95 replies to this topic

[Andi Nagasia]

Reduce quirk values when boating several of the Same Type of weapon,

for example lets say you can get a max of +-20Laser Heatgen with the Skill Tree,
Naturally people will be inclined to boat many of the same weapons as to save on Skill Tree Points,
this would allow a Mech to Run all Laser Quirks and save points for Structure / Mobility,


=Idea & Concept=
so make a slight dis incentive to doing such,
divide your Quirks for every Pair(2) of weapons Maxing, Penalty Maxing out at 3Pairs,


=Examples(Boating)=
Have -30%PulseLaser HeatGen on your NVA? but have 6MPL Equipped?
(-30% / (6 / 2)) = -10% MPL HeatGen, this helps balance the NVA-S to what it has now,

Have -30%StandardLaser HeatGen on your NVA? but have 6MPL Equipped?
(-30% / (6(Maxed) / 2)) = -10% ERML HeatGen, this helps balance the NVA-P to what it has now,


=Examples(Less or Mixed)=
but what does this do for other Mechs? well:
Have -30%StandardLaser HeatGen on your NVA? but have 4ERLL Equipped?
(-30% / (4 / 2)) = -20% ERLL HeatGen, this helps balance less weapons on the NVA,

but what does this do for other Mechs? well:
Have -30%Standard&Pulse-Laser HeatGen on your NVA? & have 2LPL&4ERML Equipped?
(-30% / (4/2)) = -20% ERML HeatGen, (-30% / (2/2)) = -30% LPL HeatGen, Mixing up the NVA,


i feel this would help people mix up how their Mechs are Built,
this also would help hardpoint Starved Mechs, and Mixed Build Mechs,


Thoughts, Comments, Concerns?
Thanks,

Edit- Topic reworked,

Edited by Andi Nagasia, 07 December 2016 - 02:52 PM.

[Barantor]

It's an idea that could work. I'd tweet it to Russ if I were you lol.

[1453 R]

So the same thing they talked about in the other thread?

No. Bad idea.

15% heatgen for 20 medium lasers is the same increase as 15% heatgen for 4 medium lasers. If you spend the extra weight/crits on a weapon, it shouldn't magically reduce the effects of your skill specializations. That's not a reason to diversify weapons loadouts, that's a reason to avoid weapon-based skills.

Seriously. You're never going to come up with any way for Idiot's Trail Mix armaments to be competitive with a proper loadout. Even in tabletop, with zero modification, 'Mechs that had stock loadouts which made sense and coordinated well were significantly more powerful/useful than the dumb schitts that had one of every low-caliber weapon type in an attempt to be "well-rounded for all ranges and engagement types".

It's just not good, bruh. Stop wishing it was.

[WarHippy]

Andi Nagasia, on 07 December 2016 - 12:01 PM, said:

reduce the Quirks when boating several weapons,

for example lets say you can get a max of +-20Laser Heatgen with the Skill Tree,
Naturally people will be inclined to boat weapons as to saev Skill Tree Points for other things,

so make a slight dis incentive to doing such,
divide your Quirks for every Pair(2) of weapons,

have -15%Laser Heat gen? but also have 6ERML?
(-15% / (6 / 2)) = -5% ERML Heat Gen,

this would also help hard point Starved Mechs,

(ill add more on this topic as i come up with more)
=0=0=0=0=

Thoughts, Comments, Concerns?
Thanks,

What if your mech only has energy hard points? Seems like a good way to punish some mechs for seemingly no reason. While this new tree is a lot nicer than the old one the fact remains that it is the same generic tree across all mechs. This means you are going to end up punishing some mechs that don't deserve it when you make a change that tries to tone down an over tuned mech. Only way to try and avoid that is to either have trees specfic to each mech or quirks, but both of those don't really seem to be an option.

[Barantor]

WarHippy, on 07 December 2016 - 12:10 PM, said:

the fact remains that it is the same generic tree across all mechs.

Do you have a source for this?

[TheLuc]

The skill tree is a bad system to start with so just like ED better off just kill it.

[AlphaToaster]

Ghost heat 3.0?

I think we should see how it plays first.

