Robinson Crusher, on 18 September 2016 - 03:04 PM, said:
No ScarecrowES, I understand the argument. You agree that heat is part of weapon balance, but think the heat system isn't... and that by adjusting more than just cooldown this causes problems. Then you go on to make a fairly strong argument that the system IS actually part of balancing GROUPS of weapons by discussing the differences in behaviour between TT and MWO. I agree completely with your assessment of how the TT penalties effect behaviour compared to MWO and would personally prefer we were in that environment. That's why I said your system was interesting.
My point is that heat (by weapon and the heat system itself) is part of balance because of the effect on groups of weapons. Since "boating" and alpha strikes are the enemy of the day, I'm not surprised the devs want to play with the heat system rather than cooldowns.
You seem to be assuming the devs don't understand their game. What they adjust for balance will have to do with coding time and server load, not the twists and turns they put us through to get to that goal. However, I completely support your efforts to put an end to "redlining". I hope the devs take a close look at it.
As for cooldowns, you seem to have misunderstood my comment. Not to worry, my sense of humour often does that to people.
The thing is... the heat system... if it is to be impartial, and function correctly in all situations no matter what weapons you're using and in what amounts... then it has to be designed that way from the get go.
As we showed, weapon balancing and build mechanics and the heat system all work together. To do this much damage at this much range, you need this much investment. Essentially, you're going to spend this many crits, and this much weight, or this much heat or whatever to get it. These values are carefully chosen. The relationship to the heat of a weapon to the concepts of output and investment are EXTREMELY important. And just the same, the relationship of the build to output and heat are extremely important. Changing something like the heat cap value of heat sinks or their dissipation changes the relationships of heat and investment. It messes with weapon balance, it messes with build balance, and it messes with match balance.
On the Live servers, this balance is thrown off. PGI's methodology for setting up cap and dissipation deviates from the very specifically chosen method, while neither the build system or weapon balance have fundementally changed. The ways in which PGI deviated cause ALL of its current problems. Adding 30 extra heat to the heat scale for all mechs gives everything more heat to work with. That means higher alphas and longer bursts of damage with no way to reign it in other than a shutdown.
Changing the way cap and dissipation are calculated has lead to low-cap builds getting a significant boost to both cap and dissipation, while high-cap builds lose significant dissipation. That throws off the investment mechanic in the build and with weapon balance, yeah? These are the results of the very first choice PGI made. They gave players WAY too much heat, with no restrictions on how they could use it, and didn't dole out that heat fairly. So their fix... ED...
You punish damage output by penalizing heat. Mistake. Throws off balance - automatically you are punishing some weapon types more than others for the same infraction. You now decided that certain kinds of damage aren't worth as much as others... further unbalance. Then you started messing with heat cap and dissipation rates even more. More imbalance. You didn't reduce cap by reducing the fixed amount of heat all mechs get, but pulled it from the cap they earn through their builds. Further imbalance. Not to mention the hundreds of stat changes we're going through trying to compensate for all these mistakes.
I say PGI doesn't understand their system for several reasons... first, they've never gone back and addressed the very first mistake... deviating from TT in the first place for the heat system, while retaining the other pillars of balance from TT intact.
The second is in using one metric to punish another metric that has no direct correlation to the first. Damage and heat are not the same thing. You cannot measure them equally against each other.
The 3rd is in decoupling heat cap and dissipation from the build. This is, for all intents and purposes, a capital sin. Noone who understands the system at all would have done this.