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Simple note, I would like all remaining weapons to be added, those being IS ER SL, IS ER ML, IS SSRM4, IS SSRM6, IS LB2X, IS LB5X, IS LB20X, IS UAC2, IS UAC10, and ISUAC20 before adding new weapons and with these new weapons use them to balance against clans instead of trying to balance IS ML's against Clan ERML's, because that is silly and foolish. Also fix IS ML heat, it should be 3 heat not 4.
(IS Tech) Medium Range Missiles (3058); MRM-10, MRM-20, MRM-30, MRM-40:
So, I am going to start off with MRM's first due to these are the simplest to do. By this I mean we just have to take Clan LRM's and make them have a flat trajectory and only go out to 450m then just have them lose their engine and just fall as they should due to gravity (so they have a soft range of 450m and then would fall a couple dozen meters away to the ground due to momentum). This is the easiest way to make MRM's work and the most balanced. Probably have the speed between SRM's and LRM's so they don't replace SRM's but, also aren't so sluggish they can't hit anything past 300m.
A possible way to help MRM's be a bit easier to use is make them have a stream of missiles for every 10 missiles in the weapon. So an MRM-10 is 2 streams, MRM-20 is 4, MRM-30 is 6, and MRM-40 is 8 making the missiles launch faster and have basically a tighter cluster. On top of this the timing between each missile firing would be able to be adjusted to better balance the weapon, same goes for missile velocity.
(Clan Tech) Heavy Lasers (3059); Heavy Large Lasers, Heavy Medium Lasers, Heavy Small Lasers:
Now, next easiest thing to introduce would be Heavy Lasers. Heavy Lasers I would say would have a longer time to burn to do full damage. To do this we have the normal burn time of say a cER Large Laser which is 1.5 for 11 damage, or 7.3 damage per second during the burn. So a Heavy Large Laser would burn normally for 1.5 seconds for 10 heat and 1.5 damage, but, it works like a flamer, you hold the button down, it fills up the cooldown bar and then you can release it and just do a standard cER LL burn with it. Now here is the fun part, you can continue holding it for another .95 seconds to do a full heavy large laser burn. During this time you 7.37 heat per second (but only for .95 seconds so it is just the extra 7 heat), roughly. Once the full HLL burn is over it begins to cycle. This makes heavy lasers have a higher potential damage output, but, doesn't lock you into firing the whole thing for a massive heat penalty. Throw this in for the very long burn time of 2.45(ish) seconds and you have the canon aim penalty as well due to 2.45 seconds is a VERY long time to hold a target in your sights.
Other possibility is to allow for a constant stream burn like a normal laser but have an increasingly large amount of shake for each heavy laser burning (so a Heavy Small Laser would be like .2 shake and a Heavy Medium would be .5 shake, Heavy Large Laser would be .8 shake of MASC) that would add up across all classes of Heavy Lasers, I do prefer the first option though.
(IS Tech) Rotary AutoCannons, aka RAC/2 or RAC/5's (3062):
RAC's would work a lot like Heavy Lasers. Now I will explain, or maybe I should say RAC's would work a lot like flamers but instead of over heating it is greater jam chance. So think of the MG and how utterly worthless it is outside of face hugging with four of them, now imagine if their DPS was a laser thin stream of 5 DPS? That is my idea for the RAC5. Simply put you would fire with maybe a small amount of vibration like MASC and JJ's apply (the amount increases with every RAC firing, just like the second heavy laser option). Now RAC5's only are effective out to 450m, with MWO' scheme they would do 0 damage at 900m, so they would be very brawly weapons due to their range band of engagement. RAC2's would go out to 540 optimal and max range of 1080m.
Again, RAC's are more rapid fire stream weapons of small projectiles. This would be a lot more balanced than just making them UAC's that can fire up to 6 times before the cooldown finishes but with higher jam chance each time you fired.
This formula would be the first second of firing would fill the bar slowly with green until it filled up, then turn orange then rapidly flashing red indicating over heating of the weapon and eventually jam. Now, the cooldown would be the same as the AC/5 and UAC/5 for the RAC/5 and the RAC/2 with the same profile as AC/2's after that 1 second burn. Yes I know this makes it a stream ballistic weapon which aren't that great, but, a safe 5DPS for 1 second for 1 heat with the ability to go on for more than 1 second at 1 heat per second for 5DPS is rather nasty, even if it is spread about. This is why there would have to be some shake to the RAC's to offset the exceptionally high DPS one could mount with these weapons. Ammo would be counted in seconds (out to .01 second intervules) of fire time left in the RAC's ammobins.
