mechs to arguably the worst Inner Sphere assault. Or close to the worst. Relatively few people use PPCs now. Jump jets are now used to climb over pebbles, at least for heavies and assaults.

Beyond that, I don't know that the game has changed so much.

Edited by Alistair Winter, 01 March 2016 - 07:31 AM.

[xWiredx]

A good place to start might be the tutorial to get yourself reacquainted with the controls and see how movement, accuracy, etc feel. You know, now that we finally have one of those tutorial things. Plus you can put a few more cbills in your pocket to buy something shiny and new if you want.

If you were a fan of the Highlander poptart meta, I'm sorry for your loss. Jumpjets are now hoverjets and gauss+ppc have been desynced. There is also a charge mechanic on the gauss rifle now. To replace this, go with the dakka meta. Grab a Mauler MX90, King Crab, or Direwolf. The alternative is the laser vomit meta, but it is as befitting of a self-respecting assault pilot (though who are we kidding, it's still effective and that's why it's sticking around).

[Alistair Winter]

Xenophontis, on 01 March 2016 - 07:25 AM, said:

What's a good place/way to get reintroduced to everything?

Personally, I'd just play the game. Don't mean to sound blunt, but there you go.

[MoonUnitBeta]

SINCE THE HIGHLANDER?! Wow, long time. Welcome back!
Just off the top of my head…

• Lots more mechs.
  
• We got a new UI.
  
• There's a new play area called Faction Play. This is Community Warfare, however it's in "Beta 2, Phase 2". With Phase 3 coming soon which will flesh out what it means to be a loyalist, etc. I wouldn't recommend it for Solo Play. Wait times are long. You have a drop deck of 4 mechs, and you either defend or attack a base. on new maps for
  
• If you have Premium Time, you can make a group and launch a Private Match, and you can play 1v1, or any size of match, etc. Anything you do in Private Matches does not reflect against your c-bills, xp, etc. for obvious reasons.
  
• 3^RD Person view was added. Not game breaking. Was mainly implemented for new users to help visualize the mech’s leg to torso differences in orientation.
  
• There’s a Tutorial, with various different things to mess around in
  
• You can drop into “Testing Grounds” to test out your builds by shooting stationary mechs and explore maps.
  
• More Modules (weapon range and cooldown modules added to aid your builds)
  
• We have Consumables nows (coolshot, artillery strike, etc)
  
• Heat and Thermal Vision modes reworked
  
• Revision to match making (simply put: an individualized ELO Rating): Match Score and PSR. Match Score is based on how many things you do in-game (component destructions, most damage dealt, kills, assists, capping, scouting, etc). PSR is based on how whether your team won or not, and how high your match score was (low match score results in reduction in PSR, high match score results in increase of your PSR). There are 5 tiers of PSR, and a T5 player will not be matched with a T1 player. You can see your PSR rating and progression in the home screen.
  
• More maps.
  
• Clans, basically the same as Inner Sphere mechs, except you can swap out arms, and torsos to mix and match hard points. Clan Mechs have different flavoured weapons (AC’s shoot many bullets consecutively, lasers are different colours, weapons weigh less, but have higher heat, damage, and burn times, etc) The caveat to being able to swap out hard points and different parts of other mechs is that some equipment (jumpjets, engines, bap, etc) can be locked to the omnipod (arm, torso, leg, etc) you’re replacing. You cannot swap out the CT. If you buy a TBR-S, you must use the TBR-S center torso, feel free to switch out anything else. You also cannot change Ferro or Endo upgrades. So, Clan mechs basically trade some of your typical Inner Sphere customization for their own type of customization. That’s all really. There’s more, but that’s the basic run-down.

That’s just what I can think of in 5 minutes. PGI is doing monthly patches now, they’re bigger patches. So when they patch, be sure to read up on the notes.



Edit: Oh ya, couple more things

• In-game Voip added (C3 “integration” was scrapped, and now it has integrated Teamspeak codec. Adjust your VOIP settings in the Audio game settings)
  
• Ghost Heat – this was implemented to reduce the size of alpha’s people were putting out (were you around for the 6PPC stalkers?) So now, when you fire more than 2 large lasers, the heat each of them generates is subjected to a multiplier. The more you add, the more the heat for each weapon is multiplied. Fire more than 1 AC/20? Say hello to 40% in heat. The cooldown for Ghost heat is 0.5 seconds. You can fire one AC/20 every 0.5 seconds without being affected by ghost heat. Pressing Backspace will set your currently selected weapon group to chain fire. Chair fire fires once every 0.5 seconds. So now you can see how they kind of work together.
  
