358 replies to this topic

[TheLuc]

So while trying to do a copy of my current Mechs on the PTS with the skill tree instead of the current module system, I get less of what is needed or want. I did not feel I was choosing but more painfully trying to optimize my Mechs with half of options I don't actually use or need.
The survival tree didn't do a difference in Time To Kill and the other trees felt like an overall nerf.

I still will give it some time so PGI can adjust but so far no high hopes.

At this moment the module system is still better as you unlock, you pay and you get exactly what you want, with the Skill tree it is not the case.

[Arkhangel]

Tiantara, on 05 March 2017 - 02:57 PM, said:

- Especially when many mech use locked arm, because difference between arm and torso weapon aim sometimes make mech shake and lose target completely or force to play with mouse settings every-time when you change one mech to another.
Mostly - arm skill useless, except mech which have weapon only in arms.

many PILOTS use locked arms. that doesn't mean the mech has to. just because you do doesn't mean the vast majority of pilots do. gotta remember only about 10% of the community even posts on the forums, at best.

[Trev Firestorm]

Arkhangel, on 05 March 2017 - 08:00 PM, said:

many PILOTS use locked arms. that doesn't mean the mech has to. just because you do doesn't mean the vast majority of pilots do. gotta remember only about 10% of the community even posts on the forums, at best.

And yet many mechs do have 'locked' arms, therefor forcing those nodes as prereqs for other, more universal nodes is bad design.

[Arkhangel]

Trev Firestorm, on 05 March 2017 - 09:19 PM, said:

And yet many mechs do have 'locked' arms, therefor forcing those nodes as prereqs for other, more universal nodes is bad design.

lemme guess, don't often set arm and torso weapons in separate groups, do you.

[Summoner6]

Since the new PTS server went up I have tested it and found it, while wanting a very very good base. And a step in the right direction, my only concern is with the new tech dropping this year that this skill tree may have to be redone. Other wise on with it!!

Positives:

• Jump Jet trees - Amazingly useful. Creates a significant reason to forgo other trees for a significant boost in jump capabilities and general mobility.
  
• Miscellaneous tree - Providing the support you'd expect from consumables. And with the update giving us premium air and arty strikes as well as UAV's for only 40k C-bills this is looking very very promising.
  
• Increased Time To Kill - Really changing this game with this one and what I perceive to be the focus of this update - Enjoying this very much, it is now more forgiving to battle, in any mech, of any weight class, thus reducing the skill floor need for this game.
  
• Sensors - Really enjoying the choices I'm given. But would like it to explain what 200+ target retention does in game and what that means for me? More indepth tool tips here please.

Neutral:

• Operations tree - While I'm finding it a very good set up, I don't understand things like speed retention being in this tree. Something that affects your mobility should be in the mobility tree.
  
• Mobility tree - A can of worms in my opinion. Good and bad. Good: skills varied giving significance to your decisions. Bad: Skills all over the place. I have to fully invest in the tree to get basic improvements like accel and deccel.
  
• Changes to the acceleration and deceleration on mechs - Finding this.. interesting. Its definitely effecting peak play where you jump out, alpha and jump back into cover. More on this later -

Negatives:

• Survival - From auto take to now why bother take. Even fully invested in this tree gives me barely noticeable returns. For instance I receive 5% armour on a 100ton assault like the king crab giving me 5 armour at most for fully investing twenty SP points in it. I tested it with all weight classes and while the % rate is higher at lower weight classes, giving me 4-6+ armour does not make it worth while investment. One IS med laser worth of damage for 20 SP points.. And while I have 15% more structure, that's not enough to justify the expense.
  
• Firepower tree - A good improvement over the original no doubt, but its lack of structure is bad, looks like a dogs breakfast to be honest. Skill points chucked all over the place, like Range six is deep in the energy hemi-sphere and range seven is mid way through the ballistic hemi-sphere, not to mention the specific weaponry nodes are everywhere making it confusing to map out a effective route. I can propose a basic linear version that allows users to go swap from one enhancement to another, (range, heat gen, cooldown, velocity) with weapon type hemi-spheres down the bottom of the tree. http://i.imgur.com/Fh0xflO.png - This tree is a very basic idea and such could be extended or shortened as needed.

