Dirty Starfish, on 05 May 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:
Lower ttk, more reliance on pilot skill, more time for tactical thought. If you were around before double heat sinks you would remember how much better the base gameplay was (ignoring the horrible bugs) with a lower heat cap. This isn't supposed to be call of duty.
WHOOP. My Force-Chokin' reflexes have been activated. To quote from an old thread of mine:
1453 R, on 16 November 2015 - 01:30 PM, said:
((INTERMISSION: ‘TTK’ stands for Time To Kill, and is a measure of how long it takes to fresh-to-dead your target. Decreasing this time means FASTER kills. Increasing it means SLOWER kills. Every time I see a grognard use the phrase ‘decrease TTK’ when they are speaking of ways to lengthen player life, it makes my inner Grammar Sith want to reach across the Internet and Force Choke them. Don’t get Force Choked, boys and girls – use your words the right way!
END INTERMISSION))
Now, on to your point. Heh, or rather, my deconstruction of it.
Dirty Starfish, on 05 May 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:
Not necessarily. All the jackalopes bellowing on and on (and on and on and on and on and on and on......) about "decrease capacity, increase dissipation!" seem to forget that if
dissipation is increased to a greater extent than
capacity is decreased, what you would end up with is actually an increase in overall DPS and
faster times-to-kill. Sure, damage might spread out more in such a system, but that spread-out damage would be applied more quickly than the concentrated spikey damage currently in vogue, and it'd mostly just mean your entire 'Mech is a slagpile, not just your CT. If that's a goal you endorse, then by all means do so - but don't confuse "lowered capacity" for "longer time to kill."
Dirty Starfish, on 05 May 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:
more reliance on pilot skill,
Again, not necessarily. As has been pointed out before, if you force chainfire at all times for all weapons, then what you're effectively doing is forcing pilots into staring contests. The relevant skills of defensive piloting, damage spreading, and proper twisting would be atrophied away, since there is no more ability to duck and weave. Or, alternatively, what you would actually accomplish by forcing constant always-on chainfire, the way lowered-capacity folks are aiming to do, is to force a meta in which single large weapons such as gauss rifles, AC/20s, and...well, that's actually about it...are used to out-duck-and-weave 'Mechs which cannot or do not take these weapons - an AC/20 guy gets his one big whack of 20 damage, then ducks away, while the guy forced to chainfire his medium lasers is never able to twist aside and spread damage without losing a
ton of DPS himself.
Lowered heat capacity/forced permanent chainfire is not the ultimate utopia of A BattleTech Game™ and Supreme Pilot Skill™ that a lot of folks claim it to be.
Dirty Starfish, on 05 May 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:
more time for tactical thought.
Why? A "Thinking Man's Shooter" is still a
shooter. Being able to make decisions and act on them more quickly than your opponent is
always going to be an enormous advantage. In point of fact, it's such an enormous, universal advantage
that the military teaches it to fighter pilots and modern businesses will account for it in their planning and business-doing. Slowing down the game isn't necesarily a good thing, nor is forced-chainfire necessarily going to slow the game down. All it does is spread damage. Certain 'Mechs and/or pilots will still use raw speed to out-circle other players and pour continuous chainfire into them. Slowing the game down doesn't necessarily mean you're going to slow your fellow players down. As a famous man once said...:
"If you go slow, you die."
Dirty Starfish, on 05 May 2016 - 11:28 AM, said:
If you were around before double heat sinks you would remember how much better the base gameplay was (ignoring the horrible bugs) with a lower heat cap. This isn't supposed to be call of duty.
'The base gameplay' centered around maybe six 'Mechs, with no electronics whatsoever, no quirks, less than half of the currently existing weapons, an 8v8 game mode, average 'Mech speeds below 60kph, and innumerable other changes. Furthermore, single heat sinks' primary issue isn't capacity, it's
dissipation. SHS have essentially nil dissipation next to a machine fitted with DHS. A SHS 'Mech can alpha just as hard as a DHS 'Mech, it just gets to do so once a month instead of once every ten-ish seconds.
Lowering capacity, by itself, does nothing except to encourage dakka boating or missile boating rather than beam boating. Lowering capacity and increasing dissipation, depending on the ratio of one to the other, is effectively a nil change or, in fact, a
decrease in TTK (remember, that means you're dead FASTER! Not slower!) because of a game-wide increase in overall DPS. And in neither situation is anyone going to magically become Incredibly Awesome™ simply because alpha damage has been cut down some. You'll still lose to all the exact same people you lose to now - you'll just do it with less overall integrity before your CT blows out than is currently the usual case.
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