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TheArisen, on 20 March 2017 - 01:34 AM, said:
Except this wouldn't be one upping but rather providing an equal competitor. I obviosly agree equipment is much more important when it comes to balance but frankly the IS doesn't have mechs that are of the same quality as a NGR, etc. Nor would this single mech be the end all be all. It'd be a small step towards bringing the Clans & IS into parity. I'm not sure how you can make that a reason not to let the IS have something as good as the Clan stuff. Balance requires that in one form or another that both sides are equal.
Simply put, the IS needs to have mechs of comparable quality to the KDK, MAD IIc, NGR and HBK IIc, etc. Not better than those mechs but something on a similar level. As it stands only substantial quirks get the IS mechs close to the Clan ones. Look at comp play, almost everyone is in Clan mechs and theres an obvious reason for that.
I can agree to your final statement, but not directly. The main thing that I think that you're getting at is that the clans have a number of mechs which stand head and shoulders better than all the others. The examples that you've pointed out, I think, have the same problem. Even among the clan mechs, they stand out as "Too good" and seriously need to be dialed back. Even in the clans, there are certain mechs that are praised as good (by their users' standards, good enough), some that are kind of average, and a few that are bad. Among clan mechs, I think that everything needs to be brought to that "Average" ability level. The closer each mechs' popularity is to the "Median" in terms of popularity, the better balanced they are. There should always be greater efforts on behalf of the devs to reduce the standard deviation in mech usage. However, you've got to balance clan mechs only against other clan mechs first and foremost, since they're all equipped with the same technologies. Once IS is balanced against itself and the Clans are balanced against themselves, then you start balancing the components until numbers of Clan/IS tech start to balance out better (Namely in the higher levels, so that C-bills aren't the deciding factor).
Back during the first run of CW, the IS did have a mech like you're talking about: the Thunderbolt. It was beefy, boaty, and was one of the few mechs that could go toe-to-toe with the clans' Timber/Streakcrow combos. The problem is that it didn't FIX balance, it forced pretty much every IS player to take that mech and only that mech. I'd run into comp players who'd been running dropdecks almost completely comprised of that mech, with maybe a Firestarter for weight savings or light rushing.
That said, the Firestarter was another good example of a "Too good" mech. Until it got upscaled, every other non-ecm light was garbage, in comparison, because nothing else could bring as much firepower. That's not something to seek after, it's something to avoid.
The problem is first and foremost the tech level. I'm not saying that the IS shouldn't have mechs that are competitive against clan mechs, I'm saying the goal should be to make every mech in the IS roster be competitive, and every Clan mech to be competitive, both against themselves and against the opposing faction. If a mech is too good, it must be nerfed. If a mech isn't good enough, it must be buffed. Simply looking at the frequency of use of each 'mech should make it easy enough to tell what is or isn't popular, and more likely than not, what's popular is probably because it's powerful.
Edited by ice trey, 20 March 2017 - 02:12 AM.
