13 replies to this topic

[Cold Darkness]

since a sudden burst of extraheat akin to what ghost heat does right now feels like a very clunky mechanic, i suggest change like this:

when your energybar is depleted, rather than producing instant extraheat for every extra point of damage, your mech will no longer cool down, but heat up gradually until your energy levels are normalized again.

for exact numbers, the math guys can calculate feasable suggestions. this topic is mainly to discuss a more realistic and possibly more strategic implementation of heat penalties to the game.

why gradually generating heat would be more realistic should be obvious. why it is more strategic might not be as obvious. this system would give you the option to burst an enemy mech in a desperate situation, with the a guaranteed VERY long cooldown shutdown after that bursting (because for up to 6 [-120 energy] your mech will not even start cooling down) and potentially serious damage/death to your own mech.

please post your opinions and possible suggestions for numbers into this thread.
posts like "this sucks" arent welcome. if it sucks in your opinion do a post like "this sucks, because:..." < " ... " being a your reason for thinking so. (just because i assume someone taking it literally )

[BLOOD WOLF]

So a couple of notes. They way you put it, your system is a bit more complex. Also It makes no sense for the mech to continue to heat up when your bar is depleted. I would understand that using more energy in the given period will cause an increase. Penalites after are good, just not the gradual increase in heat. that's overkill


I have said that it wouldn't in fact be more realistic. As object that's draw more energy tend to get hotter. They don't get hotter when the energy is depleted. Now you are penalizing the player with something he can not see.

Sounds like an overdrive mode with penalties towards the end. I dunno if that's a fair analysis of your post.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 27 September 2016 - 05:17 AM.

[Cold Darkness]

see issue with overdraw is, that you can simply not tax an electrical system by over 6 times of what its build for and expect it to simply heat up more then usual. thats simply not how it works.
essentially what my suggestions assumes is, that there an energy storage system in place in your mech, whichmakes sense for the whole ED system. in physics, heat build up is also not a spontanous thing to happen. which is why ghost heat and the instant penalty of ED do not make sense in the simulator aspect of the game and propably are only there for simplicity.

now, with an energy storage (or more simple: battery) youd have your basic overdraw needs explained to some basic and easy to understand degree. as long as your system is below its comfort energy level, your generator will work harder to get it back up to normal levels and by this will heat up.

and "overdrive mode with penalties towards the end." is actually EXACTLY what the whole override mechanic in MWO is, so yes, your analysis is correct in that regard. my suggestion is to simply switch from an immediate heavy penalty, which does not only limit high alpha damage, but also tends to limit burst dps to a system that will allow you to do both, but turns both into a strategic decision, because you mech would continously heat up instead of cooling down while your ED is in critical levels.

[ScarecrowES]

Using heat to tax damage, from the outset, is a flawed and unbalanced mechanic. It punishes different weapons to different degrees. Low heat weapons get taxed proportionately more than high heat weapons, which wreaks all kinds of havoc on weapon and build balance. Really, there's no way to "fix" the system so long as you look at damage and apply a heat penalty to it, which means ED is rotten down to its core.

[Cold Darkness]

while you may or may not be right about that, this thread is not created to discuss heat as a penalty mechanic. it is to discuss an alternative application of the currently planned penalty mechanic. for discussion about heat as a penalty mechanic, please use one of the threads with that theme. there are ALOT to chose from.

[FupDup]

ScarecrowES, on 27 September 2016 - 08:14 AM, said:

...Low heat weapons get taxed proportionately more than high heat weapons, which wreaks all kinds of havoc on weapon and build balance...

I'm not defending this thread's idea, but I want to point out that your quote here is the literal purpose of the ED mechanic.

If it punished high-heat weapons more than low-heat weapons, it would be literally useless. It would be a reskin of the heat bar. We don't need two separate heat bars. Two separate heat bars would be useless for the game. If PGI really wants to stick with ED, it should be different than heat.

[ScarecrowES]

FupDup, on 27 September 2016 - 11:51 AM, said:

I'm not defending this thread's idea, but I want to point out that your quote here is the literal purpose of the ED mechanic.

