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1. Didn't seem to change much of anything. It is still possible to do nothing but alpha strike and in fact seems even a little cooler to do so and not having to wait as long in between alphas to cool down, even with the heat penalty. Alpha strikes have always been canonical as a last resort or to make the kill shot (which risks immediate shutdown). Still not the case and doesn't appear to help the TTK and doesn't really give that 'great risk' feeling.
2. What I did notice was the Critical Draw indicator would light up for a much shorter duration than I expected when reading the PTR post about it. When hitting the critical threshold, the indicator was only on for maybe half a second by appearances and there was never a second that I could not fire even a single weapon. In essence, this made it seem like the mechanic of preventing weapons fire when the indicator was lit wasn't even working.
- I feel like this should be increased to maybe 2+ seconds to actually give that 'oh crap' moment when you can't return fire.
- I would even go as far as to suggest that you give a long weapons lock, but you only prevent the ability to fire all weapons simultaneously (by using the Alpha Strike key, or simply pressing the keys for all of your weapon groups at the same time, or any other workaround). Granted this may be trickier to implement, and was just a thought. Either way, the weapons lock period should be noticeable and longer.
- As another alternative, maybe the weapons lock length should be incremental based on how much of a penalty you receive at any given time, and cumulative.
3. The 20 energy/1 second recharge rate feels a tad too quick. I suggest either slightly increasing the wait by a second or 2, or make it so it only recharges a lower amount of energy per second (like 10).
These are just my first impressions while testing it in the testing grounds during the short time I had to try it out last night. I plan to actually take some additional time and see how it plays out while in a match and with different mechs/builds later tonight. I will update my results after that.