I'm looking forward to setting up an Executioner with those sweet 20% heat quirks, and maybe some more hops and armor.

[WarHippy]

Barantor, on 07 December 2016 - 12:13 PM, said:

Do you have a source for this?

No, not really, but that is the impression I was given. The trees as far as I can tell are the same for every mech it is your choices that make them different. If you are building an energy based mech you avoid all of the ballistic and missile skills focusing on the energy ones. I hope I am wrong, but I highly doubt PGI created a unique custom tree for however many individual mechs there are in the game.

[Barantor]

WarHippy, on 07 December 2016 - 12:18 PM, said:

No, not really, but that is the impression I was given. The trees as far as I can tell are the same for every mech it is your choices that make them different. If you are building an energy based mech you avoid all of the ballistic and missile skills focusing on the energy ones. I hope I am wrong, but I highly doubt PGI created a unique custom tree for however many individual mechs there are in the game.

See I'm assuming they have to be a bit different because some mechs don't have certain weapon points, like an all energy boat doesn't need AC boosts etc. I'm also wondering if the quirks that are taken away will be put into the skill trees themselves, which would make them unique to each mech.

We don't know yet, I'm still on 'wait and see' mode, but I am excited that it's going to change to something like this.

As far as boating though, dunno if this would 'fix' anything. I could see a bonus for using a stock weapon loadout though or something.

[Big Tin Man]

I posted this in another thread, but it is very possible to promote mixed loadouts with:

Jack of all Trades skill points.

If your mech had at least 1 energy weapon, 1 ballistic weapon, and 1 missile, you receive 15, 20, 25, 30% cooldown, heat reduction, whatever for ALL weapons. Maybe heavies and assaults require 2 of each. You'd have to tailor it to the mech's hardpoints.

Make the bonus big enough and it can happen.

[1453 R]

WarHippy, on 07 December 2016 - 12:18 PM, said:

No, not really, but that is the impression I was given. The trees as far as I can tell are the same for every mech it is your choices that make them different. If you are building an energy based mech you avoid all of the ballistic and missile skills focusing on the energy ones. I hope I am wrong, but I highly doubt PGI created a unique custom tree for however many individual mechs there are in the game.

They specifically said this is what they did.

Certainly some node types will probably be in everyone's trees, but I just watched some footage from MechCon, and they stated "variant-specific skill trees".

[Gas Guzzler]

Dude come on. Some mechs have to boat weapons because of their hardpoint layouts. Don't make 8 E hardpoint mechs useless again, we don't need the game to go back to bring 2-3 energy and 2-3 ballistics or GTFO.

[davoodoo]

Pretty counterproductive to have higher dissipation on mech which inherently generates less heat because you have less guns...

It breaks boat builds while giving no viable incentive to run less guns.

Edited by davoodoo, 07 December 2016 - 12:40 PM.

[RestosIII]

TheLuc, on 07 December 2016 - 12:15 PM, said:

The skill tree is a bad system to start with so just like ED better off just kill it.

Please no. I hated ED with a passion, but I can see this skill tree theoretically working, unlike ED.

[Duke Nedo]

The only thing that makes sense to me so far would be more general skills. If cooldown skills affect all types together instead of separately for each type, then at least boats and mixed build are affected the same. Like the old 5% skill did. Everything that is weapon specific will promote boating more than necessary.

[WarHippy]

Barantor, on 07 December 2016 - 12:30 PM, said:

See I'm assuming they have to be a bit different because some mechs don't have certain weapon points, like an all energy boat doesn't need AC boosts etc. I'm also wondering if the quirks that are taken away will be put into the skill trees themselves, which would make them unique to each mech.

Well from other things that were said mechs that really needed their quirks are going to have them baked into their base stats not the skill tree, which adds to my suspicion it is the same tree for all mechs. I would love to be wrong, but we have something like 300-400+ different mechs in this game and we are to believe that each has their own unique tree? It would make sense that a mech that doesn't have any ballistic hard points would not have the option for ballistic skills, but at the same time if you accidentally select one all you have to do is respect(wasting time or money) to fix it.

