33 replies to this topic

[Mcgral18]

What do you notice about the AC20 in this picture?

Other than it looking fantastic, of course.

The fact it has such a high chance to be hit. It is at the LOWEST chance it will ever be hit by a critical hit, because it is crit padded by the other two filled slots (actuators, at 10HP). If it's not protected in the ST, such as that heatsink in the LT, it will have a 100% chance to be struck.

The AC20 has 18 HP, throughout those 10 slots. 1.8HP/slot, so to speak.
Both those actuators have 10HP/crit.

Most ballistics have this problem, being larger weapons, but only having the typical 10 HP. The AC20 is the only AC exception to this rule, having 18 HP. One of four items in MWO which does not have 10 HP (being the AC20, Gauss(5), ECM(3) and the Engine(15), IIRC, all engines, Gauss and ECM suites follow this...but not AC20s.)

However, aside from the engine, Ballistics are the largest pieces of equipment. They also cost a fair bit of tonnage, yet die almost as soon as your structure is penetrated (also due to how FLD and the crit system interact...but that's another discussion).


One simple, not really bandaid solution is simply to, again, increase HP, but by more than marginal amounts. If the AC20 had 50 HP, it would survive a touch longer. That's still only 5 HP/crit, but a fair improvement over the current state.


At or under 15 HP, a Gauss Rifle can one-shot any piece of equipment that's not an AC20 (only 17-20% there) which has 14 armour protecting it. At 50 HP, only the AC20 itself could crit an AC20, 3% of the time (also at 19 or less armour)
Those are pretty forgiving odds.


Whether this should be tied to size, just tonnage or by feel can be debated...but some things should be hardier, IMO.

I'll give placeholder number of

• 50 for the isAC20
  
• 25 for the isAC10
  
• 18 for the isAC5
  
• 10 for the AC2...it's only one slot, but could also stand for an increase due to weighing 6 tons, the heaviest one slot item.

All ACs could stand for an increase, and might as well put this 6 month old chart up


Not exactly the numbers...but a general feel for HP increases.

[sycocys]

How often do you lose your cannon's regardless of their placement?

To my recollection it's almost never.

[Mcgral18]

sycocys, on 07 April 2016 - 05:23 PM, said:

How often do you lose your cannon's regardless of their placement?

To my recollection it's almost never.

Very common to lose AC20s the second you lose armour, smaller ACs not long after that.

Depends on what's shooting you as well.
Lasers will be worse than AC10+ for critting other items.

[1453 R]

My read on it would be “Right idea, wrong direction”.

50-point autocannons become, essentially, immune to damage. Outside freak once-in-a-million accidents, those guns are vastly more durable than the ‘Mech chassis component they’re housed in. Losing components throughout a match as you accumulate damage, actually losing effectiveness as your ‘health’ degrades rather than fighting at 100% until that last hitpoint falls off and you suffer Critical Existence Failure, is supposed to be one of the defining features of the BattleTech franchise.

I’d argue that certain smaller/lighter weapons should be rendered less durable. Medium lasers (of all varieties in both tech bases) at 4 health would be one place to start. Admittedly a pie-in-the-sky figure I just pulled out of my ear, but if lightweight, low-crit, easily-boatable weapons started being very fragile things, easily busted once a component opened up, it might serve to encourage larger, heavier weapons (or at least mixing things up), it could potentially do interesting things for the game.

I’unno. Definitely something to investigate. No reason a small laser should be as durable and resistant to damage as an AC/10.

[El Bandito]

50 HP for AC20? Might as well make it indestructible. When a section of the mech takes 50-70+ damage, I expect the weapons in that location to be damaged beyond repair.

Edited by El Bandito, 07 April 2016 - 05:38 PM.

[Mcgral18]

El Bandito, on 07 April 2016 - 05:37 PM, said:

50 HP for AC20? Might as well make it indestructible. When a section of the mech takes 50-70+ damage, I expect the weapons in that location to be damaged beyond repair.

If a Gauss rifle Crits twice, you're down to 20 wHP.
If that Gauss Rifle hits 10 armour, you're only down 5 HP, but have lost your current AC20.

Proposed AC20 would still have 20 HP left.


Crit Damage isn't like normal damage. It can be 3 times as high as normal damage (or far higher, for MGs, at 9x-27x normal)
The 17-23% chance to lose the current AC20 instantly isn't exactly small.


If you give 14 tons and 10 Crits to something, I expect it to last more than a second once the armour is gone.

[cazidin]

Excuse me, Mcgral18, where'd you get that spreadsheet from?

[Mcgral18]

cazidin, on 07 April 2016 - 05:47 PM, said:

Excuse me, Mcgral18, where'd you get that spreadsheet from?

Karl Bergs old thread.

Potentially outdated, I've heard, but still seems accurate to how things work (Crit Padding and such).
Karl is no longer with MWO, and we no longer get any useful information.

[cazidin]

Mcgral18, on 07 April 2016 - 05:49 PM, said:

Karl Bergs old thread.

Potentially outdated, I've heard, but still seems accurate to how things work (Crit Padding and such).
Karl is no longer with MWO, and we no longer get any useful information.

