Lightfoot, on 26 April 2016 - 07:54 PM, said:
They added the charge-up in May 2013, long before the Grid Iron or any Quirks. You block the Gauss from being a brawling weapon by making the recycle 5.5 to 6 seconds at which point you force players to stay at long range with it or bring a mixed load-out because the Gauss could never keep up with UAC's or medium/small lasers. Very simple, always works. The reason the Gauss has the charge-up is that MWO mechs are too fragile and weak to damage so the charge-up removes it from the game for the most part.
However, the more advanced weapons make the Gauss look tame so MWO can't support them either. Trust me. Working ATMs, Arrow IV, Heavy Lasers, RACs, all make the Gauss look mediocre. Which means if they were added now they would be nerfed up like the Gauss. I don't want that. You all should be bugging PGI to make the mechs tougher first. They shouldn't be getting ripped by a few SP laser volleys, then the Gauss would not need the charge-up.
They aren't as fragile as you think, at least on the surface.
PGI doubled both the armor and the structure of all mechs shortly after the closed Beta, or so I've heard, I can't confirm the time exactly, someone else would have to.
The problem is, even with doubled armor and structure, the ability of multiple players to focus their fire with nigh-pinpoint accuracy pretty much negates that doubled armor/structure.
And as stronk as the all-lasers-all-the-time-meta-vomit is these days, mechs will continue to be weak to heavily focused fire until PGI does one of two things.
One: Slashes the heat cap by at least half to curtail the alpha-puke. You want to FIRE ALL DA LAZORS, then you're going to pay for it by shutting down and leaving yourself open to attack for probably a long time.
Or Two: Introduce some element of randomness to weapons fire like the tabletop game had. You want to FIRE ALL DA LAZORS again? Expect probably 25-50% of your weapons to either hit another location on the mech, or miss altogether.
Obviously I would prefer both, as that would seriously curb the laser-puke, but I'd settle for one or the other.
The game is too easy currently, and that's a problem.