[1453 R]

RestosIII, on 07 December 2016 - 12:39 PM, said:

Please no. I hated ED with a passion, but I can see this skill tree theoretically working, unlike ED.

Even if this initial iteration doesn't work out as well, this is still a much better fundamental skeleton to build from than the existing pilot efficiencies/modules system. Put it in, fix it then if it needs it. Or rather, when it needs it.

[Tristan Winter]

People are going to hate your idea, but... to be honest, I never understood why people thought weapon modules (and now, weapon skills) were a good idea to begin with.

You see, in other games, you sometimes see special upgrades that give you X at the expense of Y. In Fallout 4 (I know it's not PVP, but bear with me), you can upgrade a machine gun to give it more range at the cost of damage, or better accuracy at the cost of rate of fire. This is good for PVP games, because it means that upgraded items are different, but not better.

In MWO, weapon upgrades are just plainly better. I understand why PGI wants this. After all, it's a cheap carrot to make the players play the game. They call it an "endgame", whatever that means. But why would the players add this? It adds little depth to the game. It just makes you better than people who played less than you and makes you worse than people who played more than you.

There's every indication that the new skill tree will have a relatively minor impact in terms of role warfare. Instead of actuall skills (which PGI described in 2012), we now have simple upgrades. More damage, more structure, more speed, etc. You're not upgrading your mechs for a different playstyle, you're simply upgrading in order to compete with other upgraded mechs. And of course, if you only upgrade your mobility and nothing else, then you're effectively sacrificing firepower and durability. But only relative to other equally upgraded mechs. And it's still not really a matter of creating new roles. Dakka mechs are just gonna get more dakka, lurm boats are gonna get lurmier.

As for the inevitability of boating, this is something I have started threads about before. The consensus is that boating is inevitable, but I don't agree with it and there are many people with good arguments as to why boating is not inevitable. However, just like R&R, it's a really complex problem that would require rebuilding the game from scratch in order to really deal with it. So now we just have band-aid solutions, like Ghost Heat.

Edited by Tristan Winter, 07 December 2016 - 12:47 PM.

[WarHippy]

1453 R, on 07 December 2016 - 12:36 PM, said:

They specifically said this is what they did.

Certainly some node types will probably be in everyone's trees, but I just watched some footage from MechCon, and they stated "variant-specific skill trees".

I guess I will need to go back and watch it again, but I have my doubts it will be that way in the long run. Like I said I would love it if they were unique for each mech, but that seems really unlikely. If it is just minor differences between the various mechs that might be enough, but I guess we will have to wait and see.

[1453 R]

WarHippy, on 07 December 2016 - 12:41 PM, said:

Well from other things that were said mechs that really needed their quirks are going to have them baked into their base stats not the skill tree, which adds to my suspicion it is the same tree for all mechs. I would love to be wrong, but we have something like 300-400+ different mechs in this game and we are to believe that each has their own unique tree? It would make sense that a mech that doesn't have any ballistic hard points would not have the option for ballistic skills, but at the same time if you accidentally select one all you have to do is respect(wasting time or money) to fix it.

You're overthinking it.

Assume there's fifty different types of skill node (by way of demonstration, not an exact or predicted number), spread between weapon, structure, armor, mobility, whatever else. Fifty different buff types the system can generate.

"Variant-specific skill trees" means each 'Mech variant gets a slightly different web drawn from that pool of fifty skill nodes. 'Mechs with no ballistic hardpoints don't get ballistic weapon nodes, they get something else in those spots instead. 'Mechs with no jump jets don't get jet-related skill nodes, they get something else instead. They don't get Supah Custom Special Nodes for them and them alone, they just get different configurations of the existing pool of nodes.

Doing variant-specific trees this way isn't really any harder than doing variant-specific quirk lists, once the actual skilltree system is in the game in the first place. You build out your node trees with nodes applicable to the variant in question, give everyone the same overall number of choices in their variant-specific trees (i.e. twenty different nodes in the 'Mobility' tree to pick between, again by way of random example, spread between all the various mobility-type nodes that make sense for that variant), and you're golden.

It's not nearly so big and hairy a problem as you're making it out to be, dood.