Alright. Thank you! A shame that he's no longer with the company though. Could you add a link to the old thread for me, please?

Edited by cazidin, 07 April 2016 - 05:53 PM.

[Mcgral18]

cazidin, on 07 April 2016 - 05:52 PM, said:

Alright. Thank you! A shame that he's no longer with the company though. Could you add a link to the old thread for me, please?

Looking for the source post...but here's the 96 page thread
http://mwomercs.com/...courtesy-phone/

Found it!

http://mwomercs.com/...70#entry3481670

It was Omid, in Karl's megathread

[Ex Atlas Overlord]

I think the weapon should be functional until one of the "structure slots" it's housed in is destroyed.

Disclaimer: I'm not really sure how it works, I'm basing this on how I think it works.

So if a mech has say 10 torso slots, and it's torso has 50 structure points.... then each torso slot should have 5HP.

If a weapon uses 3 of those slots... that weapon should become non functional as soon as any of it's 3 slots takes 5 damage.

On a seperate note..... why doesn't PGI have actuators be meaningful? If my arm actuator is destroyed, the weapon should be locked aiming at where ever it was aiming when the actuator was destroyed. I think that'd be pretty cool.

[Wintersdark]

The Atlas Overlord, on 07 April 2016 - 06:01 PM, said:

On a seperate note..... why doesn't PGI have actuators be meaningful? If my arm actuator is destroyed, the weapon should be locked aiming at where ever it was aiming when the actuator was destroyed. I think that'd be pretty cool.

I'll ignore the first part, as it's miles from how crits work.

The quoted section above... We used to have functional actuators and gyros and such, but it was disabled during CB because there wasn't a good way to communicate to the player what was going on, and it lead to problems. As well, in the case of weapons overall, we can't have variable convergence - that is, weapons all converge on the same point, as a technical limitation regarding HSR and whatnot. You'll notice we have pilot skills affecting weapon convergence time: we didn't use to have this limitation (pre-hsr and such) but it caused severe hitreg issues, coupled with lagshields.

These things are a maybe with a new engine, but not happening now.

[Wintersdark]

Mcgral18, on 07 April 2016 - 05:21 PM, said:

Interesting post.

I am intrigued. Tying equipment health to size is a fascinating starting point (further modify for balance, such as the fragile gauss rifle having less health). I'd consider something like 3 health per slot as a starting point.

This has three primary benefits, only one of which you cover.

First, as you say in your post, it helps offset weapon fragility from size (this serves to buff ballistics and nerf lasers).

Second, it impacts clan vs. IS balance. Clan equipment is smaller - this is a flat, unanswered strength clan side. Under this system, all clan equipment would also be more fragile than IS equipment.

Note: Before some halfwit moron rails off about clans UP IS OP blah blah idiocy, this is a good change even in an "IS is OP" paradigm, because it provides "balance wiggle room" to roll back nerfs elsewhere, or what have you. The purpose isn't to make clans worse so much as to provide another avenue of differentiation so we can have Clan Weapons, for example, get a bit of their glory back.

Bold Part TLDR: For gods sake, STFU about the particulars of IS vs. Clan balance, don't derail.

And finally, it helps move the crit paradigm overall away from The Magic 10 damage. Currently, crit seeking weapons are garbage because they do multiple small crits. These get randomly allocated, so nibbles of damage get spread.

Consider: Executioner. One arm, 6xERSL. The other, UAC20.

The laser arm can sustain (ignoring actuators) 60 damage to its weapons. The UAC? 10/18 (not sure if uac20's gain the ac20 health). But the UAC20 is way bigger and heavier. Every crit to weapons crits the UAC, while small crits hit individual ERSL's making it unlikely to lose any even if you take 20+ crit damage to that arm. Against the UAC, after 10/18 crit damage, that weapon is gone. In short, while you may lose one or two, you'll almost certainly lose the arm before more than 2/6 lasers. The UAC is pretty much guaranteed to be gone long before the arm.

If those ERSL's had 3 health, even LBX pellets would be wrecking them in short order. Machine guns would ravage multiple small weapons.

Weapons doing smaller hits would still be effective at destroying equipment... Or at least, smaller equipment. The change to the overall crit system is extensive and extremely interesting.

[Deathlike]

Tweaking the AC20 health to 25 or even 30 would be a start IMO, as you need to set a baseline or cap for how high we want to make stuff like this work the way it should.

The other baselines for other equipment (like energy weapons or heatsinks) can be left to another day.

It's amazing after 3+ years after implementing "health" into weapons that it never got adjusted in any seriousness (outside the last known Gauss tweaks due to charging) that it never really got any sort of investigation (most notably when Clans were added)... especially when every freaking armor quirk is basically for the internal structure.

Edited by Deathlike, 07 April 2016 - 06:47 PM.

[Xetelian]

Desperate for more AC20 HP as an Atlas lover. Nothing ruins my day faster than 2 or 3 games in a row where I lose my cannon right away.

[Fox With A Shotgun]

I'd be open to the idea of increasing ballistic component HP and decreasing energy weapons' HP.

