56 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

Mystere, on 15 May 2017 - 08:27 AM, said:

Increasing (C)ERPPC heat by at least 1 should curtail dual gauss + dual ERPPC setups. Allowing only one gauss rifle being charged at any given time is another. Heck, do both.

Alternatively, get rid of gauss charge but allow only a single gauss rifle to be fired at any given time with the normal cooldown timer in between shots. Heck, do the latter as well for all PPCs.

I'd prefer to get rid of the Gauss Charge, so a mandatory 0.5 to 1 second cooldown between all Gauss and PPC shots would probably my preference, too. Basically the result is similar to the laser duration in effect overall - you can still snipe, but you must expose yourself longer. Or stick with one gun.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 15 May 2017 - 09:01 AM.

[MechaBattler]

They tried a lower heat cap and a higher dissipation for dubs during the Energy Draw PTS. Even increasing the dissipation after people said it wasn't enough. Some people found the combat to be more frenetic and fun.

But if they just lowered the cap I suspect the combat would become slower. Poking would become more dominant. If you lower the heat cap. You need to raise dissipation. And there needs to be something to reign in low heat ballistics and gauss.

[Mawai]

Khobai, on 15 May 2017 - 06:32 AM, said:

yes they are supposed to work like that. its how they work in battletech too.



They did technically increase heat capacity. The more heatsinks you had the more heat you could generate before suffering penalties.

Say you have two mechs, one with 10 DHS and one with 20 DHS. Both mechs fire 40 heat worth of weapons.

The first mech generates 40 heat, loses 20 heat from 10 DHS, and ends at 20 heat and suffers penalties

The second mech generates 40 heat, loses 40 heat from 20 DHS, and ends at 0 heat and suffers no penalties

The second mech would need to generate 20 additional heat to suffer the same penalties as the first mech; because it has more heatsinks it has a higher capacity before suffering penalties.

I don't think I agree.

TT is a 10second game turn. In TT you can fire your weapons ONCE every game turn. With more heat sinks you can dissipate more heat every turn and thus have the option to alpha strike on consecutive GAME TURNS without suffering heat penalties. However, this is due to the turn based calculation of heat accumulation and dissipation not due to any increase in heat capacity caused by the heat sinks.

MWO is a real time game. IF heat sinks ONLY increased dissipation and NOT capacity then the mech with double heat sinks would dissipate its heat load more quickly and would be able to alpha strike more frequently simply because it dissipated the heat more quickly - exactly equivalent to TT mapped to real time.

If heat sinks did not contribute to the heat cap then it might further constrain the set of weapons that could be fired simulaneously without either shutting down or incurring heat penalties (if they implemented heat penalties) ... but that is exactly the way it is now depending on weapon choice and "ghost heat" ... you can still shut down your mech with a single salvo alpha strike of certain weapon combinations.

Changing this however, would make heat management a MUCH bigger part of the game ... however, it might also make the game easier to balance. (Many clan mechs typically have more heat sinks on average since they don't have other options to spend the tonnage and crits on ... clan heat sinks only need 2 crits ... and clan FF/Endo are only 7 slots each ... all of which means that clans will have on average more heat sinks than IS ... though this can be balanced by degrading the performance of clan heat sinks ... which is what PGI has done.)

[MustrumRidcully]

MechaBattler, on 15 May 2017 - 09:13 AM, said:

They tried a lower heat cap and a higher dissipation for dubs during the Energy Draw PTS. Even increasing the dissipation after people said it wasn't enough. Some people found the combat to be more frenetic and fun.

But if they just lowered the cap I suspect the combat would become slower. Poking would become more dominant. If you lower the heat cap. You need to raise dissipation. And there needs to be something to reign in low heat ballistics and gauss.

It's true, inccreased dissipation might be neccessary, after all, we fire our weapons two to three times as often as TT would suggest. (Well, not quite, TT doesn't tell us how many shots the mech actually fires, it just tells us the overall heat and damage you can achieve in those 10 seconds. But going by those numbers, our heat generation is probably at least twice as high for every weapon - some weapons deal less heat per shot than they did in the table top. Of course, one doesn't need to be too slavish to the TT; because some of its mechanics are questionable and its balance wasn't all that great, either.)

[Mystere]

Athom83, on 15 May 2017 - 08:40 AM, said:

The preferred would be to remove charge while increasing time to recycle by 2-3 seconds. But that would reinforce poptart.