If it punished high-heat weapons more than low-heat weapons, it would be literally useless. It would be a reskin of the heat bar. We don't need two separate heat bars. Two separate heat bars would be useless for the game. If PGI really wants to stick with ED, it should be different than heat.

*shrug* My personal feeling would be that a system designed to handle combat pacing and is supposed to have no actual role in weapon balance would actually work that way, haha.

Of course, if our goal really WAS to simply reign in low-heat weapons (certainly not part of any stated goal for the system), one could simply remove the massive buffs to heat cap and dissipation low caps receive as a result of the poor-dubs heat changes, and find some way to isolate the 30 free extra points of heat cap all mechs receive - like putting it behind a penalty wall, for instance.

Is there really a need for a whole system like ED to combat a natural buff in the system? Why not just... remove the buff?

[Cold Darkness]

i point out yet again, that this kind of discussion is not the intend of this thread, EVEN THOUGH I REALLY LIKE IT BECAUSE ITS ACTUALLY BEING MADE IN A CONSTRUCTIVE MANNER.

this thread is about a change in the penalty mechanic of the ED that pgi suggests.

god damn, you guys really tempt me to derail my own thread -.-

[Reno Blade]

So 1.) do you suggest that any penalty heat is distributed over a certain amount of time instead of instantly?
something like this:
fire 4x PPC = 10 extra penalty heat over [3] seconds instead of instant
(replace [3] with your number of seconds)

OR 2.) are you saying you will deal X% of the heat as long as you are over the 30 energy limit?
In this case, the penalty is VERY small, as the energy restores 20/sec, so even with 5x PPCs (20 over draw) you would only have 1 second to get back to the limit line.

OR 3.) should the heat penalty be delivered until the energy is 100% refilled again?
In this case, the time would be 1.5sec longer than on 2.), but it would be very hard to understand without any additional notification why your heat keeps heating up if you keept using energy.

Depending on how fast your heat dissipates, the heat-over-time effect could be less of a "penalty" and the mech would NOT shut down at all (while it would shut down in current PTS5).

I don't think that would actually help the system, but of these 3 variants, #1 would be the only one that can be tweaked to be useful/balanced.

[Cold Darkness]

keep in mind that if you fired 5 ppcs, youd be 20 in minus, which would result in ~9 extra heat if youd set the heating up to 5h/s (assumption of cooling being around 4h/s on average) that youd have to deal with. of course those numbers can be tweaked to whatever ammount seems fine, too. but the suggestion of giving a heat over a fixed amount of time might be a good idea, too.

to get this kind of feedback is exactly why this thread exists.

in any case, the heatpenalty will have to be big enough to severly outmatch your cooling capacitys or simply deactivate the cooling for simplicitys sake (which on the other hand would actually be interesting in combination with standard heatsinks, considering the changes on the current pts)

edit: i also would in no way suggest #3 unless it magically solves every problem imaginable.

Edited by Cold Darkness, 27 September 2016 - 03:29 PM.

[Chuck Jager]

Pretty sure your system would allow big alphas just not as many with some of the same loop holes that don't translate well from lore/tt into MWO.

I do not like comparing games to science, but I just treat some of the issues the same as how some mechanics in real life have high curves and others how more stable curves, but almost all heat/power/speed etc is still based on a curve. I then pretend this is the sim part when they apply the curves to balance the OPness of certain weapon/loadout combos.

Edited by Chuck Jager, 03 October 2016 - 12:54 PM.

[Cold Darkness]

actually, this does not change the base mechanics of energy draw. the penalty rules are exactly the same, its the appliance that is the difference.

ED gives you the whole penalty instantly without any time delay, which is quite unimmersive. what i suggested was to simply apply the penalty over time but it in a severe manner. that would give you a] more options for handling tight combat situations and b] feel more real and thus immersive.

i didnt even try to design yet another system in place of ghost heat and energy draw.

Edited by Cold Darkness, 03 October 2016 - 01:49 PM.

[Reno Blade]

what would improve the visibility of the extra penalty heat would be to have this part of the heat bar to have a yellow color, similar to the blue color of the heat bar part when using a coolant flush consumable module.

[Gas Guzzler]

I agree that the current heat penalties are way too severe.