337 replies to this topic

[Lily from animove]

Ok, serious question, can the system add a energy multiplier penalty per mech?

I jst found one possibility of an very awkward case of overalphaing.

take a NVA with 12 SPL (maybe even more possible?)

such build will deliver a 72 alpha and not overheat. The old system prevented that and made only 10 possible. the new one totally allows that. Now the NVA is a mech meant to use 12 Energy hardpoints. it would be good if such a mech would be able to have aq total heat of 36 to ensure the old 6xCERMl volley is possible. Yet it really needs a prevention from something cheap like that 12 SP volley.

So when there would be a seperate mech penalty value that indictaes the negative energy into heat conversion.

so lets say the NVA gets a energy treshold of 36 but a conversation rate of 3 That way it would allow the NVA to shoot volleys, yet any overusage of the heatscale will be ehavily penalised with a lot heat to prevent said Overalpha usage. The non linear behavior of the energy to heat scale is clearly in a disadvantage compared to the oldghostheat when it comes to some large alphaboats.

so the question is:

Do you really want clanassaults being able to alpha 5c-LPL with 65damage without shutting down?

Or a DWF able to shoot an alpha of 88damage with C-MPL without shutting down? Such a setup can one shot any IS medum mech without massive quirk should a pilot land the full damage into a sidetorso.

imagien now 2 or 3 assaults in that CMPL laodout?

Edited by Lily from animove, 19 August 2016 - 05:26 AM.

[invernomuto]

Wintersdark, on 18 August 2016 - 03:29 PM, said:

well, not really. Exceeding the bar by a bit generates a trivially small amount of heat. 4 ppc's or 2ppc/ac20 generate 5 points of Ghost Heat under this system.

Unlike ghost heat, then, firing again a bit early isn't severely punished.

This system is both clearly defined and more forgiving than ghost heat.

Agreed, but if you sistematically exceed the bar you will face increasing heat penalties. Not bad.

[invernomuto]

Appogee, on 18 August 2016 - 10:58 PM, said:

I am asking a different question. I am asking: why does it work that way?

How are you able to fire a weapon when you don't have any energy in reserve? And why does firing when you are low on energy cause a Mech to get hotter?

(Why not make it that, when you are out of energy, you can't fire. That would at least be logical.)

Very simple explanation: Because your mech's compact fusion reactor can generate, on "normal" workload, 30 energy per second for mech's weapons. If you draw too much energy you're overloading the reactor -> if you overload the reactor, you'll have more heat to dissipate.

Ok, I tried

[Lily from animove]

invernomuto, on 19 August 2016 - 05:41 AM, said:

Very simple explanation: Because your mech's compact fusion reactor can generate, on "normal" workload, 30 energy per second for mech's weapons. If you draw too much energy you're overloading the reactor -> if you overload the reactor, you'll have more heat to dissipate.

Ok, I tried

this, its basically going to fry your energy cables pushing that amount of energy through them causign a lot more heat.

[Zeoraimer]

I'm not going to be able to test this myself, but does the Order of gaining heat matter? Example:

AC20 then Gauss fired split seconds apart.

AC20: 6 head, 20 energy = all good.
Gauss: 1 heat, 15 energy = 5 energy over.

Whats is the heat calculation?
6 + 1 + (1 x 0.5) = 6 + 1 + 0.5 = 7.5 heat total?

or will it back date the the AC20, giving:
6 + 1 + ( (6+1) x 0.5 ) = 10.5 heat?

Some macros might help...


Also, any played an old game called Shattered Steel? You have a energy reactor on board, where you can balance the generated energy to power movement, shields, and energy weapon recharge. So if you went with just ballistics, you moved all the power to shields and locomotion instead. On totally destructible terrain. There were maps where you could plough through a mountain to skip most of the level to get to the objective...

[Wintersdark]

DGTLDaemon, on 18 August 2016 - 09:19 PM, said:

Hold on a second. If I'm reading this correctly, dual UAC10 builds are now illegal? Because double-tapping 2xUAC10 would put you at 40 heat, and it definitely takes less than 0.5 seconds to fire the second burst...

