125 replies to this topic

[Supersmacky]

I guess what bothers me is this seems like such a reversal of what PGI did in the previous PTS iterations of ED. Not just small things. Not just changes to one or two things, but a sweeping reversal. It makes it look like they have lost sight of what they were wanting to do with ED. It is sort of like corporate initiatives I see so much in my job.

"This will be so much better"

"Everyone will benefit"

"People are excited about it"

It fails and then, six months to a year later, the whole thing is scrapped...quietly and unceremoniously.

PGI needs a clear outline of what they want to do here and what it should look like when it goes live. Their testing doesn't seem to reflect the focus of implementing ED, but tweaking everything because, reasons. Yes, I realize they have testing data to look at which will impact future iterations, but these recent changes are so broad and sweeping it doesn't even really look like ED anymore. ED has become almost an afterthought instead of the core of this effort.

Now, for my specific suggestions:
Gauss - get rid of the charge mechanic. Have the Gauss continually draw power so that the overall "energy pool" is lower if you have a Gauss. Do that and increase the cool down of the weapon. Yes, there will be snap shots and the associated salt flowing, but these two things will keep their 'god mode' comparable to current levels.

Heat Sinks - Stop fiddling with this. Make a baseline for SHS, then double it for DHS. PERIOD. I am speaking more to dissipation than capacity. Sure, make SHS and DHS have the same capacity, but make dissipation the point of different and again: SHS x 1, DHS x 2. Simple.

Splash Mechanic - Again, get rid of it. Fiddle with cool down, heat, and/or power draw, but stop with silly mechanics to address perceived issues. Clan lasers have longer durations and generate more heat to balance their increase damage, so why aren't you doing the same thing when it comes to the cERPPC?

Missile Spread - Seriously? What does this have to do with ED?!? You want to adjust the cool down, heat generation and power draw, then fine. But missile spread should not even be a part of the testing.

UACs - I like that you are distinguishing the jam clearing time for each size UAC. Now, if you would just make the jam chance a sliding scale based on how many 'double-taps' you are doing rather than some arbitrary percentage that would be a step in the right direction. Or, another idea, have the jam chance go up with each UAC you are boating (attribute it to ammo feed issues or whatever). But, all in all, you are working on ED so why not use that mechanic to limit the double-taps? For instance, have the jam chance be relatively small unless you are exceeding your available power at which point it does up considerable (for instance, a flat 10%, but it goes up to 25% is a player is over-drawing power).

I have other ideas, but this is already a long post and I don't think much of what gets suggested by myself or the rest of the user base will be seriously considered anyway. And so it goes...

I'm not saying my ideas are great. I just really feel that PGI is missing the boat on this opportunity and taking a step backwards in their current testing parameters. I am really concerned that what we will end up with in the end is a badly implemented system that is a bastardization of what ED was supposed to do/be. This will lead to even more band-aid fixes, more salt and smaller player base.

[SlightlyMobileTurret]

I have my tin-foil hat on.

Night Gyr can do 3UAC10.
3UAC10 is probably the only build stronger under ED.

[Wecx]

Keshav Murali, on 13 September 2016 - 07:20 AM, said:

I have my tin-foil hat on.

Night Gyr can do 3UAC10.
3UAC10 is probably the only build stronger under ED.

Night Gyr and KDK-3s i can see it now.

[pizzafly]

Soooooo, pgi is going to f4ck mwo up and players go away..... so they can say us "Sorry, there aren't enough players... sadly we need to stop servers (and developing something else, finally").

[Gas Guzzler]

Keshav Murali, on 12 September 2016 - 11:37 PM, said:

Night Gyr and MAD-IIC with 3UAC10 will be very, very strong in this system.

No. The 4 UAC5 Night Gyr will be strong in this system. The 3 UAC10 version will not be as good, as you have to wait 1.5 seconds in between bursts of 30 damage.