Lasers are quite fragile, and giving them the same hp as a solid steel block that's intended to receive huge pressures is just silly. Are they saying that the optics, capacitors and other electronics of a laser are as durable as an AC20's barrel, chamber and housing? It's 12 tons (Clan) or 14 tons (IS) of solid hard metal, for goodness sake.

I reckon ballistics should be:
AC20: 25 hp
Gauss: 15 hp (it still explodes on destruction, though)
AC10: 20hp
AC5: 10 hp
AC2: 10 hp
MGs: 4 hp (not as durable as big cannons, but less touchy than lasers)

Energy weapons:
PPC: 6 hp
Large lasers: 7 hp (less volatile than PPC, but still fragile)
Medium / small lasers: 3 hp (small and destructible)
Flamers: 2hp (Be glad it doesn't cause an internal fire on destruction!)

Missiles... I'm not sure where these should stand. I guess the only sensitive part of a missile launcher is the autoloader and the launch door itself?

[Deathlike]

Fox With A Shotgun, on 07 April 2016 - 06:47 PM, said:

I'd be open to the idea of increasing ballistic component HP and decreasing energy weapons' HP.

Lasers are quite fragile, and giving them the same hp as a solid steel block that's intended to receive huge pressures is just silly. Are they saying that the optics, capacitors and other electronics of a laser are as durable as an AC20's barrel, chamber and housing? It's 12 tons (Clan) or 14 tons (IS) of solid hard metal, for goodness sake.

I reckon ballistics should be:
AC20: 25 hp
Gauss: 15 hp (it still explodes on destruction, though)
AC10: 20hp
AC5: 10 hp
AC2: 10 hp
MGs: 4 hp (not as durable as big cannons, but less touchy than lasers)

Energy weapons:
PPC: 6 hp
Large lasers: 7 hp (less volatile than PPC, but still fragile)
Medium / small lasers: 3 hp (small and destructible)
Flamers: 2hp (Be glad it doesn't cause an internal fire on destruction!)

Missiles... I'm not sure where these should stand. I guess the only sensitive part of a missile launcher is the autoloader and the launch door itself?

Energy doesn't really need health reductions (if at all).. it's really that ballistics in general get shafted because in due part to the crit system that they are easier to hit (more crits = more likely to take damage) and thus easier to remove from a mech when internals get breached.

In the case of even just lasers, sticking 6 Mediums on a Hunchback-4P Right Torso shouldn't shred them all up immediately just because it got exposed (removing the hunch itself is far more optimal).

PPCs of any sort shouldn't really be touched either... if anything, they could use a slight buff since lasers are generally more compact (IS weapons should technically be a bit more durable due to slightly increased slot usage).

Anyways, that's not the point - energy isn't really the problem here... it's ballistics being more fragile on a durability front than energy.

Edited by Deathlike, 07 April 2016 - 06:53 PM.

[Mcgral18]

Fox With A Shotgun, on 07 April 2016 - 06:47 PM, said:

I'd be open to the idea of increasing ballistic component HP and decreasing energy weapons' HP.

Lasers are quite fragile, and giving them the same hp as a solid steel block that's intended to receive huge pressures is just silly. Are they saying that the optics, capacitors and other electronics of a laser are as durable as an AC20's barrel, chamber and housing? It's 12 tons (Clan) or 14 tons (IS) of solid hard metal, for goodness sake.

I reckon ballistics should be:
AC20: 25 hp
Gauss: 15 hp (it still explodes on destruction, though)
AC10: 20hp
AC5: 10 hp
AC2: 10 hp
MGs: 4 hp (not as durable as big cannons, but less touchy than lasers)

Energy weapons:
PPC: 6 hp
Large lasers: 7 hp (less volatile than PPC, but still fragile)
Medium / small lasers: 3 hp (small and destructible)
Flamers: 2hp (Be glad it doesn't cause an internal fire on destruction!)

Missiles... I'm not sure where these should stand. I guess the only sensitive part of a missile launcher is the autoloader and the launch door itself?

I like the idea...but I also don't want 3 HP.

A variety of HP values for each weapon system I can get behind. Maybe something more fragile than 10...but 3 is a touch too far IMO.

Edited by Mcgral18, 07 April 2016 - 07:18 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Yes, please, increase it. I swear to Oprah, every time the RT on my MAD-5M is breached, both AC/5 are destroyed instantly.

Freakin' infuriating, especially for a ballistics-heavy 'Mech that puts all its eggs in one basket.

[Khobai]

All weapons/equipment should have health based on how many crit slots they take up. more crit slots = more health.

They could use a formula like critslots + 9 = equipment health

Certain equipment like ecm/gauss could be tagged as "vulnerable" and would have half the normal hitpoints

Examples:
A 1 crit slot laser would have 10 health
A 10 crit slot AC20 would have 19 health
Gauss would normally have 16 health but with the vulnerable attribute it would get halved to 8 health.

The result is that smaller weapons would be easier to crit than larger weapons which is how it should be since that helps discouraging boating.

Edited by Khobai, 07 April 2016 - 07:32 PM.