Khobai, on 18 August 2016 - 10:58 PM, said:
Yep. Assaults need to do more damage than Lights. The energy cap should be based on weight class.
Light = 30
Medium = 35
Heavy = 40
Assault = 45
It makes logical sense. I agree. However, as a mechanism to replace ghost heat and limit large damage alpha strikes from boating ... the energy value is critical.
You could do something like:
Light: 20 - recharge 30/s
Medium: 25 - recharge 25/s
Heavy: 30 - recharge 20/s
Assault:35 - recharge 15/s
Or give the assaults a higher cap ... but reduce the recharge rate.
Keep in mind that 40 is a magic number for either 4 PPC builds or 2 AC20 builds ... both of which currently have ghost heat penalties.
Also, with longer cooldowns on weapons ... it will be important to check the recharge values to see if they are relevant. If the recharge rate is substantially less than the cooldowns then you will always be able to fire the weapons with no penalties.
One more point to make ... the comment has been made that assaults should have a higher alpha since they carry more weapons. The 30 limit imposes 30 damage/shot. With a recharge rate of 20/s the full 30 will be available after 1.5s. However, most weapons cooldowns are longer than this ... as a result, an assault mech with 60 total points of damage from weapons will be able to fire TWO 30 point alpha strikes (using different weapons) with a spacing of 1.5s while the other weapons are still on cooldown.
So the other way to approach this would be to give assaults a faster recharge rate and NOT increase their cap so that they can use the rest of their weapons in multiple 30 point alpha strikes ... which is not available to smaller mechs since they don't have the weapon loadouts and have to wait for cooldowns to fire again ... this does open the door for 6 PPC Stalker builds that can fire alternating sets of 3 PPC every 1.5 seconds even under the current plan (assuming it can dissipate the heat
).