Nesutizale, on 02 July 2017 - 07:37 AM, said:
Heatscale (the original TT system slightly modified)
The old TT system wasn't capping anything, it was easy to understand, could increase TTK while keeping alphas an option and works with any kind of weapon combination.
It needs some tweaking to work in MWO but it offers more depth to the game then ghostheat or energydraw can.
You can see my topic about the changes here
https://mwomercs.com...eting-movement/
TT's Heatscale ultimately had its own way of capping things. With the Heatsink Taxing, the risk was melting heatsinks if you produced more than the cooling power of your heatsinks, and if you hit 30 excess (uncooled) heat, you shut down. (I should note there is no override, and according to the rules you cannot start back up until cooled to 46.67% heat aka "14" units.)
(In Battletech, there's a weapons override when the weapons shutdown. Weapons shut down at >80% and do not restore on their own until 79% heat. The IS commonly override this. The Clans do not.)
There is no override for the mech shutting down, period. That is a Mechwarrior game fabrication.)
Our current heat caps are in the 80 to 120 range for most builds. That's higher than the 60 locked limit of Mechwarrior 4 and its rampant abuse which was twice that of tabletop. Furthermore, we can fire 6 PPCs (sans the ghost heat limitation) at once without shutting down and in 7 seconds we were good to do it again before shutting down.. In Tabletop you'd shut down with a similar build that has MORE heatsinks than MWO's build AND shutdown on the first volley almost automatically.
MWO has to resort to ******** systems because it allows so much more freedom than intended. Ghost heat allows loopholes to be exploited, so we can combine these lasers with those lasers to produce 80 damage "alphas."
Alpha strikes are defined as a high risk/modest reward manuever performed by desperate mechwarriors as a last ditch effort. Not the common practice.
Of course we mistake the lore Alpha strike for the tabletop one, where we queue all the weapons to fire over 10 seconds. That is not the alpha strike but we call it that for some reason. The lore version is all at once, and typically mechs are known to explode due to ammo explosions, weapons are known to take damage or explode, barrels on autocannons are known to melt, and pilots are known to cook alive inside of their mech.
Now consider what Energy Draw does for a moment.
You fire X damage at once, you cook.
Seems pretty straight forward. That is very simple to communicate to new players. But therein rests the problem, the condition for applying it sucked.
it needs better conditions, applying an "energy usage" trait to each weapon can then produce better combinations, and then you have "X" energy which drains and fills. Rather than an arbitrary ghost heat thing, you'd just not fire things outside of that range if you fire too much. Then comes in the alpha strike key, hit this and the energy draw lmit is ignored, all weapons fire at once, and laser durations are cut in half. The cost, of course, is you get all that heat + an additional 50%.
Now I'm not saying that's the best way to do it. But it does sort of fit the intent and the issues you described.
Edited by Koniving, 16 July 2017 - 08:03 AM.