A In Depth Look

Acceleration/Deceleration
The changes to the acceleration and deceleration have changed the game more then I first thought. With lights losing a deal of their agility, making them easier to hit in general and meds and some heavies coming out on top during this change. Perhaps the weight class I tested most was the assaults. (out of need since I couldn't get into many matches with anything less) Assaults now handled like brick walls rather then busses, with their torso twisting gone spreading the damage isn't as effective as it once was and so staring at the target whilst you unload very bullet, missile and beam you have is now the way todo things.

Positioning is now ever more important since you can't easily get out of harms way once the battle begins. For the most part I'm liking the changes, now giving lights a real advantage once they get into the backs of heavies and assaults as they struggle to torso twist fast enough to blow my brains out. However as a bitchin locust I cannot shoot and scoot as I used to so its give and take I guess.

Peaking Alpha
With the above changes peaking alpha tactics and builds will be harder to pull off. It seems roughly a second or so has been added when jumping out and firing and returning to cover. A second that could see you copping alot of return fire.

Cost of enhancements
A sore spot over these new changes is the cost. I think that 60k and 800 exp per node is acceptable for veterans and even newer players, causing an equilibrium of enough incentive for you to want to get MC and buy premium and acceptable time invested to get a mastered mech. What I think is not acceptable is associated cost where people have to spend potentially hundreds of millions of C-bills to re master their mechs which they have already done. I would advocate a 5.4 mill bonus to every mastered mech a player has and if at all possible extend this to percentages based on the mastery levels any one player has for any one mech. For example -

By breaking it into thirds (basic, elite and mastered) 5.46 mill divided by 3 gives 1.82million per stage. Thus no one is receiving a negative and its all happy days since no one has to grind out the C-bills, which is a slap in the face to customer loyalty.

Fire Power Tree
The enclosed picture shows a basic layout to simplify the current tree which I assume looks like it does out of haste. As you can see the tree has a linear progression system, where each upgrade leads to another upgrade of the same type. Of the four types of neutral nodes (Range, Cooldown, Velocity and heat gen) they are stacked in vertical series allowing players to choose what they want out of their upgrades. After so many nodes are chosen the player will have the choice to choose weaponry specific nodes, in correlation to their above nodes. For instance the entire tree of velocity needs to be unlocked to have access to the entire ballistic hemi-sphere. The entire tree of cooldown must be unlocked to access the laser hemi-sphere. The missile hemi-sphere can be accessed from all of the neutral nodes. A key feature I think would be the option to move to another neutral node tree easily. Rather then start from the beginning and go down, you can go across as needed, gathering various nodes. This picture is an example and by all means does not have balanced values but serves as a potential example of the future of the fire power tree.

Conclusion
I very much like the direction this PTS has went, and while their are limited 4v4 games available, in my opinion I can say with confidence that this is the right direction for PGI to take. I however will say that this version is not currently ready for live but with some changes and tweaking it will be. I look forward to the future PGI and your implementation of the skill tree. Cheers

[Dee Eight]

cougurt, on 05 March 2017 - 11:14 AM, said:

i really don't see any compelling reason to have individual nodes for things like +6% arm pitch. that level of granularity in skill selection is just ridiculously unnecessary. you're not losing out by having those things included as part of a single, all-encompassing skill node.

That depends I guess on whether you know what arm weapons are good, and elevation options on map positioning.

[MGEEZ]

Dee Eight, on 06 March 2017 - 03:09 AM, said:

That depends I guess on whether you know what arm weapons are good, and elevation options on map positioning.

You are grasping at straws. I have never had a situation where I needed 6% more arm pitch to do damage to another mech. And I honestly doubt there is another pilot that has needed it. It's a dead node or point sink. Plain and simple.

[Zergling]

MGEEZ, on 06 March 2017 - 04:15 AM, said:

You are grasping at straws. I have never had a situation where I needed 6% more arm pitch to do damage to another mech. And I honestly doubt there is another pilot that has needed it. It's a dead node or point sink. Plain and simple.

Yup, they might as well just leave the node blank than create worthless bonuses like those.