All cLPL builds now seem totally useless, too. Good job, PGI. Will be pulling my preorder for Marauder IIC.

illegal? No. Don't be silly. Dual 10 works fine, no ghost heat. Fire, get 20 draw. Double tap happens half a second later (has always been this way, hence why double tapping a single uac20 doesn't hit ghost heat on live - .33s burst and a bit more delay becore the double tap happens) so you've shed 10 power draw.

Thus, the two 10's double tapping hits 30.

"But then you can't fire anything else" - you can, you just generate a LITTLE more heat. This is what people not testing don't understand. It's not like ghost heat. If you exceed 30 by a bit, the extra heat is trivial and not really even noticeable at all.

In fact, I found 40pt alphas to be a good target for everyday usage.

[Lily from animove]

Zeoraimer, on 19 August 2016 - 05:51 AM, said:

I'm not going to be able to test this myself, but does the Order of gaining heat matter? Example:

AC20 then Gauss fired split seconds apart.

AC20: 6 head, 20 energy = all good.
Gauss: 1 heat, 15 energy = 5 energy over.

Whats is the heat calculation?
6 + 1 + (1 x 0.5) = 6 + 1 + 0.5 = 7.5 heat total?

or will it back date the the AC20, giving:
6 + 1 + ( (6+1) x 0.5 ) = 10.5 heat?

Some macros might help...


Also, any played an old game called Shattered Steel? You have a energy reactor on board, where you can balance the generated energy to power movement, shields, and energy weapon recharge. So if you went with just ballistics, you moved all the power to shields and locomotion instead. On totally destructible terrain. There were maps where you could plough through a mountain to skip most of the level to get to the objective...

that depends on when and how much you exit the energy bar. if you drop to -10 energy (no matter which fired first) you will have 5 heat as penalty. So it depends with yoru "split second" how much energy is left when firing this happened.

Wintersdark, on 19 August 2016 - 05:57 AM, said:

illegal? No. Don't be silly. Dual 10 works fine, no ghost heat. Fire, get 20 draw. Double tap happens half a second later (has always been this way, hence why double tapping a single uac20 doesn't hit ghost heat on live - .33s burst and a bit more delay becore the double tap happens) so you've shed 10 power draw.

Thus, the two 10's double tapping hits 30.

"But then you can't fire anything else" - you can, you just generate a LITTLE more heat. This is what people not testing don't understand. It's not like ghost heat. If you exceed 30 by a bit, the extra heat is trivial and not really even noticeable at all.

In fact, I found 40pt alphas to be a good target for everyday usage.

this, basically the current system means:

when your heat is empty, you can still fire but 50% of the damage you shoot is additionally generated heat. (except for srm's as they are 0,75% energy draw per damage or CERPPC's havign a different energy value). to theres exceptions, but for lasers ad AC's thats the easy way to undertsand it
Strange how many people don't even understand that simple theoretic construct.

Edited by Lily from animove, 19 August 2016 - 06:01 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Zeoraimer, on 19 August 2016 - 05:51 AM, said:

I'm not going to be able to test this myself, but does the Order of gaining heat matter? Example:

AC20 then Gauss fired split seconds apart.

AC20: 6 head, 20 energy = all good.
Gauss: 1 heat, 15 energy = 5 energy over.

Whats is the heat calculation?
6 + 1 + (1 x 0.5) = 6 + 1 + 0.5 = 7.5 heat total?

or will it back date the the AC20, giving:
6 + 1 + ( (6+1) x 0.5 ) = 10.5 heat?

Some macros might help...


Also, any played an old game called Shattered Steel? You have a energy reactor on board, where you can balance the generated energy to power movement, shields, and energy weapon recharge. So if you went with just ballistics, you moved all the power to shields and locomotion instead. On totally destructible terrain. There were maps where you could plough through a mountain to skip most of the level to get to the objective...

