98 replies to this topic

[Felicitatem Parco]

Assault Mechs cannot fit enough heatsinks to run"cool" with an assault-load of energy weapons. They will always eventually overheat... often in only 15 seconds of sustained fire or less.

Ballistic weapons are very heavy because they inherently contain their own "heatsinks" in the form of reduced heat output.

So, assault Mechs are almost designed to use ballistics because they can take advantage of the low-heat firepower that ballistics offer in a heavy, but slot-friendly package. Otherwise, they cannot fit enough HS to continually fire.

Assaults and Ballistics go hand in hand, so don't be surprised when the Ballistic Kodiak out-performs the models that are based on hot weapons. It was already expected by everyone who understands this game.

Edited by Prosperity Park, 23 May 2016 - 09:45 AM.

[Gas Guzzler]

Prosperity Park, on 23 May 2016 - 09:44 AM, said:

Assault Mechs cannot fit enough heatsinks to run"cool" with an assault-load of energy weapons. They will always eventually overheat... often in only 15 seconds of sustained fire or less.

Ballistic weapons are very heavy because they inherently contain their own "heatsinks" in the form of reduced heat output.

So, assault Mechs are almost designed to use ballistics because they can take advantage of the low-heat firepower that ballistics offer in a heavy, but slot-friendly package. Otherwise, they cannot fit enough HS to continually fire.

Assaults and Ballistics go hand in hand, so don't be surprised when the Ballistic Kodiak out-performs the models that are based on hot weapons. It was already expected by everyone who understands this game.

B-B-B-but laser vomit is the only dominant meta! GH2 power draw naow #plzpgi save me from the lazors!





/sarcasm

Edited by Gas Guzzler, 23 May 2016 - 09:54 AM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Gas Guzzler, on 23 May 2016 - 09:48 AM, said:

B-B-B-but laser vomit is the only dominant meta! GH2 power draw naow #plzpgi save me from the lazors!

Smart people have been using DakkaVomit and SRMvomit to kill laser boats for a long time already, and the bulk "meta" is already moving in that direction. The quirks for the Kodiaks were assigned by folks that learn about how the game plays by asking others... apparently using a time machine from several months ago.

[Weeny Machine]

And light and medium mechs are supposed to take advantage of speed, yet heavies and assault players complained so hard when their fatties got killed by a light mech that their fatties are now able to turn like overweight ballerinas. Disgusting.

[Mister Blastman]

Gas Guzzler, on 23 May 2016 - 09:48 AM, said:

B-B-B-but laser vomit is the only dominant meta! GH2 power draw naow #plzpgi save me from the lazors!

Implementing a MW:LL Ultra jam bar would help.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

This just reinforces my thought that weapons from BT need to be rethought as a whole, the fact that light mechs are forced to use energy and missiles to be effective because ballistics are too heavy and the opposite often being true for Assaults is silly imo. Though, a huge part of this is ghost heat which has a big impact on limiting how many energy weapons you can reasonably mount.

[Ultimax]

Game (meta) Balance is sort of like a simplistic ecosystem.

What we have here is PGI consistently, if haphazardly, nerfing long range combat for over two years.


Autocannon max range reduced from triple to double (mostly affecting how much damage they do at double).

Autocannon velocities nerfed.

PPC familty weapon velocities nerfed.

ER lasers nerfed (extended beam times).

Gauss CD nerfed.

Clan CERMLAS max range nerfed.

The game was pushed to shorter and shorter ranges, seeing a rise of "Pulse-Vomit" builds operating optimally about 324-450m.

They are inferno hot and not so ideal for short range, but still very strong.

Then we had the rebalance, heaps of structure quirks, mechs with SRM/missile quirks.

As well as the introduction of some strong ballistic capable mechs like the Mauler, Warhammers 6R & Black Widow.

Now we have the KDK-3, and soon we will have 3x UAC 10 Night Gyrs.


We're going to have quite a lot of dakka being thrown around soon, I will enjoy the tears as they shift from complaining about "OP hitscan lasers" to "no skill ballistics that only require your LMB and low trigger discipline."

[cazidin]

Ultimax, on 23 May 2016 - 10:01 AM, said:

Game (meta) Balance is sort of like a simplistic ecosystem.

