56 replies to this topic

[Y E O N N E]

ITT: people acting like you can't strike a moving formation, or even a moving individual.

[Admiral-Dan]

Appogee, on 27 August 2017 - 08:37 AM, said:

But PGI's priority appears to be incenting you to buy Mech Packs.

Not working as intended. They only incentivize me to play less because I want to play mechwarrior online not airstrike online. If PGI wants a game which is centered around airstrikes they at least should let us fly an aerospace fighter.

Edited by AlphaEtOmega, 27 August 2017 - 11:58 PM.

[An Innocent Urbie]

Teer Kerensky, on 27 August 2017 - 11:39 PM, said:

Movement is the counter.

movement HAAHAHAHAAH that gives me chuckles

[InfinityBall]

Xorkrath, on 27 August 2017 - 12:50 PM, said:

I suppose I could supplement my post by being a bit more on topic. I hear a lot from these threads about how deadly strikes are, but I wonder how accurate their damage estimates are. I got steamrolled in a match about three weeks ago...my own fault I died. Bad positioning. But the one thing I did was drop an arty strike directly on an IS marauder. It was the only damage I did that round, and my skill tree gives me all the arty upgrades. And I managed to mark him right at his feet, he never saw it coming. He never moved out of the way, nothing. It did very low 100's damage, like around 110. And he was right in the center of it when it hit.

So you made a bad decision, took a terrible shot, and still did a huge amount of damage with one shot that took no tonnage, took no slots, and created no heat. And you're arguing that's not a strong ability.

You're bad at arguing.

[Prof RJ Gumby]

Yeonne Greene, on 27 August 2017 - 11:55 PM, said:

ITT: people acting like you can't strike a moving formation, or even a moving individual.

Yes you can, especially in FP siege, where the enemy movement is very predictable due to him having to walk many long, narrow corridors. A 12 man may bring 98 strikes to one game, gl with that. And yes, it is possible to use them all in roughly 16 minutes of spamming.


IMHO solution without breaking is simple - increasing cooldown. It's 10 seconds between every strike now. Make it so after the second arty (as 1st cooldown doesn't count, it goes off long before you meet the enemey) the cooldown rises by (for example) 2 seconds after each strike. So the cooldown would look like that:
(for) 1st (strike) (starting at spawn) - 10 seconds - it doesn't matter anyway
2nd - 10 seconds [20 total]
3rd - 12 seconds [22]
4th - 14 [46]
5th - 16 [62]
6th - 18 [80]
7th - 20 [100 seconds]
8th - 22 [122 seconds, so 2 minutes needed to launch 8 strikes instead of the current 80 seconds
9th - 24 [146]
10th - 26 [162]
11th - 28 [190]
12th - 30 [220]
etc. etc.

Why like that? So that strikes still work and are useful, but it is not possible to spam them like crazy, especially for organised teams. You can still bombard an enemy team if it gets clusetered and refuse to move, but just spamming them on every possible enemy location will make you end up with a loooong cooldown.

[FunkyT]

Feels like a lot of people in this thread miss the actual point of the discussion.

I don't hate the strikes, nor what they stand for or what they are intended to do. I am fully aware that they are meant to counter entrenched defenses and clumped up teams. And I am absolutely OK with all of that.


I am however NOT OK with the frequency of them raining down. The game just degrades to "Artillery Spotter Simulator".
Instead of setting up a defensive line and probing for weaknesses in the enemy line-up, you just have 4 or so light mechs swarming the location and dropping smoke as soon as possible. They are farming damage without actually doing anything for it. They are not using their mechs for combat, but only for maneuvering and spamming the consumable key.
Call me stupid for it, or anything really, but these players aren't playing Mechwarrior in my eyes.

Strikes are just way too spammable right now. It's not a tactical tool right now, but a lazy damage farm.
Some of the counter arguments presented here don't really make sense either:

Of course the mechs need to expose themselves and hold still for a second in order to drop the strike. But peeking does the exact same thing. Pushing the enemy lines also exposes your mech to fire. You guys seem totally ok with coordinated pushing, but why push if you can just cook the enemy lineup with strikes every 15 seconds?

Of course movement can help avoiding strikes, but it is no guarantee to escape unscathed. Pushing is supposed to be the hard counter strikes? What exactly is preventing the enemies from putting strikes right in front of the advancing enemy force every couple seconds? I'm pretty sure the push will scatter most of the times, in such a situation. So you want players to push but also want to maintain strikes at a 4-per-minute ratio? Seems contradictory to me, but what do I know?

And some of you make it sound like grouping up is just generally wrong. But why? If you want to push the enemy, you want to do so as a united front to reduce the chance of the enemy focussing and destroying singular mechs inside this advance. You don't want your team to trickle one by one toward enemy fire, that's just suicide. But in order to push as a united front, you need to group up first, don't you? And chances are, that the enemy light mechs, filled to the brim with red smoke grenades, reach your temporary encampment about the same time (or earlier) than the last of your slow assaults. So just because you are about to push doesn't mean you are safe from strikes. These things are largely unrelated.


Again, to summarize:
The existence and use of strikes as an ingame mechanic is NOT the problem.
The sheer frequency and mindless spamming of said strikes is the problem.

As stated many times before, increasing the global cooldown between strikes seems to be the best idea and the easiest change to make. I don't ask for PGI to nerf them into the ground, I am just asking for them to put the focus back on actual mech combat, not on artillery spotting.

Edited by FunkyT, 28 August 2017 - 12:21 AM.

[DerMaulwurf]

My personal favorite is to spot clusters of enemies on HPG/Crimson using Seismic Sensor before dropping strikes with zero warning. It's just absolutely silly considering it costs neither heat nor tonnage.

Even when I only hit a single mech I still consider strike CB to be well spend. Because free damage is free damage is free damage.

I have a full year of banked premium time and enough hero mechs to continue spamming at will. The only thing dumber than strikes is the idea that CBill costs somehow counterbalance anything.

[kesmai]

30 sec cool down between strikes and -5 pts dmg for each "boom" should suffice.
I do not want to see them removed or completely nerfed into oblivion.

Edited by kesmai, 28 August 2017 - 02:25 AM.

[Lily from animove]

Well, they said "internal testing" made 30 heattreshold unviable. and if anything prevents alpha it's a LOT lower heattreshold, until then, Alpha all the way.

But I stick with it, lower heattreshold dramatically.

Edited by Lily from animove, 28 August 2017 - 02:11 AM.

[Exilyth]

<sarcasm>Might as well introduce a long tom consumable, that would stop the strike meta.</sarcasm>

Seriously though, the frequency is way too high.

[BinaryDuck]

Don't know If this Idea has already beeing trown around, but what If when you unlock the extra Strike skill, you receivee a debuff on the Strike of 50% >60% damage reduction. The psychological factor Will still be there, but people will not do so much damage as before.

[Khobai]

max one strike per mech please

[Mechrophilia]

I want to be able to buy red smoke-bombs, at a much reduced cost, to shoot at clusters of mechs so they think an airstrike's coming and scatter. *evil grin*

[Xorkrath]

InfinityBall, on 28 August 2017 - 12:06 AM, said:

So you made a bad decision, took a terrible shot, and still did a huge amount of damage with one shot that took no tonnage, took no slots, and created no heat. And you're arguing that's not a strong ability.

You're bad at arguing.

I made a bad decision in regards to positioning, yes. I took a great shot though, in case you missed the part where I dropped an airstrike right on his head and got verified damage.

My argument was that this ability is not the armageddon it's been presented as. People have been screaming from the rooftops about the hundreds and hundreds of damage these things do...possibly even thousands if you collect all four. I merely pointed out they aren't "all that and a bag of chips".

You created a rather weak strawman because you couldn't refute the argument or the results, exaggerated the magnitude of the central point, and about the only thing you got right was the technical side on "no slots and no heat". Then you capped that off by sarcastically implying it's not a strong ability.

If it were a strong ability, you wouldn't have to resort to (poorly) arguing against a strawman - you could argue the facts that were on your side. Maybe if this ability was really able to farm massive amounts of damage, you'd see each team using them in a coordinated fashion to wipe out half the enemy team before any weapons trades happened. Heck, why even bother with firepower nodes when you can eliminate swaths of the enemy team with a handful of strikes and related skill nodes? That doesn't happen because the mechanic is not nearly as strong as has been claimed.

Maybe I should just graciously accept your concession of the point, save you the trouble of taking the foot out of your mouth.

[AncientRaig]

I've posted this on every one of these threads that I've seen, and I'll post it here. There's three things that would fix strikes.

Firstly: Make it so that strikes can only be called in by mechs mounting a TAG laser. The TAGing mech would have to paint the target zone for several seconds (at least five). The strike could be called off by deactivating the TAG before the painting is finished, or adjusted based on enemy position up until the target is painted and the smoke is deployed. This not only makes using strikes require more risk on the part of the user, but would also make accurate aiming of strikes easier and help avoid accidentally calling down a strike on or near a teammate because of an invisible wall or something.

Secondly: Provide more warning to any players in the strike zone. Add a voice line for Betty and a HUD notification saying "Warning: Incoming strike!". This would allow players to actually have a chance to react to a strike that they can't see, and reduces the need to rely on teammates. PUGs are unreliable, and even a group might not be able to see the smoke and warn you in time.

Thirdly: Make the strikes take longer to arrive. The strike timer must be long enough for Betty to give her warning, plus a few more seconds to give pilots a chance to react. Combined with the second point, this makes avoiding strikes an actual possibility without compromising the primary role of strikes, which everyone seems to agree is breaking up deathballs.

[Brain Cancer]

Most of these would mean people use fewer strikes. And a Betty warning means you'd be as likely to walk into a strike as you are to evade it, honestly. People already do the silliest things when I sling missles...

This runs counter to the reason such an easy to use mechanic exists- to encourage you to spend as many C-bills during a match as possible. That is why strike spam exists. In PGI's eyes, it would be optimal if they saw 24+ strikes per game, because that would mean nearly a million C-bills sunk out of the economy via consumables each match.

[jonfett]

I've stopped playing this game while this strike crap is ongoing...not coming back until it's fixed.