[MovinTarget]

DeeEight has a point. If you don't have arm weapons or poor range of motion, a smart team can use that against you on a map with lots of extreme angles where they can shoot you, but not the other way around.

Granted, most players go torso/locked so this isn't common atm, but at some point it could become much more prevalant...

[C E Dwyer]

Bluttrunken, on 05 March 2017 - 02:14 PM, said:

Yeah, and I'm pretty sick of seeing this player base destroying all these approaches forward. There were things about the infowar patch I did like immensely and I just had to watch how a playerbase destroyed it which couldn't wrap their heads around it. I was excited for these changes.

The main fault here doesn't lie with PGI but with a playerbase which is not able to discuss things constructively and shouts everything down which doesn't fit into their small sense of how the game is supposed to be(or plainly doesn't understand what PGI is trying to do).(Much like people+the world in general)

I'm playing this game for 3 years on and off, much like many, many users which try to critise everything what PGI is doing, here in on this forum. But if I played a game that long, how can I not like it? There's something PGI does and did right.

The problem is, as you indicated, that good concepts were scrapped completely because the first iteration was lacking in some aspects.

Parts of Infowar + Higher TTK would have made the perfect mechgame for me, besides a more nuanced physicality and sense of scale in the mechs, which is a graphical thing.

Incorrect the people at fault are P.G.I they chose to throw a paddy and abandon it, because the thing they worked on for months had the major flaws in the system exposed in under 48 hours and youtube video's explaining very clearly why it was a mediocre system two days later.

There are again flaws in this system, it's by far not the best system they could have chosen but it's not unworkable, and still can be overall a good addition to the game.

The first issue is more Players opinion versus P.G.I dogma in that P.G.I are putting in skills that are attached to current modules that nobody with any common sense uses. If P.G.I remove these redundant skills it will be better received.

The second is P.G.I using a percentage system for a lot of the skills this mean the heavier the mech the better returns they get.
To correct this P.G.I either need to abandon percentages and give a fixed number, or they need to develop a tree for each weight class.

A tree for each weight class would be better, because of the engine decoupling which while I personally feel is a very good step, now requires light and medium mechs speed boost, hard breaking, and anchor turn give a higher return than less affected heavy and assault mechs which all ready get far better survival returns.

The third is far more serious and I believe it is the make or break choice P.G.I have to decide on and that is the C-bill cost of buying nodes, this is an extremely poor choice for what ever reason they want to include it.

I'm not a fan of customisation, but for the majority, customisation is the major reason to play this game and it's being penalised hard, even with the reduction, in cost there are still xp and c-bills to pay. so you annoy the hell out of a large section of your established player base, this will cause the player base to shrink.

Far far more serious is the effect it will have on genuinely new players not only have they new weapons to buy, double heat sinks Endo and Ferro to buy P.G.I have now hammered them with a c-bill tax on getting the nodes open they need to be competitive with established players, this causes a far bigger imbalance then the current system.

Not only this but when the newbie makes mistakes and they will because of the complexity of the system, they will be punished even harder by having to pay to correct the mitakes.

New players will feel this hard and most will go play a far more forgiving game.

C-bill costs on nodes isn't going to extend the life of this game, which is what I feel this whole idea is about, but shorten the time between now and it's closure.

Now I want the skill trees in the game I don't like the patheing method I think it's very untidy and scrappy, but that is just personal taste.

Out of the issues I've highlighted, all if they are not addressed, will cause shrinkage or population though Issue one you'd have to think it's as much on the players as P.G.I

The third one though if it's not addressed will hit hard both income and the games longevity and it's cirtical P.G.I abandon the C-bill tax on the games enjoyment.

My hopes is P.G.I will progress with a better version of what's on test server, past record sadly shows however P.G.I will abandon this sulking because we don't like what they're proposing, for very sound reasons they seem incapable of grasping.

[MovinTarget]

MGEEZ, on 06 March 2017 - 04:15 AM, said:

You are grasping at straws. I have never had a situation where I needed 6% more arm pitch to do damage to another mech. And I honestly doubt there is another pilot that has needed it. It's a dead node or point sink. Plain and simple.

Never? I can think of a few situations on tourmaline alone where the grade is *just* severe enough that my high mounted torso weapons shot over their head and to hit meant greater exposure.