What we have here is PGI consistently, if haphazardly, nerfing long range combat for over two years.


Autocannon max range reduced from triple to double (mostly affecting how much damage they do at double).

Autocannon velocities nerfed.

PPC familty weapon velocities nerfed.

ER lasers nerfed (extended beam times).

Gauss CD nerfed.

Clan CERMLAS max range nerfed.

Your ideas are bad but you shouldn't feel bad. Zoidberg's just a jerk.

[Gas Guzzler]

That's because everyone has always complained about long range combat, because it makes taking short range builds into the disorder of the public queue difficult some times.

But yeah, we have already seen a " cUAC-10 is OP" thread, I'm sure we will see more. Goes to show you how subjective the MWO forum community is when it comes to balance, essentially boiling it down to "I got REKT by a mech boating this weapon, therefore it is OP".

[Bishop Steiner]

Mister Blastman, on 23 May 2016 - 09:55 AM, said:

Implementing a MW:LL Ultra jam bar would help.

by making dakka easily gamed and thus the UACs a straight up upgrade to normal AC?

Jam Bars are amongst my most hate mechanics....

[kapusta11]

Ultimax, on 23 May 2016 - 10:01 AM, said:

Now we have the KDK-3, and soon we will have 3x UAC 10 Night Gyrs.

Why not quad UAC5? Less jamming, less projectiles in a burst, more speed.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

kapusta11, on 23 May 2016 - 10:15 AM, said:

Why not quad UAC5? Less jamming, less projectiles in a burst, more speed.

Loss in initial burst damage and the ghost heat won't be as significant on the Gyr as it is on the Kodiak, that said I will run 4 UAC5s because I think UAC5s are more flexible and usable at longer ranges. If the KDK-3 had an extra ballistic mount I would run 5 UAC5 in heartbeat, granted that would also open the door for 3 UAC5/2 UAC10 so that would've definitely pushed it over the edge.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 23 May 2016 - 10:20 AM.

[FupDup]

Bishop Steiner, on 23 May 2016 - 10:12 AM, said:

by making dakka easily gamed and thus the UACs a straight up upgrade to normal AC?

Jam Bars are amongst my most hate mechanics....

I already consider the UAC/5 to be a practically straight upgrade over the vanilla AC/5 outside of fringe cases like the Mauler...

Anyways, the "jam bar" mechanic would only be a straight upgrade if the "jam threshold" were too generous. If you could only fire a few double-taps back to back, then it wouldn't really be that overpowered. In fact, it might even be less of a direct upgrade than random jamming because random jamming allows you to sometimes get lucky and go full-auto non-stop for several moments.

The jam bar would allow us to set a specific and concrete hard cap on the maximum damage you can spit out, which makes the weapons easier to balance. Random jamming means inconsistent damage output that ranges from instajam to neverjam. In general, weapons with inconsistent performance are harder to balance, see LRMs and SSRMs as further case studies...

Edited by FupDup, 23 May 2016 - 10:23 AM.

[cazidin]

Bishop Steiner, on 23 May 2016 - 10:12 AM, said:

by making dakka easily gamed and thus the UACs a straight up upgrade to normal AC?

Jam Bars are amongst my most hate mechanics....

Gives UACs a jam bar. Make UACs burst fire for IS.

[Alan Davion]

One thing that's always bugged me about the whole AC/UAC thing in MWO when it comes to the lore is the fact that our normal ACs are not rapid fire weapons like the UACs. At least the Clan ACs/UACs.

The whole point of UACs is that they are supposed to fire *faster* than normal ACs, at the cost of being more susceptible to ammo feed jamming. All ACs are supposed to be susceptible to jamming, just that UACs due to their faster rate of fire are probably about 50% more susceptible.

If we made all AC/UAC weapons fire in bursts, the same number of shells across the whole spectrum, lets say 5 rounds every click, wouldn't that make the whole AC family easier to balance? Obviously it would require a re-speccing of ammo per ton, especially for the AC/20, but that's the easy part of the whole thing. That's just xml file numbers.

It's the re-coding of the AC/UAC firing mechanics that would take the most time and effort.

