Dakota1000, on 23 March 2017 - 07:28 AM, said:
I'm not talking about this patch in specific, I'm talking about what has been done in about the past year of changes. Its been creating a trend in which other weapon types have been receiving large nerfs while ERPPCs haven't had many nerfs and their buffs have been more so than the nerfs and gauss, while being nerfed, is still pretty decent for backing them up, leading to today's gauss+PPC meta.
You need to keep in mind that we are just going back to the gauss/PPC meta ... we've been there before. All it indicates is that PGI is continuing to adjust the overall weapon balance.
This is something they should be doing ALL the time and in my opinion far more frequently.
During the last gauss/PPC meta phase there was no one who would have said we would have a laser meta phase ... they were almost utterly useless compared to the PPFLD damage from gauss/PPC. However, they nerfed the gauss with the trigger delay and desynced the projectile speeds so folks actually switched to laser vomit builds. Things are just swinging back the other way a bit which is completely to be expected. The goal is to make most build variations reasonably useful.
This brings us around to the whole concept of how to balance this game.
- balance IS weapons
- balance clan weapons
- balance IS vs clan weapons
However, weapons are only part of the story.
- clans also have lighter components that use fewer crit slots
- clan XL engines that don't kill the mech on side torso loss (and provide XL benefits without the risk)
ALL of this is BEFORE they can reasonably address individual mechs with good/bad hit boxes and high/low mounted hard points.
If they try to balance the mechs BEFORE doing at least the first few passes at weapon and tech balance then they end up with a situation where all the balance shifts every time they change the balance of weapons. They also have to maintain massive tables of quirks for individual mechs.
Based on PGI recent actions, it would seem that someone has identified the entire issue of trying to balance mechs before at least a minimum level of tech/weapon balance being in place as a waste of time and resources.
They are removing as many quirks as possible, trying to develop an algorithm to better balance individual weapons between clan and IS, basing mobility off mech weight class and not engine removing one of the advantages of a clan XL engine, reducing health of clan components to try to address the fact that they weigh less and require fewer crit slots. Expect MORE changes like this to make clans and IS more comparable in MWO.
Finally, I think PGI ultimately realized that they won't be able to make IS weapons equal to clan weapons in the 3053 time frame without breaking the atmosphere/feel expected of clans. By advancing the time line they can introduce a variety of weapon tech on the IS side that can be used to balance the clan weapons out a bit. THIS is the other reason they are removing quirks. They are trying to balance tech a bit and will introduce new tech to make up the difference. Presumably by fall 2017, the game balance will look completely different than it does today with new IS tech combined with skill trees.
Personally, at that point, I think underperforming mechs could be balanced by a free extra allocation of skill points ... or points that could be applied as the player wishes to purchasing quirks that fit the role they want for that specific mech. By moving the balance mechanism into a simple additional skill point allocation (or mech bonus point allocation), they leave the choices to the players and the ONLY decision they need to make is how many balance points each mech chassis will receive. Greatly simplifies the balance mechanism while allowing greater player choice ... win/win from both a player experience and developer perspective.
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