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Okay. Tweet Paul/Russ that you think IS PPCs need nerfed or LPLs need buffed. Make a thread about it. I doubt it would be received well, considering PPCs are one of the worst IS weapons at the moment, and LPL is one of the best IS weapons. I'm willing to bet that your assessment of the balance between these two weapons is being spoiled by the amount of PPC quirks going around that just barely make the PPC almost viable on a very select few mechs.
A tweet or thread asking for a nerf to Clan ER PPCs wouldn't be met well, either, because the issue is not the gun, it's all of the supporting equipment and the 'Mechs with perfect layouts to mount them. On its own, the Clan ER PPC is almost as mediocre as the IS ERPPC. But we can't look at the gun on its own.
Also, no. My most-used PPC blaster the last three months I played was a Marauder 5M...which has zero PPC quirks at all and only token heat gen. It's quite good. Not good enough for Leagues, but that's largely for fringe reasons like isXL and lower top speed (12 kph difference) and not some overwhelming disparity in damage, velocity, range, or heat. If you can do well in a poptart TBR you can do just as well in the poptart MAD-5M.
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Except I already mentioned two - the Grasshopper (which can have three high-mounted PPCs, and jumpjets!) and the Battlemaster (which has enough cockpit-mounted hardpoints for six PPCs). You're ignoring the fact that these mechs are taking LPLs, not PPCs. There's also the CPLT-K2, which has PPC quirks, and runs better with UAC5 and LPL, and the TDR-9S, which ... doesn't get used at all. The WHM-6D gets a PPC quirk, and it runs LPLs always. Same with the Black Knights. Actually, I didn't even notice until now... but four of the Battlemasters have a smattering of PPC quirks. But for them it's always LPL and ERLL. Noticing a pattern? The Blackjack was the only real PPC mech that I can think of they came into any vogue in recent times, and the WHM-6R only uses PPCs to support its UACs. Personally I liked LPLs on it better.
I'm not ignoring anything. The Grasshopper doesn't take LPLs for Leagues and the Battlemaster is all but totally dead as long as the Kodiak is around because 3+2 LPL is garbage compared to 50 PPFLD or dakka. There's no point in taking the PPCs because they can't be fired four or five at a time to compete with the Gauss-inflated Clan damage and the Battlemaster doesn't have anything else to combine them with for lack of mounts or bad mount position; you swap out its Gauss arm for a Rifleman arm and you will start seeing a
lot of PPC or dakka+PPC Battlemasters. And for extreme range, even Clan ER PPCs aren't considered the ideal option.
The K2 runs better with LPL because they nerfed the UACs to be hotter, and so the DHS that used to be sufficient...aren't. The Warhammer has suffered similarly, but you can squeeze 14x DHS in so it doesn't quite feel it as much.
You are not giving enough thought to the environment surrounding these 'Mechs and their equipment.
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It doesn't help that PGI buffed the heck out of clan DHS in the past few months. Midrange pushing / pseudo-brawling used to be a viable strat, running mostly IS LPLs. But with the heatsink changes, Clan mechs have the DPS to keep up and receive such a push ezpz in competitive environments.
The LPL brawl-push was viable
before the Warhammer came out. When the latter dropped, the strat rapidly converted to dakka Black Widows or PPC+Dakka WHM-6R because both could keep the pressure on during the push because they actually ran colder than the Black Knights and Grasshopper by leaning on the ballistics.
But yes, the DHS buff for Clans didn't help at all. The heat nerf to IS AC/5 and IS UAC/5 compounded the error.
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For what it's worth,
I tried doing the same thing, back when I was trying to balance heavy lasers. The numbers in that image will probably make absolutely no sense without an explanation, but suffice it to say that I couldn't even get the weapons already in the game to be rated via weighting their various stats/parameters, using a single "utility score" value. It was all kinds of dubious and questionable, and I just gave up after a couple hours of fudging numbers. It might be possible, but even if you do manage it, it doesn't trump two things: actually playing and experiencing how the weapons handle, and seeing how effectively they are used by expert players vs the majority of players.
I spent considerably more time than a few hours. And I did run the balance what we already have in the game. Shame on me for not archiving those results, because they were part of the same table before I expanded it to include future weapons after the announcement.
I should put it all up on GDocs...it's just that last time I tried, GDocs didn't take the formulae and I did not feel like redoing them. I'll get around to it sometime soon.
That said, the weights are based on my experience with the game, and I leave some of the scores out of alignment because my experience with the game tells me that I would be over-correcting if I pushed them any more. You will never get it perfect, because 'Mechs don't have the same hardpoint availability or placement and then there are Omnis...which throw a wrench into determining the value of available resources.
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I'll just cut you off right there, because it sounds like you're describing lasers, not PPCs. How long do you want this PPC burn duration to be anyways? Like I said before, the longer it gets, the more like a laser it becomes, and the less interesting and more same-y it is. 0.50 seconds is probably too long - at that point, it will handle like a laser, it will feel like a laser, it will look like a laser, it will deal damage like a laser, and it will just generally be a laser. Why? Why do you want PPCs to be lasers? I don't und
Oh, I see. So PPCs are now the same as large pulse lasers, except worse. Less damage, more heat, same or slightly less duration, and barely more range. Why?
Because, if you read my reply to Quicksilver at the top of Page 4, pulse lasers would not be doing what they do now. Like I said earlier, it's not like PPCs are the only thing that need changing.
Also, same-y argument goes both ways. Samey....like an AC/10. Samey...like a laser. You really can't cut it any other direction without introducing more...advanced...mechanics into the mix. Even pulse lasers, right now, are mechanically just standard lasers with shorter burns. Meh.
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In my experience, the only PPFLD mechs that don't take TCs are the Timber, and ummm... I think the MAD-IIC? I guess the SMN as well, but that has outrageous PPC quirks that deserve to be removed, and I'm not sure how most people build that one. I have a TC2 on mine, and Gman has a dainty little TC1 on his, but it's probably fine without it. The Kodiak and Night Gyr definitely run at least TC3, and the HBK-IIC-A runs upward of a TC4, depending on application. Oh, and the Nova. The Nova gets quirks to make up for the lack of TC as well. Except for the Timber and MAD-IIC, nobody really run's cERPPC unless they can fit a TC or get quirks.
To be fair, you're right... most of them aren't taking the larger TCs, but they are taking the smaller ones, which leaves them open to target with nerfs, which I think would be appropriate. =]
I mean, go for it, but I don't think nerfing the TCs is going to alter the MWO equation. We've still got cXLs, cDHS, cEndo/Ferro, cGauss, and god-like mounts on the HBK-IIC, KDK-3, NTG, and SMN conspiring to keep the status quo where it is. You give me cERPPC on my IS 'Mechs and nothing else, and they aren't going to be any better than they are now.
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Jman5, on 07 February 2017 - 12:04 AM, said:
