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So I am asking, what would make ED acceptable?
My view is that ED is indeed a power bar in a power bar (nicely put by Kin3ticX in another thread), and as such I think it would work just fine to explain why heat becomes exponential when shooting lots of energy weapons simultaneously. To me that's a way to visualize what is now going on in the HUD in the underlying Ghost Heat Mk 1 tables. I welcome that part of it. It may look a bit confusing, but I think having to go to the smurfy web site and read the tables to figure out why your heat got exponential is much worse. Imo this works fine for Energy weapons because they are typically balanced vs heat anyways. This aspect of the ED-principle I like, I think it's about time to "normalize" combinations of lasers. I.e. not have 7 ML produce GH while 6 ML + 3 LPL does not produce GH. Yes, this is a nerf to E-boats, but please read on.
The problems start when they also pull in Ballistics and Missiles under the same roof, and base that roof on damage alone. Traditionally these weapons are "balanced" by their weight which more or less works out for all mechs (allowing them to juggle heat vs pod space) except the biggest assaults that can boat enough of them to "break the system", especially clans with their lighter ballistics. The worst offender weapon is Gauss with 15 damage per heat, where a limit of 2 simultaneous are therefore hard coded. The dual AC20 was instead given extreme ghost heat which I think is not the best solution. I don't believe ED is alone can solve this, and that's where I think PTS ED went wrong. The three different weapon groups (E, B, M) needs their own "resource" or system to result in diminishing returns when boating a single type, anything else will promote boating a single weapon as has been pointed out a billion times. This doesn't mean that ED as a principle is cannot be an improvement over GH1 - but ED should not be considered the magic bullet to alone control all damage output!
So my stand point is: don't scrap ED as a concept, but also don't over estimate what it should resolve.
Extreme ballistics boating needs to be reined in (especially if ED normalizes ghost heat across E weapons) but by it's own mechanism. Be it some implementation of recoil, convergence, weapon jams or whatever. Something that gives diminishing returns, but not heat and not energy.
Missiles are somewhere in between and are to a large extent also controlled by heat, but we'd still need some form of diminishing returns for boating. Control it by missile spread for example, or introduce global tube restrictions or whatever you fancy.
Now, there should be some spill-over between the mechanisms, but not too much. Just enough to for example not make PPC+ballistics the perfect workaround, but not too much so that single type boating is buffed. There are many possibilities to be creative here. What I think is a good example is using a short (0.3s-ish recoil as a spill-over between ballistics and lasers). Gauss could consume Energy draw while charging, and thereby allow you to hold that charge for as long as you wish at the cost of energy) etc etc.
A final point I'd like to stress is the need to tweak the ED parameters themselves and NOT START TO MESS WITH WEAPON BALANCE. For example, a flat ED roof of 30 is bound to be a horrible idea. If it puts restrictions on heavier mechs, then heavies and assaults will end up having the same restricted offensive capabilities, thus obsoleting assaults. We can't have that so for the sake of argument we could consider be something like:
Lights: 20
Mediums: 25
Heavies: 30
Assaults: 35
Now, a big potential I see with ED here is that ED can be used as a balance parameter that doesn't break any build rules. You can tweak the ED of individual weapons, and even more attractive, you can buff weaker mechs by giving them a ED capacity quirk. Say normal 80-85-tonners have 35 ED capacity, give the Awesome 40 because it's a brick for example.
So, what I would like to be a take home message here is that there are opportunities lost if the whole concept is just trashed. I feel the same way about Information Warfare. It had some good bits and pieces that were lost to us because the PTS implementation was not good enough. It's all in the implementation!
Could we have a constructive discussion about this?
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Edit: Suggestions made in the thread:
- Tweaking should be focused around the ED variables them selves and not the weapon stats
- A flat roof of 30 is not fair towards clan mechs (because higher damage/longer burn trade-off) and not fair vs assaults (because any limits imposed on heavies would be the same for assaults thereby making the firepower the same)
- Ballistics could be punished by increased reload time instead of heat
- Generally increase cooldown and remove stacking penalties for boating, allowing full alphas but less dps (I assume with long range weapons here?)
- Change the way heat is applied (i.e. not instant heat penalty)
- More extremely low ED values for weak weapons (i.e. freebies)
- Limit alphas (high heat alphas only tho) with fixed low heat threshold and high dissipation instead (good old discussion)
- Salvage the sounds/icons of the HUD integration on PTS1-5
- Increase roof to 40, keep GH but make GH violation automatically max out ED visually and mechanistically
Edited by Duke Nedo, 31 October 2016 - 03:57 AM.