• For all the Ghost Heat values/limits, you can find it here.
  
• FOV slider added to in-game Video options. (don't have to use the user.cfg any more for that)

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 01 March 2016 - 08:17 AM.

[DAYLEET]

Xenophontis, on 01 March 2016 - 07:25 AM, said:

Hi all,

So I decided to play some MWO again, and I am afraid I am a bit lost. I have not played since the Highlander was first released, and I'm not sure what's going on anymore. The UI is a lot different and the whole clan mech thing seems weird. Are they any different? I seemed to have missed out on a lot of changes.

What's a good place/way to get reintroduced to everything? What's considered strong these days? When I quit it was pretty much all PPC poptarting and LRMs were like paper wads. Can I just hop into my old Mech builds or should I run trials again? Trials used to be awful, did they change the basic load outs?

Thanks,

Trials are great now and there is a lot of trials to have fun with, go for it.

[cazidin]

The meta has changed. It's now a SPL meta.

[Wintersdark]

Also: Faction chat, built in VOIP, MANY interface improvements, many balance changes - particularly but not limited to quirks... Lots of small changes, things like overriding shutdown now being a toggle.

Best, really, just to play. Fundamental gameplay is largely the same, though what's good and bad is obviously quite different.

[Steinar Bergstol]

You do want to complete the tutorial since doing so nets you a tidy sum of C-bills.

[TLBFestus]

Depending on how much you have invested, financially or time-wise, you might want to start again from scratch.

The game-play is pretty much unchanged from back when you played, only some minor changes have been made.

There are several new maps, which are an improvement, but when you consider that the game is still a simple arena shooter, it's debatable whether there are enough maps to give variety (I think the consensus would be "No, not really).

Lot's of new mechs that might excite you for a bit.

Meta continues to change, lasers are back again.

CW is a waste of time, and the leet players in it have a tendency to whine about the lack of population while a significant portion of them continue to insult and denigrate players new to CW and then wonder why the population is low. It doesn't help that the maps for CW are basically nothing but bottle necks that force certain paths and allow teams to crush less experienced.

Of course PGI has big plans, lots of stuff being promised, like new game modes and features, but we've all heard that since day one. That said they are better than they were 18 months ago, it's just a question of is that good enough.

Enjoy it for what it is, not what they promise it will be or glass-eyed fanbois claim it to be.

[Mawai]

The basic game play of MWO is the same and anyone who expects that to change in any significant way really doesn't understand either what PGI has said or what they are building.

1) The basic game of MWO has been two teams of mechs facing off against each other trying to win through a varying set of victory conditions (game modes), on different maps and with different mechs. It has been like this since closed beta and the closest implementation in previous MechWarrior video games was the "Instant Action" or "Network play" options. This is the core game. It is fun by itself though eventually gets boring and repetitive and I don't really expect that this option will ever change. Expecting change in this area is unrealistic.

2) What has changed? New game modes, new maps, many many new mechs. Clan ominmechs and IS battlemechs (the difference being clan vs IS weapons, different mech customization rules, and an on-going effort to balance everything using a same but different philosophy.

3) One game mode added was Community Warfare or Faction Play as it is called now. Longer matches, drop with 4 mechs that you play serially as they are destroyed or you self destruct. Clan vs IS. The game mode has issues with implementation, some people like it and some don't. PGI is working on phase 3. It is considered a beta feature still as far as I know.

4) A decent list of some of the additions was posted above. Try to ignore the negativity since some folks are just burned out and rage at PGI to deliver the game they dream of now ... which isn't happening since PGI has a small development team ... and what individuals dream of is often different from PGI.

5) PGI is working on a number of initiatives. However, PGI is atrocious at community relations so we have no idea what will be upcoming beyond the monthly roadmap which usually just describes what will come out in the patch this month. Some of the items that have mentioned as possibilities:
- PVE content - you can see the basis for some of this by running the tutorial
- Solaris game mode
- eventual XP system revision (eventually ... but that has been on the list for 3 years so far)
- phase 3 of Faction Play
- tournament (PGI has a dream of making MWO an e-sport ... we shall see)

[Kristian Radoulov]

Patch notes are your friend. You do know how to read, don't you?

[MoonUnitBeta]

Kristian Radoulov, on 01 March 2016 - 09:01 AM, said:

Patch notes are your friend. You do know how to read, don't you?

I bet you must be swimming in friend requests.

[Coolant]

You can read all past patch notes (up to about 18 months) here:

http://mwomercs.com/game/patch-notes

For archived patch notes all the way back to Nov 2012 go here:

http://mwomercs.com/...-notes-archive/