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If weapon is fired before cooling off it generates more heat than usually. Weapons' heat dissipation is shared or partially shared among all mounted weapons (or maybe classes of weapons to encourage mixed builds) so if you fire 3 large lasers for example it's gonna take longer for them to cool off than if you fire just one.
Firing «cool» weapon while other are «hot» doesn't cause extra heat generation.
The outcome should be:
1. Reasonable heat penalties instead of instant disproportionate heat spike.
2. Better (and smoother) differentiation of Alphastrike/DPS builds. Powerful alpha strikes are viable option but strongly reduce your ability to deal sustained damage. Current DPS builds are just alphastrikes with short cooldowns (ballistic boats) or chained weapons with long cooldowns and strong heat penalties (LRM boats).
3. Builds won't be based around a few optimal non-overheating sets of weapons (like 2xC-LPL + 6xC-ERML) thus allowing more builds diversity.
4. More space for weapons and mechs balancing. GHOST HEAT QUIRKS?
5. Backup weapons could be a thing.
6. Although this system is surely more complex, it should be more intuitive for players if incorporated in HUD properly.
The main possible issue I see here is that while a repeating alphastriking becomes very risky, this still allows a one or two supergigashots. I think that global range reduction which PGI tried during energy draw PTS could help here because if combats occur at closer distances the risk of overheating should be much bigger issue. And new tech is going to increase the gap of ranges (light Gauss vs HMG and micro laser) making it harder for some close-range weapons to perform well. Maybe it's also time to deal with huge extra heat capacity provided by heatsinks.
Now let's talk about how to fit so many heat bars into HUD not to overwhelm players (and deal with some small issues of current HUD):
So, what do you guys think about this?