[Cyrilis]

Now, these changes look promising to me. I am not too happy with the skill tree nerfs (they are quite serious !), but the rest of the values seem to work at least on th paper. *logging in to test client*

[L3mming2]

Gas Guzzler, on 13 September 2016 - 08:22 AM, said:

No. The 4 UAC5 Night Gyr will be strong in this system. The 3 UAC10 version will not be as good, as you have to wait 1.5 seconds in between bursts of 30 damage.

so?

with the cd increase of 15% the cd module decrease the cd of the UAC10 is 2.92s anny way (dont forget the 0.33s of the burst...) and it only draws 9 points .. so you can fire it at full dps with no penalty

Edited by L3mming2, 13 September 2016 - 09:17 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Keshav Murali, on 13 September 2016 - 07:20 AM, said:

I have my tin-foil hat on.

Night Gyr can do 3UAC10.
3UAC10 is probably the only build stronger under ED.

It's not.

3UAC10 is ED capped; cannot output maximum DPS. You fire, have to wait 1.5s to doubletap, then 1.5s to fire again, but it's a ~2.5s cooldown.

If you doubletap early, extra heat.

4xUAC5 is a much better build under ED. Basically, if you're running 10's, 2UAC10 is the cap with ED, and even then it tends to eat all your available energy so otherwise backup weapons/LRM's is realistically the rest of your build.

3 UAC10's is kinda bad under ED.

Edited by Wintersdark, 13 September 2016 - 09:19 AM.

[Wintersdark]

L3mming2, on 13 September 2016 - 04:44 AM, said:

not entirly shure how the heat caps work now, if i have a 250+ engine and no more HS
is my cap 30 ore 40 ore 50?

ore is it 40 for a DHS mech and 42 for a SHS mech??

and why is 50 whit this SHS smurfy build?
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...2f30cb9c6aa0356

On PTS4, heat capacity = 40 + (1*total DHS count). So if you have 10 in engine and 3 out of your engine, 40+(1*13) = 53
With SHS, it's 40 + (1.2*total SHS count), so a 15 in engine/25 out of engine build (40 total) can have 40 + (1.2*40) = 88 (fun with SHS Kodiaks on PTS!)

[Aleski]

WTF are you doing, PGI ?

Juste remove the charge mechanics on the gauss and remove the splash damage on CER-PPC... Do you even read the people on the forum ?
Gauss : 6 second cooldown and charge mechanic make it impossible to use. If you don't have the cooldown module and some quirks on the mech, it's endless to wait for the cooldown.

For the LRMs family : it's good to adjust them, but nerfing the LRM5 isn't the solution. The solution is to buff the 10-15 and 20. All the LRMs launchers are garbage, only the LRM5 is usefull. So why do you nerf LRM 5 ?

The rest is OK and seems to be a step forward. That's a good point to adjust lazors and adjust ultra AC jam chance depending of the caliber.

[xXBagheeraXx]

AnTi90d, on 12 September 2016 - 10:23 AM, said:

I like the heat threshold changes.

.. that's about it.

Lowering ER laser duration is going to make peek/poke sniping even more annoying.

I still despise the whole Energy Draw mechanic and prefer Ghost Heat.

ED screws mixed builds over, who aren't very powerful because they don't have perfect convergence.. because of discouraging mixed builds, thus it encourages boating.

GH discourages boating and thus encourages mixed builds.

No iteration of ED can or will ever encourage mixed builds. It's an inferior system to what we have live. It sounds OK from a design perspective until you think in terms of mixed-VS-boat.

-----

I'd rather see the lower heat cap tested with the current or a tweaked Ghost Heat.

Basically this. You guys stepped in the right direction with the heatsink, heat cap changes but you still want to hold on to this ED mechanic. Ditch ED. all its going to do is make me uninstall this game when It goes live, and you will lose another whale, and work with the current heat system.

[BLOOD WOLF]

Supersmacky, on 13 September 2016 - 05:29 AM, said:

"People are excited about it"

It fails and then, six months to a year later, the whole thing is scrapped...quietly and unceremoniously.

You mean like how the 3/3/3/3 tonnage rules broke the MM?........ohh wait, it didn't and the he players making the most noise quietly backed off till nobody remembered their threads

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 13 September 2016 - 11:35 AM.

[TankBadger42]

Guys, get your behinds on the test server!

Prattling means little, go generate some data!