Whoops you're are talking arm pitch... turn the tables and be on the low ground shooting up... you can only tip back but so far.

Another example is that uav right over you, giving those pesky lurmers locks... if only you could it from where you were and not have to step out into direct fire too...

Arm pitch is like a lot of other skills... seeming useless until suddenly you really wished you had it...

[JonDoeIowa]

Over and over I keep hearing the cry of the assault mechs with the mobility issue brought up when facing a light mech. Ok I hear you, and I have a simple answer to this survival issue you are having.


YOU HAVE A 12 MAN TEAM.

Work together, and that light mech should never get the opportunity to kill that direwolf cause you should have a medium or your own light to shoot the little bugger when he tries to get you in the back.

Keep in mind as you play this horrible not equivalent to live 4v4 pts that in live it's 12v12 and it's not going to be just the 4 assaults on your team fighting. You will have others who if playing properly should watch each others backs and protect the slower assaults from the ambush predator demon "Pirate's Bane"

[cougurt]

MovinTarget, on 06 March 2017 - 04:19 AM, said:

DeeEight has a point. If you don't have arm weapons or poor range of motion, a smart team can use that against you on a map with lots of extreme angles where they can shoot you, but not the other way around.

Granted, most players go torso/locked so this isn't common atm, but at some point it could become much more prevalant...

no team is ever going to exploit that to any serious degree. if you have arm weapons at all, your range of motion is going to be perfectly adequate for just about any situation.

Dee Eight, on 06 March 2017 - 03:09 AM, said:

That depends I guess on whether you know what arm weapons are good, and elevation options on map positioning.

there have been very few instances in which i've found myself wishing i had that little bit of extra arm pitch. if there's someone right below me, i'm more likely to be hindered by the minimap/cockpit obscuring my vision, or by my arms being too low to hit them in the first place. same deal with high up targets.

i'm not saying that improved arm pitch should be gotten rid of, just that it be rolled in with other, more significant mobility enhancements in order to streamline things. not only is a simplified system better for new players, but it's also much easier for PGI to make adjustments to.

[MGEEZ]

MovinTarget, on 06 March 2017 - 04:28 AM, said:

Never? I can think of a few situations on tourmaline alone where the grade is *just* severe enough that my high mounted torso weapons shot over their head and to hit meant greater exposure.

Whoops you're are talking arm pitch... turn the tables and be on the low ground shooting up... you can only tip back but so far.

Another example is that uav right over you, giving those pesky lurmers locks... if only you could it from where you were and not have to step out into direct fire too...

Arm pitch is like a lot of other skills... seeming useless until suddenly you really wished you had it...

Considering arm pitch range currently feels like 180 degrees of vertical and horizontal elevation. I haven't had any issues with getting my arms on target. So I stand by increasing arm pitch is a wasted skill point. The point of the skill tree is to get the feeling of improvement. Will you be able notice a difference without being told a skill node is "improving" the mech's ability? With arm pitch, I'm going with no.

Edited by MGEEZ, 06 March 2017 - 06:20 AM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

You guys have to restructure your comments.

Don't say "6% Arm pitch is a useless node and might as well be blank."

Say "24% arm pitch is a useless skill and might was well be blank" because the arm pitch nodes stack. You can say the nodes are worthless as long as they are worthless when stacked.

[Trev Firestorm]

Arkhangel, on 05 March 2017 - 10:56 PM, said:

lemme guess, don't often set arm and torso weapons in separate groups, do you.

I don't use arm lock at all, I mean some mechs arms don't benefit from arm quirks because their arms can only pitch and others have no arm weapons. Thus nodes modifying arms need to be outside edge rather than mid-chain else it is bad design.

Edited by Trev Firestorm, 06 March 2017 - 09:20 AM.

[cougurt]

Prosperity Park, on 06 March 2017 - 07:35 AM, said:

You guys have to restructure your comments.

Don't say "6% Arm pitch is a useless node and might as well be blank."

Say "24% arm pitch is a useless skill and might was well be blank" because the arm pitch nodes stack. You can say the nodes are worthless as long as they are worthless when stacked.

the point isn't that any of these skills are necessarily useless, just that there are way too many insignificant nodes. you could condense the entire mobility tree into ~5 nodes and nothing of value would be lost.

