Malorish, on 23 April 2016 - 10:26 PM, said:
If it was up to me, we'd cut all weapon damage in half (or double armor and structure values, whatever floats your boat).
Then we'd shorten a lot of weapon ranges (maybe everything except machine guns). Finally, we'd need to double the ammo/ton to make sure missile and ballistic systems keep pace with energy weapons. (I'd also standardize ammo around a damage/ton number, but that's another topic and another post).
I don't know how you get rid of pinpoint convergence that translates into fun gameplay. I've seen the proposed systems in the forums, and they're terribly unintuitive or complex, IMO. I think we could live with pinpoint convergence (which people expect in a FPS style game) as long as you can't unleash ungodly amounts of damage with a push of a button.
I don't know where you've been, but armor/structure values have been doubled in this game for several years now, since about the time of the end of closed beta to the beginning of open beta I think.
That is to say doubled over their tabletop values because the whole point of the TT values is based on the random dice rolls determining where on the mech you hit. Where as here, you can hit literally the exact spot on the enemy mech you want to hit with 100% accuracy 100% of the time.
That is the biggest problem with MWO over the TT. It is just too easy to hit your target.
I agree with you on shortening the weapons ranges. We need to do away with the whole "Maximum/Optimum" range BS here. Make all weapons current "Optimum" range their "Maximum" range. That would shorten up engagement distances considerably, and at that point you could start decreasing weapon damage bit by bit to find the sweet spot for this game.
However, your third point here, about convergence... I don't know what FPS games you play, but literally every FPS game I've played has had some sort of recoil induced cone of fire mechanic that encourages aiming down sights and burst firing your weapon.
I do not agree with your assessment here. MWO needs some sort of cone of fire mechanic to introduce some element of randomness back into the game. Exactly how it's introduced is up in the air, as not all weapons would be affected by it. LRMs and SRMs come to mind in this case, as they're already random enough as it is, spreading damage all over the enemy mech just by sheer fact of all the missiles hitting different spots on the mech.
ACs and Lasers are where the randomness would mostly come into play. Obviously IS ACs would be affected the least as they fire one shot, wait a few seconds, fire again. This is pretty much equivalent to the sniper rifle or designated marksman rifle out of the Battlefield series.
If anything the Clan ACs would probably feel the affects of the cone of fire mechanic more, as they all fire multiple rounds, with the exception of the Clan AC/UAC2, which only fires one round. This would be a good case for making IS ACs function like they are in lore, in which they fire multiple rounds, like they did in all other MechWarrior games as well.
Making all ACs fire multiple rounds would allow for better balancing on both sides, Clan and IS.
The lasers are where things get incredibly tricky.
Introducing a straight-up cone of fire mechanic to lasers could potentially cause them to just fire wildly all over the place, at least depending on the mech. This is particularly true of mechs where the lasers are mounted in the arms, as we've all seen how mech arms bounce and wobble about in the game, yet the lasers still fire with pinpoint accuracy.
On this particular subject I am open to suggestions on how to introduce a cone of fire or other mechanic to lasers that doesn't come off as contrived and convoluted... What am I saying? Every attempt to balance this game so far has been contrived and convoluted to some degree.
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