Extra heat depends on how much energy you draw.

Fire a 20 and a Gauss at exactly the same moment you get 35 damage = (35-30)*.5= +2.5 heat.

If there's any delay between the two at all, you'll dip below 30 energy and have no extra heat.

[Wintersdark]

Lily from animove, on 19 August 2016 - 05:59 AM, said:

that depends on when and how much you exit the energy bar. if you drop to -10 energy (no matter which fired first) you will have 5 heat as penalty. So it depends with yoru "split second" how much energy is left when firing this happened.

Exactly.

Quote

this, basically the current system means:

when your heat is empty, you can still fire but 50% of the damage you shoot is additionally generated heat.

and that energy bar regards constantly. So, you take full energy draw when you pull the trigger - so a 1 second burn duration on a laser has recharged 20 energy during the lasers burn time.

As long as you're not using very huge alphas, you can safely ignore the system really.

Again, the really important thing people miss is just how minor the impact of this system is. If anything, it needs harsher penalties, it's so very much more lenient than ghost heat.

[PFC Carsten]

Given that I am poster #210-ish, it might have been said 200 times already, BUT:
In order to do a meaninful test you need to do 2 things:
- Do not have people re-download the whole game each time. That is just bull.
- Even more important: Do not let it run concurrently with an event. I got, but don't understand that you don't want to provide bonuses for takting part in what's normally the job of paid playtesters. Fine. But in this case especially, you compete with your own event for player particitaion. That's not helpful. It almost feels like everyone at PGI lives on his own, private Island and does not talk to the rest there.

Wanna buy a mech pack?

[Wintersdark]

xengk, on 19 August 2016 - 02:59 AM, said:

Thanks for the reply.
I am away on holiday and have no access to MWO.
Should check youtube for PTS videos.

What I understand from the test note is that:
Fire UAC20
Use 20 Energy
Energy Reserve at 10
No penalty
0.5 seconds later
Double tap UAC20
Use 20 Energy
Energy Reserve at -10
Take (10*0.5) 5 Heat penalty

From your reply, it seem the energy replenish at "real time" instead of 1 second tick.
Fire UAC20
Use 20 Energy
Energy Reserve at 10
No Heat penalty
0.5 seconds later
Energy replenished: 10
Double tap UAC20
Use 20 Energy
Energy Reserve at 0
No Heat penalty

Yes, it's constant real time energy replenishment,and it's very fast.

Thus, and this is what I'm really happy with, you can for example fire two groups very close together and not have the Ghost Heat problem: say a Warhawk Prime with 4 ERPPC's. With ghost heat, if you accidentally fired the second set at .499999s, you'd shut down on the spot.

If you do that now, you'd have 30-27+(almost)10=13, so your second volley would cost you -14 energy = 7 extra heat.

Without that extra almost 10, your have 13 extra heat.

This means you can develope skill riding the energy draw threshold, knowing that minor mistakes just cause a bit of inefficiency instead of spiking heat.

[Wintersdark]

Appogee, on 18 August 2016 - 10:58 PM, said:

I am asking a different question. I am asking: why does it work that way?

How are you able to fire a weapon when you don't have any energy in reserve? And why does firing when you are low on energy cause a Mech to get hotter?

(Why not make it that, when you are out of energy, you can't fire. That would at least be logical.)

Inerv... Sorry, forget the name... He covered why. The game does stop you from firing if you're actually over 30 draw already (more accurately under zero) but you can choose to override that with the override button.

Note that the why explanation actually works: it's not that you have no energy in reserve; its not a big capacitor. It's how much power you're mech can safely handle moving around at one time.

Consider car audio. You can run an amplifier with a small gauge wire if you want, and if it's a low powered amp that's fine. Put a more powerful amp in its place, turn up the volume, and the internal resistance of the smaller wire causes heat to be generated. Big enough power draw and you liquid the wire.