Note, I would change UAC's on both sides to allow you to fire a second time at any point during the cooldown but with a jam chance.
Hyper Assault Gauss (3068): HAG-20, HAG-30, HAG-40;
The HAG is a nasty clan weapon, it is a clan gauss rifle that fires LB style shots at groups of 20, 30, and 40, but, is noted to have a rate of fire like a RAC5. This gives me an interesting idea of how to handle these weapons. The idea is that HAG's would burst fire 5 pellet shots as long as the player holds down the fire button until it hits the weapon damage rating. So this would prevent 2,000m/s LB's with very tight clusters from being a thing, while at the same time allowing for them to actually be a thing. By this I mean a HAG-20 would fire 4 shots of 5 pellets in a tight spread over the course of a few moments and be done firing pretty quickly. How fast? Questionable, and not certain. Bigger HAG's I would have increase time to fire all the rounds by .3s from the 20 to 30, and from the 30 to 40.
Option number 2 for making HAG's work would be make it so HAG's fire like Clan AC's and UAC's do currently but instead have it 1 round of 10 pellets at say 1,500m/s. This would mean a HAG20 would fire two shells of 10 pellets with the same spread as an LB10X, or possibly tighter (making spread tied to not distance from the gun by instead make it velocity dependant). This would mean HAG-40's would fire 4 shells and HAG-30's would fire 3.
The other major issue is how tight to make the clusters as that heavily impacts how quickly the next shell would be fired. Which gives another method to balance these weapons.
Another method to this would be each HAG would get x 'barrels' like a multi barrel shotgun with an LB10X Gauss round in it, and you can fire up to the damage rating of the gun equal to that during the cooldown. Basically, with a HAG 20 you have two barrels, so, you can fire one 'shell' and then at any time during the cooldown fire a second one then have to wait for both to reload, draw back would be the cooldown would either have to reset, or, if possible have two seperate cooldowns within the weapon itself. This would give a great new bit of flavor to the HAG's and give them a high rate of fire, but, more down to user skill to make the most of it.
Side note, this now gives me the image of double, tripple, and quadruple barreled shotguns which is hilarious and awesome.
This concludes my ideas.
A side note is that with the PTS on power draw I have realized that MRM's would be a stream of power draw on your system as would every other weapon here based on damage of projectile launched or DPS of the stream. so an MRM-10 would be draining 1 energy per missile launched which would be probably at a rate like the cLRM10. This would make missiles more unique than pin point front loaded damage weapons, as well as different from stream weapons, making a new class of 'burst fire' so to spead weapons.
RAC's would be a constant stream of 1:1 dps to energy drawn, simple enough, as would heavy lasers and all other lasers. HAG's and clan AC's would be several dips into your energy pool based on how much damage potential the shot has. So a HAG would fire 2 rounds each at 75% potential damage due to spread so you would get to draws of 7.5 energy with a small gap between them when firing a HAG 20. This would be a nice way to give burst fire weapons, again, some flavor and some upswings to their use. This also makes smaller mechs that have to boat lasers able to do so without dying horribly from overheating.
Edit to add:
I forgot about Advanced Tactical Missiles (3060) and Multi-Missile Launchers (3068). Due to the issue of the lack of ammo switching they would have to be heavily fudged to work, but, best to just not do anything with them until we have ammo switching otherwise they serve no purpose. Said purpose being on hard point starved mechs, or tonnage starved mechs ATM's and MML's offer the ability to take both long and close range missiles by just taking certain ammo types and swapping between them at a moment's notice. Due to the lack of ammo swapping and the fact that the ammo is vastly different over overlapping range brackets it is not possible to create a fudged system of x damage type for y range while w ammo for z range, it just doesn't work, sadly as SRM's and LRM's over lap with different damage values so it fall flat on it's face at this point in time.
Edited by Moonlight Grimoire, 18 August 2016 - 10:17 PM.