[FupDup]

Alan Davion, on 23 May 2016 - 10:45 AM, said:

One thing that's always bugged me about the whole AC/UAC thing in MWO when it comes to the lore is the fact that our normal ACs are not rapid fire weapons like the UACs. At least the Clan ACs/UACs.

The whole point of UACs is that they are supposed to fire *faster* than normal ACs, at the cost of being more susceptible to ammo feed jamming. All ACs are supposed to be susceptible to jamming, just that UACs due to their faster rate of fire are probably about 50% more susceptible.

If we made all AC/UAC weapons fire in bursts, the same number of shells across the whole spectrum, lets say 5 rounds every click, wouldn't that make the whole AC family easier to balance? Obviously it would require a re-speccing of ammo per ton, especially for the AC/20, but that's the easy part of the whole thing. That's just xml file numbers.

It's the re-coding of the AC/UAC firing mechanics that would take the most time and effort.

It would require more than just changing ammo values.

It would also require buffing of things like firing rate, velocity, etc. to compensate. Right now, one of the key advantages of IS ACs is that they are PPFLD. Making them burst makes them similar to lasers but much heavier.

The Clans get away with burst because they have more Ultras (double DPS) and their ACs are all lighter and/or smaller than IS versions. IS versions are heavier and can only single-tap outside of the UAC/5. They need some kind of advantage to make them worth their weight.

Not to mention, being PPFLD also makes them more unique and differentiated. Making everything spread/DoT reduces weapon diversity.

Lastly, a uniform number of shells per AC would result in the lower rated ACs being trash. The AC/2 is bad even with 1 projectile, how do you propose that we make it viable with a longer burst than the current Clan UAC/20?

Edited by FupDup, 23 May 2016 - 10:49 AM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Almost all of us know that Mech Rifles fire a single slug per firing event, and all Mech Autocannons fire multiple slugs per firing event. This is the definitive difference between those two types of weapons in BattleTech.

This game simply missed the memo.

[davoodoo]

**** stalker is failed assault, no ballistics.
Excluding pay2win misery, best stalker cause 1b hardpoint.

I would say that energy boats assaults would be just fine if we had actual dhs and no ghost heat.
In tt 20 dhs would vent 40 points of heat every turn as much as 5 llas can produce.

Edited by davoodoo, 23 May 2016 - 11:14 AM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

davoodoo, on 23 May 2016 - 10:56 AM, said:

**** stalker is failed assault, no ballistics.
Excluding pay2win misery, best stalker cause 1b hardpoint.

Actually the 4N is still the best thanks to quirks. Misery and the 3H is a close second though.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 23 May 2016 - 11:00 AM.

[FupDup]

Prosperity Park, on 23 May 2016 - 10:54 AM, said:

Almost all of us know that Mech Rifles fire a single slug per firing event, and all Mech Autocannons fire multiple slugs per firing event. This is the definitive difference between those two types of weapons in BattleTech.

This game simply missed the memo.

Tabletop also missed the memo apparently when they made all ACs deal their damage to a single hit location. Don't say that it was just a simplification measure, because they have very easily used the same cluster hits table that SRMs and LBX used in order to simulate the burst.

It was a balancing feature because of how damned heavy the weapons were. The AC/20 is supposed to be scarier than 4 Medium Lasers. A burst-firing AC/20 has about the same lethality as 4 ML but it costs waaaaaaaay more tonnage to mount.

It's also really bass-ackwards how BT explains the Mech Rifle family. BT lore claims that ACs have superior penetration power over the Rifles. However, firing a single huge slug will always be better at penetrating very thickly armored targets than a volley of several tiny bullets.

The BT logic is that "Oh, if you fire a 9mm handgun 50 times, that has a better ability to penetrate metal than a single 50 caliber sniper rifle shot." That of course is pure BS. Against a thick armor plate, the 9mm bullets will all bounce off harmlessly, while the big 50 cal shot will penetrate deep into the metal (or even pop out the other side depending on the thickness).

By the laws of how weapons and materials actually work, Mech Rifles should have superior penetration over ACs, not the other way around. But of course, BT and logic don't usually go well together...

Edited by FupDup, 23 May 2016 - 11:02 AM.