Of course it will because you will still be allowing more than 1 gauss rifle to be fired.

Athom83, on 15 May 2017 - 08:40 AM, said:

As it is, gauss is in a weird spot for balancing. Also, by making it so only 1 gauss can fire at a time makes mechs like the Fafnir (one of the most requested mechs) DOA.

It will not be DOA. The cooldown between gauss shots just needs to be tuned.

Also, I think certain people are requesting the Fafnir precisely because of its 50-point PPFLD potential. Tsk! TsK!

Edited by Mystere, 15 May 2017 - 10:52 AM.

[Pjwned]

MustrumRidcully, on 15 May 2017 - 06:33 AM, said:

It's an old topic, but the way I i see it:

A table top turn is 10 seconds long.Everything mechs do, moving, jumping, firing guns, some kicking, happens in that 10 second interval. The game mechanics don't tell us how things are split up over the 10 second time frame.
Even the TT "Alpha Strike" just means firing all your guns in a 10 second turn. It does not neccessarily suggest that mechs are (always) capable of firing all their weapons in one instant.

When we want to use battletech concepts in a real time game, we have to figure out how we model the specifics in that 10 second turn. It could very well be quite plausible that we'd model it by saying that 30 point heat cap is a fixed value, and thanks to staggered fire (chain fire) and working with the constant application of heat dissipation, we can fire all the weapons that a mech is expected to fire in a 10 second interval.

Obviously, this means that 1-second alpha strikes are no longer practical for many mechs. But this might be exactly what we'd want, if we really worry about short TTKs and excessive alpha striking. (And it might also discourage boating a bit, since one of the biggest advantages - alpha striking with converging weapons - no longer applies.)

It doesn't adress all issues, of course - Gauss Rifles for example will never be limited by heat. (But they got the Gauss Charge mechanic in play for a long while now, and if we'd want to be harsher, we could also say that only one rifle can be in the charged state at a time.)

But since this is such an old topic, I strongly predict that this isn't something that PGI will attempt to do.


I hope that MW5 will not suck too badly and allow us to mod the game statistics so we can experiment with this...

It's an old topic that has also been repeatedly debunked because it's such a stupid idea.

https://mwomercs.com...ost__p__5387884

Quote

There wouldn't be any point in bringing 4 ER PPCs if you're only ever going to fire them 1 by 1. If the heat capacity in MWO is slammed down to 30 with no other changes to compensate for that, then you would need to wait so long for heat dissipation that by the time you could fire an ER PPC again safely the first one would be ready to fire again, making it pointless to bring more than 1 ER PPC.

You're not understanding that heatsinks in TT effectively added extra heat capacity which is what made it possible for something like a stock Warhawk to fire 4 ER PPCs without shutting down, and when you say to throw out that extra heat capacity then you're demonstrating that you don't know what you're talking about.

[Athom83]

Mystere, on 15 May 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

Of course it will because you will still be allowing more than 1 gauss rifle to be fired.

Even with only 1 gauss charge limit, there would still be 1 gauss + 2 ERPPC potarts if the gauss didn't have a charge.

Mystere, on 15 May 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

It will not be DOA. The cooldown between gauss shots just needs to be tuned.

Precisely what I said.

Mystere, on 15 May 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

Also, I think certain people are requesting the Fafnir precisely because of its 50-point PPFLD potential. Tsk! TsK!

Agreed. Which was why I was in support for other Assaults to be added before the Fafnir, like the Sunder or Nighstar. There are even better and more interesting IS 100 tonners to be added, like the Marauder II, Vanquisher, Grand Titan, and the Berserker (If we ever get melee and/or TSM).

[Alan Davion]

Mystere, on 15 May 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

Also, I think certain people are requesting the Fafnir precisely because of its 50-point PPFLD potential. Tsk! TsK!

Of course people are requesting a mech that can dump that much firepower into its enemies.

Got to keep that perpetual power creep advancing yo~!

Otherwise it's decried as dead on arrival and not meta effective.

[Requiemking]

Alan Davion, on 15 May 2017 - 02:24 PM, said:

Of course people are requesting a mech that can dump that much firepower into its enemies.

Got to keep that perpetual power creep advancing yo~!

Otherwise it's decried as dead on arrival and not meta effective.

And then there are those mechs that aren't quite meta effective when they first arrive, then become meta gods later down the line(lookin at you, Black Knight).

