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[Queen of England]

Overall, I like the system better than heat scaling.

I was happy to see that the penalty for going over the 30 energy limit was fairly relaxed - it creates a good dynamic in-game. Sometimes its appropriate to fire an alpha strike and incur a penalty, sometimes its appropriate to split fire to maintain maximum DPS. Heat scaling had penalties so severe that you pretty much would just work around them in the mechlab, rather than making decisions in-game, since you'd never want to actually incur the penalty. This is a nice improvement.

I think the new system overly favors pin point front-loaded damage. Since pin-point front-loaded damage draws the same energy as pin point non-front-loaded damage, and front-loaded damage is more valuable than damage over time, all else being equal, the system really favors PPCs/ACs/Gauss over lasers. I'd suggest increasing the energy/damage for those weapons moderately, perhaps to 1.2 energy/damage.

I also think the new system unnecessarily punishes heavy- and assault-class SRM brawlers, such as the CPT-A1, Mad Dog, AS7-S and D-DC, or Spirit Bear, which deliver very high damage alphas that scatter widely. I'd suggest decreasing the energy/damage for LBX and SRM weapons significantly, perhaps to .5 energy/damage. That would allow 'mechs like the AS7-S to still perform alpha strikes occasionally, even without completely eliminating the heat penalty.

I also think a visual indicator for how much heat penalty you were incurring, such as the one proposed by Jman5, would be a good idea. The audio indicator lets you know when you've incurred a penalty, but there isn't any visual or auditory indication of how large the penalty was.