Our mechs fusion reactors can supply 30 draw, over and above ordinary operation, safely. Draw more, and reactor efficiency drops. Poor power supply efficiency means more power is wasted as heat.

Note that that doesn't happen often: it's kinda hard in normal play to acheive because weapon cool downs allow energy to rebuild before you can fire again anyways.

Edited by Wintersdark, 19 August 2016 - 06:21 AM.

[invernomuto]

PFC Carsten, on 19 August 2016 - 06:10 AM, said:

Given that I am poster #210-ish, it might have been said 200 times already, BUT: In order to do a meaninful test you need to do 2 things: - Do not have people re-download the whole game each time. That is just bull. - Even more important: Do not let it run concurrently with an event. I got, but don't understand that you don't want to provide bonuses for takting part in what's normally the job of paid playtesters. Fine. But in this case especially, you compete with your own event for player particitaion. That's not helpful. It almost feels like everyone at PGI lives on his own, private Island and does not talk to the rest there. Wanna buy a mech pack?

1) seems that someone on Reddit found a workaround:
- Download and start the PTS client installer.
- once PTS client starts patching pause the download and exit the client.
- copy/paste the contents of your main install directory into the PTS's
- Reopen the PTS client and run the repair tool.
- Now you'll only need to download the files that changed. (approx. 800 mb vs 13gb)

2) See Russ's tweet on the subject:

Quote

Those worries about event running during PTS - don't stress there is no hard deadline to bring down PTS

Edited by invernomuto, 19 August 2016 - 06:25 AM.

[Kshat]

I won't judge about exact numberssince these are subject to change and that's what the PTS is for anyway.

But, I like the general approach, because it opens up a totally new way to balance mechs and chassis.

IF this system stays more or less this way, we got simple and easy ways to influence a mechs performance: by it's max energy level and refill rate.

Take, for example, the classic Awesome with three PPCs. Right now it got heatquirks and stuff to make it work with three PPCs, in the future you might get completely rid of these quirks, instead allow him a greater max energy value to regulate the alpha-size and with a modification to the refill-rate you can tweak the DPS.

At this point, I would suggest to roughly tie the max energy value to the chassis size (light, medium, heavy, assault) and the refill rate to the reactor size used.
A Spider won't have the capabilities to deliver an Alpha like the Atlas.

To cut it short: energy refill rate defines your DPS and the max energy value is simply a means to pool your power. So, an Atlas actually NEEDS a higher max energy value than a light, because a light can easily disengage and wait to fill up whereas an Atlas has to stick to the fight.

This would, first time in this game, help to define the assaults without the need for heavy ballistic boating. As it stands, an assault is hampered by it's size and movement archetype alone - and to make him move you need a much bigger reactor than a heavy mech, which costs exceedingly vast amounts of free tonnage.
But an assault doesn't get any power back, a heavy mech brings mostly the same firepower to the table.
In the end: assaults need massive quirks in order to perform and are, if these quirks are lacking, not played at all (hi Victor!) since there are ONLY drawbacks in piloting an assault compared to a heavy mech.

In the end, these ratings might give you options like, for example, an engine rating or a number of hardpoints. You're not forced to use them, but they open up possibilities. You can use a higher energy rating, but you can absolutely build your mech another way to another playstyle. So, this would offer more leeway to build a mech than these superspecial quirks but STILL increase it's value.
Or a mech could have reduced values in order to reign him in.

What this system needs is a GRAPHICAL way of displaying the effects of the weapons you've chosen in the mechlab. It is not intuitive to build a mech and the only way to see how it will fare using the weapons is taking him out for a ride. Sure, the values will be written somewhere, but most people don't like to play around with an excel sheet, so the mechlab needs graphical means to display the changes made to the mech.

One point to the Gauss, though: the system seems veeery broken. I can't see why the Gauss should need an additional rule. It takes HUGE amounts of energy to load the coils used for these weapons, so give a single Gauss an energy draw value of ~20 - 30 and Gaussboating in itself will be limited. Because if a Gaussweapon will generate excessive heat, it won't circumvent the existing limiter system (heat). Three Gauss-slugs are a 45point Alpha. Okay, that's a lot. But given the fact that you will then generate tons of heat (and that not many mechs can field three Gauss's anyway) you won't need any "special rules" besides energy draw of the weapon used and cooldown/reload time.

As a sidenote: I like that this system somewhat emulates the lore, where frequent overuse of weapons drove the reactor to extreme heat.

[Krucilatoz]

why the energy generator limited at 30?

Would it be better if it defined by engine size, for example 375 engine (XL/Std) have 37.5,
kodiak XL400 has 40 energy draw ??

If those "energy" generated from engine, it will be more sense that bigger engine generate more energy/power

[Scout Derek]

Gauss Rifle Charge removed, but 6 Seconds cool down. Now I would only be upset if this was all that was done to it, but they incurred the two gauss only rule on the PTS. makes sense to me to stop meta gauss builds like Kodiak or Dire from exploiting system.

Other than that Dakka is slower, and laser vomit and FLD mechs with massive amounts of damage in one alpha have been times down, specifically Lasers.

Now I wish there was some way that snipers with 2-3 large lasers got spared; as they get hurt the most by this it seems. Per say, the Raven -3L gets hurt the most with its only offensive weapons, the 2 ER Larges.

I know for sure that this will be tweaked, there will be a way to do this via quirks too.


Another is SRM energy draw. the 6 is really taking up too much energy, being 12.9 damage with about 9 energy draw.

The problem I have is that SRMs are a short range weapon, and thus some builds get limited by so if they're 3-4 SRM6 with some backup weapons like 3 Mediums.

I was thinking if that if the energy draw for SRM 6 was toned down to 8.5, you'd be giving the backup lasers and 4 packs of SRM 6 breathing room, for those builds who can only run this.

If not, consider doing what I said with the Raven and induce some energy draw quirks for them.

Other than that nothing has changed much save for limiting mechs with high alphas or DPS like the Kodiak -3 or Black Knight's with their laser vomit.

I'm actually okay with this as far as how it is right now. there's no denying there needs to be adjustments, but aside from that it's a ok PTS test for this new mechanic.

[WarHippy]

So after playing last night and sleeping on it some here are my general thoughts on these changes.

1. For the most part changes seem to be fine.
2. Double-Tap should not put you over your power draw. This is a step backward after we got it fixed with ghost heat.
3. Gauss changes are mostly fine. I never liked the charge mechanic, but the new cool down might be a bit harsh.
4. Cool downs in general seem a little over done in general. Pick either the nerf to coold down mods or the accross the board 15% nerf but not both.
5. Clan ER-PPC numbers need to be changed as the splash damage is not worth that extra energy usage above 10pts. Either change them to have 15 direct damage with 15pts of energy used, or keep them as is and lower the energy used.
6. Cluster weapons seem mostly okay, but I would like to try it with some other numbers as well to see how it feels before we settle on a specific number. SRM6's could probably use a little love energy wise.

As for the interface it could probably use some work. That tiny little bar disappears and reappears so rapidly it is almost meaningless, and I'm not overly fond of all the extra sound effects that goes along with it as it seems to be a little distracting. I'm not sure how to fix it exactly, but as it is I'm not particularly happy with the visual and audible cues.

Edited by WarHippy, 19 August 2016 - 07:06 AM.

[biolanpi]

[color=#00FFFF]• All PTS accounts will be boosted with currency and Premium Time to aid with testing (this does not apply to the Live servers).[/color]


[color=#00FFFF]Ok....i will not test this patch. [/color]

[Desintegrator]

Oh PGI - do not state...

....after extensive internal testing...

when you have played some single matches !!

[Dee Eight]

Flying Fox 333, on 19 August 2016 - 02:30 AM, said:

Thanks for that Matt, 5 is insane. Can't believe that's legit.

It is. Mind you, clan gauss's, standard 200 engine, and none of PGI's artificial hardpoint limits.