[Lightfoot]

Aim-Bot, on 15 May 2017 - 04:42 AM, said:

our current heat capacity is 45 but its supposed to be 30. double heat sinks are not working like they are supposed to.Lowering heat capacity will lower alpha strikes automatically.Its a PGI made problem when they implemented double heat sinks back then.Before DHS the TTK was way way longer.

Well if the heatsinks absorb 30 heat. That should put you at zero heat, then the mech starts to overheat. Plus Double Heatsinks= 2 Single Heatsinks not 1.5. That's why you can run a fair number of lasers, but not 2 ERPPCs without quirks and a heat reduction. And the Awesome is supposed to be able to run 3xERPPCs fired all at once.

I find that MWO's mechs end up with an operational threshold of about 30-34 heat with 25 DHS. That's way more DHS than should be required, but the weapons recycle faster. So heat is pretty nerfed right now. A lot of MWO's other weapons are more heavily nerfed. I would start there if seeking better balance.

[Alan Davion]

Requiemking, on 15 May 2017 - 02:30 PM, said:

And then there are those mechs that aren't quite meta effective when they first arrive, then become meta gods later down the line(lookin at you, Black Knight).

Which is due to the players knowing more about the game than PGI itself.

[Requiemking]

Alan Davion, on 15 May 2017 - 02:56 PM, said:

Which is due to the players knowing more about the game than PGI itself.

Well, to be fair, the Black Knight required quirks to become the metagod, the Locust is the current master of the(practically nonexistant) IS Light meta because all of it's competition got brutally beat over the head with the nerf hammer, and the Kodiak is the lord of the Clan Assault mechs because it's the only one without a built-in fatal flaw.

Edited by Requiemking, 15 May 2017 - 03:18 PM.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Aim-Bot, on 15 May 2017 - 04:42 AM, said:

our current heat capacity is 45 but its supposed to be 30. double heat sinks are not working like they are supposed to.Lowering heat capacity will lower alpha strikes automatically.Its a PGI made problem when they implemented double heat sinks back then.Before DHS the TTK was way way longer.

However if the implemented them correctly, DHS would actually dissipate 2.0 heat instead of 1.5. So sure we would have only a 30 heat capacity but they would cool down 50% faster. Basically you might not be able to fire 4 PPC simultanously, but you would be able to fire two constantly without ever overheating.

[Pjwned]

Viktor Drake, on 15 May 2017 - 03:52 PM, said:

However if the implemented them correctly, DHS would actually dissipate 2.0 heat instead of 1.5. So sure we would have only a 30 heat capacity but they would cool down 50% faster. Basically you might not be able to fire 4 PPC simultanously, but you would be able to fire two constantly without ever overheating.

Except that's still stupid and wrong, because it's impossible to fit in enough heatsinks for that to be true, even with TrueDubs™ that dissipate 2.0 heat over 10 seconds.

If there's no extra heat capacity in this game then what happens is you fire 2 ER PPCs, that's almost immediate shutdown right there (which is nothing like Tabletop by the way) and that's assuming you don't have any extra heat or else you will just shut down instantly.

Even with as many as 28 DHS you would still need to wait so long to fire safely again that your first 2 ER PPCs would be ready to fire again, making it pointless to equip more than 2 ER PPCs, and the only reason you could even fire 2 ER PPCs ever in that completely asinine system is that ER PPCs got a slight heat reduction a while ago so 2 ER PPCs don't quite generate 30 heat now even though they're supposed to be 15 heat each.

It would be possible to fire 2 ER PPCs without shutting down if you had no additional heat, sure, but it would still be nowhere close to "you would be able to fire two constantly without ever overheating" because that's just utterly wrong; maybe try spending 5 seconds doing some 5th grade math next time.

As a reminder this is in sharp contrast to how it works in Tabletop, where a mech with 20 DHS firing 2 ER PPCs would end up with 10 less heat on the heat table if they didn't generate heat from anything else.

It's really unbelievable how persistent this stupid "fixed 30 heat capacity" meme is despite people being completely wrong about how it would work in this game and how it worked in Tabletop.

Edited by Pjwned, 15 May 2017 - 05:46 PM.

[Mawai]

I find the vitriol on this topic quite interesting.

I THINK that we are trying to discuss what alternatives there might be to the system PGI has currently implemented that might give better balance. However, it soon seems to turn into a religious war where the "values" specified are assumed to be taken from the table top game. My first comment to that is that the table top game, although lots of fun , is wildly imbalanced in favour of the clans (by intent), is based on random assignment of damage to hit locations, and works on a fixed 10 second game turn that represents all the damage done by the particular weapon within a 10 second time frame.

