cougurt, on 26 February 2017 - 07:55 PM, said:
isn't that exactly what they said? or am i missing something here?
Touche!
Still, resultant profiles can be adjusted on a per-mech basis, so there's no point in fretting until we have a PTS build up and can make some recommendations if any are required.
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logically it doesn't make as much sense, but balance-wise i feel it's a lot better. if the main point of this change is to reduce the mobility disparity between inner sphere and clan, then i would suggest simply improving the mobility of inner sphere engines to be equivalent to larger clan engines.
Not to reduce the mobility disparity. To allow mechs to mount smaller engines without a crippling loss of agility AND the inherent speed and heat sink loss.
This IS a huge buff to the IS, however, because it allows them to mount smaller engines without a loss of agility. There are a couple Clam mechs that can do it too, but because they don't have the same XL vs. STD paradigm, the motivations are different.
But the buff to the IS isn't the only reason to do this. It's a major part of it, but not the only reason. Hence why we've asked for this to happen since the earliest days of MWO, years before Clans were added at all. The simple fact of it is when agility is determined by speed, there's a minimum speed you can have before it's too hard to keep your guns on your target (disregarding your ability to actually close with them etc), and that's silly. it's why you can't effectively run a stock engine Urbie,
even if you were ok with the snails pace speed. Because you literally handle like an (unquirked!) Atlas.
As to engines, it doesn't work that way. Mobility is only tangentally related to engine size, so you can't buff IS engines to fix that. May as well just flatly buff IS mech agility via quirks, but that'd be a huge mess when those IS mechs DID mount larger engines.
Mobility linearly correlates to ground speed, and is modified by quirks. Nothing else. Ground speed is a factor of engine size and tonnage, so engine size eventually determines mobility, but because it's not a direct link you can't cleanly buff engines that way.
On the other hand, simply having all mechs have their own base movement profiles removes that problem. It allows PGI to tune the agility of a mech without worrying about multiplicative quirks being better for larger engined mechs than smaller engined mechs[A similar situation to the problem of weapon quirks being of differing value based on how many of a given hardpoint you have] - they simply set the base value where they want it for that chassis. This in turn allows otherwise similar mechs to be differentiated better. There's lots of other advantages to this system, as have been identified (repeatedly) in this thread.