Chris Lowrey, on 05 July 2017 - 02:42 PM, said:
I hear this entire notion of small lasers being the baseline and this is patently false. Same with the AC 10. This is something that I have never said, nor would I ever say something to that effect.
The baseline is the aggregate of all the weapons combined over numerous properties and other intended metrics we wish to track and judge against at a global level. It has never, nor will it ever, come down to a single weapon system being compared against others. As that is a fast way to have whatever weapons you establish as the baseline get trapped in a perpetual state of never being reviewed as you are constantly attempting to mold everything else in the game around an artificial goal post that might be flawed in of itself. This is something that is not done now, and something I have no plans of starting anytime soon.
Preface: thank you for engaging with us in this format, Chris. We may sometimes get ahead of ourselves, but we really care about this game it means a lot to get to have open discussions with staff on such topics here. I really think PGI needs to have a discussion with comp-level players on these issues, because that hasn't happened to my knowledge and there's been a long-time simmering desire for it.
Moving on, that's a noble claim, but the fact remains that the AC/10 and LB-X and Small Laser are pretty much never taken for higher level play because they can't do anything well enough to be considered. They lack a usable combination of range, velocity, and/or DPS and get overshadowed by alternatives like AC/20, cGauss, twin AC/5, cERSL, and even standard Medium Lasers. The fact also remains that those weapons have hardly been touched in the three years I've been playing. The LB-10X and AC/10 got an ammo bump, which helped 'Mech construction but didn't help field performance and in fact the velocity and range got nerfed on the AC/10 and all other standard ballistics in that same time period. The Small Laser got multiple range boosts, which did little to solve its chief drawback: lack of damage output even inside its optimum that can't even be mitigated by massing them the way the cERSL can be massed. We've seen multiple passes on PPCs and Gauss and Clan lasers over this same period of time, but the rest of the old IS gear, which was
never internally balanced to begin with, has remained mostly stagnant. PGI's recent changes to the Medium Laser were fantastic and long-overdue, but there's more to do.
And now we get the new guns, the most important of which PGI has chosen to preemptively curb to either maintain some sort of flavor against their Clan counterparts or provide less incentive to take what would otherwise be a cut-and-dry superior weapon within the same tech tree. A prime example is the range on the isUAC/10, which PGI cut 90 meters from to make it identical to the AC/10. So not only does that make both have mediocre reach for their weight, it's also out of line with how PGI has done the rest of the ballistics, where the standard AC has longer range than the Ultra. And even then, the attempt to incentivize AC/10 usage will be unsuccessful, because the two weapons are essentially identical save for one providing the option for twice the DPS. The choice is easy, same as it is with the AC/5 versus the Ultra AC/5.
I understand the need to keep TTK reasonable and be vigilant against excessive power creep, but some equipment items just have to be buffed because the alternative is to hammer things down to be as marginally useful. Unless you want to whack
everything down that far, and you may not be able to without harming PGi's vision of how the game should be played, that's not going to work.
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