[Sardauker Legion]

TheLuc, on 05 March 2017 - 04:51 PM, said:

So while trying to do a copy of my current Mechs on the PTS with the skill tree instead of the current module system, I get less of what is needed or want. I did not feel I was choosing but more painfully trying to optimize my Mechs with half of options I don't actually use or need.

The survival tree didn't do a difference in Time To Kill and the other trees felt like an overall nerf.

At this moment the module system is still better as you unlock, you pay and you get exactly what you want, with the Skill tree it is not the case.

100% the problem.

Edited by Anavel Gato2, 06 March 2017 - 10:25 AM.

[Weeny Machine]

Wintersdark, on 05 March 2017 - 02:32 PM, said:

Yes; and I agree. However, as I said, the danger is when you're trying to do this, when the light meets an Assault, that assault is right screwed. Not on live, but on the PTS? Absolutely. Have you played an Assault on the PTS? Some "fast" Assaults on the pts are not too bad, but bigger ones? A direwolf/king crab/atlas/kodiak takes 14 seconds to turn 360 degrees at full speed. That's a huge leg up for lights as it stands. It's really dangerous to make lights an auto-win "hard counter" for assaults, and that's not a good thing.

So I'm not talking about extremes, about Lights being able to stay out of a Heavies guns 100% of the time. But in gaining more time for a light to stay out of a Heavy's arcs in close combat, you risk making it trivial to stay out of an Assaults guns all the time, and THAT is a really serious problem.

They CAN reduce enemy dps on their mech by moving well. I don't argue that it should be better, I'm just saying you need to be very careful that you don't get Light vs. Heavy in a nice place just to make Light vs. Assault broken.

Now, they CAN take structure/armor buffs, but so can the Light, and the gains are scaled. Lights gain more on a percentage basis than heavier classes do.

Careful with "brainless peek-a-boo gameplay". Everyone tends to deride other people's playstyles as "brainless" - I've no horse in this particular race, but it takes every bit as much skill to hit and fade unpredictably (because "peek-a-boo" when someone predicts where you will peek in a light means death) as it does to dance with someone.


If that's what you want, then have at it. But don't think this is PGI catering to "the heavy and assault crowd". If anything, assault pilots are losing the most here, with some very low baseline agility values. Turning at 30 degrees per second vs. some lights at over a hundred is a HUGE difference.



Anyways, all I'm saying is, you're seeing this through very tinted glasses; you want to see something you see as a problem corrected, and it's not really being corrected here. That's true, and it's a lost opportunity, but it's NOT an easy problem to fix and it comes with extreme danger to fix.

Your logic is weird. Lights should not be able to counter assaults and that's why heavies have to stay dominant as they are? That's just illogical on so many levels.

You could easily reduce the agility of heavies somewhat so that they playing field gets evened out a bit or alternatively buff the agility of lights and assaults.

But as I said before: the heavy crowd will get its will anyway. The assaults will drive like bricks, the salt will flow and then they will be buffed as well and we will be back at live server standarts plus more mechs with velocity buffs hoooray.

Nevermind, though. Let's all pretend everything is Happy Hippo and we see what happens when this goes live / shrug

Edited by Bush Hopper, 06 March 2017 - 10:37 AM.

[-Skyrider-]

I would like to address something that has been set aside and neglected for some time. Now would be good time to cover the under-performance of the LB-X. Currently this weapon is completely outclassed by the other auto-cannon types, and has been for sometime. A way to easily dissolve this barrier is to increase the crit chance of the extra damage for LB-X to make the spread fire viable. They are currently; 14% to do 2 dmg, 8% to do 4 dmg, and 3% to do 6 dmg per shot. These chances just aren't cutting it for the LB-X to compete with its brothers. By raising the chances to; 30% to do 2 dmg, 20% to do 4 dmg, 5% to do 6 dmg per shot, this can make the LB-X competitive vs the other LB-X, and be a viable choice to bring on mechs. The PTS gives the amazing opportunity to test these changes to see if they should be included into the game. It would be great if pgi looked over this change and tested it for the community's benefit.