[Rogue Jedi]

xe N on, on 12 September 2016 - 10:15 AM, said:

It's not. You can simply macro the Gauss. Therefore the whole charge thing was always a bad idea anyways.

put the gauss on a macro, seriously?
if you put a gauss on a macro you will seriously disadvantage yourself compared to those people who learn how to use it, you will waste ammo on bad shots.
A shot may look good and half a second later be no good, if I was to put the gauss on a macro I would frequently miss what looked like a good shot when I started charging but by the time the gauss is charged the enemy Mech has moved into cover or a suicidal ally has moved between the rifle and the target, in many cases I would miss a shot fired 0.75 seconds after starting charging but have a good shot at 1.5-2 seconds, and worse case I do not get a good shot so allow the gauss to loose its charge and be ready to fire again less than 3 seconds after starting the initial charge without wasting a gauss bullet, where as if it was on a macro it would be 6 seconds after starting charging before I get a second shot having also wasted 100kg worth of ammo

if I had Gauss on a macro I think it would be less than half as effective as it is having learned to use it with the chargeup mechanic.
I am not disagreeing it would be easier to use without the chargeup mechanic, and weather or not requiring a small amount of skill ^{(which I had mastered less than an hour after the chargeup was first put into the game)} is a bad thing is up for debate

[Navid A1]

So PGI... one SERIOUS question:

Why did you nerfed total DISSIPATION on top of reduced heat cap?

IIRC, the community idea was reduced heat cap AND increased dissipation!

[Vincent Quatermain]

Navid A1, on 13 September 2016 - 03:18 PM, said:

So PGI... one SERIOUS question:

Why did you nerfed total DISSIPATION on top of reduced heat cap?

IIRC, the community idea was reduced heat cap AND increased dissipation!

Because they wanted to show you that even approaching the TT numbers would be a complete sh*t show. I'm convinced that most of PTS4 is just to shut up all the idiots who claim that Shutdown Warrior Online would fix all balance problems ever.

[Naaaaak]

Scrap energy draw and remove ghost heat. It was interesting to try energy draw, but it’s just ghost heat 2.0: an arbitrary layer on top of existing mechanics that are difficult to reason about when building a mech and difficult to explain to newcomers.

Balance the game around the existing weapon properties (cooldown, duration, heat, damage, charge mechanics, spreads, jam times, etc.). I’m fine with unique mechanics (C-ERPPC damage spread, Guass chargeup, etc.)


Also, It's time to make *ALL* Clan Ultra Autocannons fire as a single shot. This "temporary" multi-shot mechanic has been in there for years now.

Edited by Naaaaak, 13 September 2016 - 04:21 PM.

[SlightlyMobileTurret]

Yes please, gimme 70 pinpoint UACs on my dire on live and 60 on PTS. Where do I sign up to farm pug tears?

[Felicitatem Parco]

TT Purists: "We want 15 damage Clan ERPPCs, like they are supposed to be!"
Reality: 6 ton Gauss rifles are probably not a good idea, especially with ISERPPCs dealing 10 dmg for 7 tons. Drop the crutch, learn to stand. If it weren't for people like you, the clans would be tempered a bit more and we wouldn't need so many ubiquitous IS Quirks to compensate for the better Clan base stats. (and don't give me that 10v12 B.S. You know darn good and well a 10v12 game of Awesome Mechs vs. Meh Mechs would not be equally fun for both teams)



Gauss + ERPPC Snipers: "Get rid of Gauss Charge! I can't do my Gauss + ERPPC combo!"
Realty: Why do you use the Gauss + ERPPC combo? Maybe because it's a bit *too* convenient...? Yeah. Thought so.



BitterVets: "Get rid of Ghost Heat and Energy Draw!"
Reality: Yeah, they are not undoing Convergence. Sorry. TTK had been [and will return to be] way too short on anything under 70 tons with unrestricted firepower available.



BattleTech Fans: "Give us a sliding heat penalty scale where your Mech and Pilot's performance degrades as you heat up!"
Reality: Yeah... still waiting for this one. It's 3+ years overdue.

[Aramuside]

Mystere, on 12 September 2016 - 12:56 PM, said:

Meh! The typical gauss macro is garbage.

Only a few know how to write the real deal, and we're not talking -- unless you're using a joystick.

I think you just proved why the mechanic is a bad idea.