All of these differences mean that MWO is NOT Table top. So there is no reason for a heat cap to be 30 or for an ERPPC to generate 15 heat. We could also imagine the imposition of scaled heat effects such that moderate overheat might cause visual obstructions, a reduction in speed or mobility or other effects, before a complete shutdown of the mech.

Some folks cite lore builds in which a mech can fire 3 PPCs/turn indefinitely. No where does it indicate that these were necessarily fired all at the same instant. With enough heat dissipation it would be easy to fire one every 3s, not build up any heat, and still fire all three in the 10s window ... and that assumes that the heat cap would be low enough to shut down the mech if they all fired simultaneously which of course can be tuned for better balance.

However, a fixed heat scale WOULD prevent multiple simultaneous firings of the same 3 PPCs within the 10s window.

Anyway, the point is that since MWO is a very different game from TT there is no requirement to retain meaningless damage and heat numbers ... the numbers should be tuned to get a decent balance within MWO.

Finally, I agree with the folks that think we could use a fix for high PPFLD alpha builds. Convergence would be my approach of choice but there are probably other options. The simplest would be to use the locking mechanism ... if you hold a lock long enough then the weapons would be fully converged on your target. Anything less and a simple cone of fire could be implemented. Fire against an unlocked target would be simple straight line. At least this way, people would be sure to lock their targets more often

[Beaching Betty]

Reading this makes me confuse, I never understand the math behind heat sink.. All I know is that, DHS is good..

[MustrumRidcully]

Pjwned, on 15 May 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

It's an old topic that has also been repeatedly debunked because it's such a stupid idea.

https://mwomercs.com...ost__p__5387884

I fail to see your "debunking" here. Why would it be unthinkable to fire your PPCs one by one? You can manage to fire a laser beam over the duration of 1 to 2 seconds already, why not fire a bunch of PPCs over that duration?
If you want to avoid ghost heat, you can't fire 4 of them at once, too.

Anyway, the main reason the discussion is mostly pointless is because it has happened 3-4 years ago, and it wasn't implemented ever. PGI has taken a different path with its ghost heat and what not. And we can't set up our own MWO servers to try ourselves.

[lazytopaz]

Can we have ghost heat removed while we're at it?

[MustrumRidcully]

lazytopaz, on 16 May 2017 - 01:45 AM, said:

Can we have ghost heat removed while we're at it?

In the purely theoretical scenario of a fixed heat capacity (or even just a reduced heat capacity), we could probably throw it out and forget it ever happened.

[Mystere]

Pjwned, on 15 May 2017 - 05:32 PM, said:

Except that's still stupid and wrong, because it's impossible to fit in enough heatsinks for that to be true, even with TrueDubs™ that dissipate 2.0 heat over 10 seconds.

If there's no extra heat capacity in this game then what happens is you fire 2 ER PPCs, that's almost immediate shutdown right there (which is nothing like Tabletop by the way) and that's assuming you don't have any extra heat or else you will just shut down instantly.

Even with as many as 28 DHS you would still need to wait so long to fire safely again that your first 2 ER PPCs would be ready to fire again, making it pointless to equip more than 2 ER PPCs, and the only reason you could even fire 2 ER PPCs ever in that completely asinine system is that ER PPCs got a slight heat reduction a while ago so 2 ER PPCs don't quite generate 30 heat now even though they're supposed to be 15 heat each.

It would be possible to fire 2 ER PPCs without shutting down if you had no additional heat, sure, but it would still be nowhere close to "you would be able to fire two constantly without ever overheating" because that's just utterly wrong; maybe try spending 5 seconds doing some 5th grade math next time.

As a reminder this is in sharp contrast to how it works in Tabletop, where a mech with 20 DHS firing 2 ER PPCs would end up with 10 less heat on the heat table if they didn't generate heat from anything else.

It's really unbelievable how persistent this stupid "fixed 30 heat capacity" meme is despite people being completely wrong about how it would work in this game and how it worked in Tabletop.

If PGI can deviate from TT with regard to weapons damage, heat, and most especially firing rate, why can't they deviate as well with heat dissipation rates, by making heat sinks dump heat faster?

That should take care of your PPC "problem".

Edited by Mystere, 16 May 2017 - 08:27 AM.