37 replies to this topic

[Requiemking]

Ok, OP, you mentioned you wanted to know more about the Light scenario? Well, here is what you need to know. Currently, Lights pretty much have zero place in game. Anything you could possibly want combat-wise in a Light can be just as easily done with a fast Medium, and since the rewards system is so biased towards combat that nothing else matters, Lights have zero other option for earning there share. You could, I kid you not, delete them from game in the next patch, and aside from angry players, it would make zero difference. Giving Lights a place in game boils down to a choice that both the players and the devs have to make:

1) MWO is a combat-based game: by choosing this option, both the players and devs admit that all mechs must be able to earn their keep through combat. Thus, Lights, as a whole, will have to be buffed to be able to keep up with the other weight-classes in combat. This means undoing the following: the Rescale, years of often unnecessary quirk nerfs, and all of the nerfs to the light-weight weapons that Lights rely upon.

2) Objectives in objective-based game modes matter: by choosing this option, both players and devs admit that combat isn't the only thing in game. Thus, the score system will need to be completely overhauled. This choice includes: remove damage from the score system entirely, restricting most combat-based bonuses to combat-primary modes(such as Skirmish and Escort), heavily buffing the Objective-based bonuses and increasing the number, changing objective locations for certain maps, and removing map and mode vote while not implementing opt-out.

[LordNothing]

the problem with balance is the same problem with the op.

too much things.

the amount of time pgi has every month to put fourth balance tweaks is fixed, but the number of things in the game to tweak is always increasing, by about 6+ mechs a month. a lot more if you count both civil war mega packs and all those fairly recent clan varients. the new mechs need their inital balance configuration set up, and recent mech packs get their adjustment, usually lagging behind a few months to coincide with cbill release. legacy mechs never get any tweaks, and those are usually the worst offenders due to power creep. there is simply not enough time to adjust the number of mechs that require adjustment. not with the monthly tweak cycle, with very few tweaks each.

to bring effective balance we would need weekly balance passes at least. instead of having one big team to put out the entire patch you would have a content team, and a balance team. the balance team does weekly patches, and set up the balance on the new mechs on the weak of the big patch. the content team makes maps, mech modes, textures, etc. the current patch cycle is considered the main patch, other weeks get balance only. these two teams would be mostly independant of eachother, except any collaberation between the two teams as needed on the mechpack patch. the purpose is to allow faster iteration of balance changes. this is all a pipe dream though, after all its hard to split 3 people into 2 teams.

Edited by LordNothing, 07 November 2017 - 07:47 PM.

[Asym]

Kiran Yagami, on 07 November 2017 - 05:44 PM, said:

So?
So? I don't care what they say. They're giving an opinion on an opinion, so why that should carry any weight is just beyond me.

Case in point: OK, your opinion, for all of us newer players, please...........what is "balance to you?" To the game....

To balance what? i.e. Weapons effects or the whole of weapons; slots, tons, ammo cap, etc.... Tactically, Operationally or strategically.....

A better question is then "was it ever balanced originally?" From what I've read in BT/MW: no......

[CancersCincar]

I would rather see everything made to the same system. An ERLL for the clans is an ERLL for the IS. An XL for the clans is an XL for the IS. I think that asymmetrical balancing could work but it's probably far too difficult to manage. I think with asymmetrical balance there would always fall one side that is "better" in the meta, whatever side that ends up being. Personally, I think that making everything work on the same system would lead to a more balanced environment faster. It might be a little less exciting, but yeah, i'd rather have the game be fun and balanced than not.

There will always be unhappy people, though, no matter what way you decide to take the balance.

Edited by CancersCincar, 07 November 2017 - 08:16 PM.

[Joshua Winters]

First off, let me say that I am a new player to MWO and have yet to play FP though I look forward to FP when I am good enough to contribute to my team. I have been reading the forum posts regularly for the past few months to learn about the game dynamics and play style/builds for the mechs available. Although my MWO experience is limited, I have played Battletech since 1987, and as I read the posts about faction play and balance, one thing has always stuck out. Why are 12 IS mechs dropping against 12 Clan mechs? This fact alone causes a major imbalance. Not to get hung up on lore but simply to say that overall, Clan mechs are superior to IS mechs ton for ton. A 12 mech IS company should be dropping against 2 stars of Clan mechs. Each side should have an equal weight allowance since the Battle Value system is not in use. Is this something that has been tried or is it not possible due to program limitations?

[Requiemking]

Joshua Winters, on 07 November 2017 - 09:21 PM, said:

First off, let me say that I am a new player to MWO and have yet to play FP though I look forward to FP when I am good enough to contribute to my team. I have been reading the forum posts regularly for the past few months to learn about the game dynamics and play style/builds for the mechs available. Although my MWO experience is limited, I have played Battletech since 1987, and as I read the posts about faction play and balance, one thing has always stuck out. Why are 12 IS mechs dropping against 12 Clan mechs? This fact alone causes a major imbalance. Not to get hung up on lore but simply to say that overall, Clan mechs are superior to IS mechs ton for ton. A 12 mech IS company should be dropping against 2 stars of Clan mechs. Each side should have an equal weight allowance since the Battle Value system is not in use. Is this something that has been tried or is it not possible due to program limitations?

Unfortunately, its a programming issue. MWO's primeval Crytek engine is gigantic mess of spaghetti code that prevents things like lances vs stars, ammo switching, things running faster than a max-engined Commando, ect.

[Joshua Winters]

Requiemking, on 07 November 2017 - 09:30 PM, said:

Unfortunately, its a programming issue. MWO's primeval Crytek engine is gigantic mess of spaghetti code that prevents things like lances vs stars, ammo switching, things running faster than a max-engined Commando, ect.

I see. Thanks for the info.

[The Lighthouse]

Tarogato, on 07 November 2017 - 02:30 PM, said:

If you're going to reward lights for doing non-combat roles (such as scouting, spotting, narc/tag) then you have to make sure that those actions contribute positively to the match outcome. Ie., does it help you win?

Hint: it doesn't. Lights are better off doing zero scouting, doing zero spotting. Their job is dealing damage to the enemy, just like assault mechs. That's just the reality of the situation because that is how MWO is designed. If you aren't killing enemies with your light mech, you are dead weight the vast majority of the time. There's no way to fix this without fundamentally changing the whole of how MWO works. We would need completely different map design, completely different gamemode design, possibly a full respawns mode... you know something kind of like what Mechwarrior Living Legends has.

My personal solution for light mechs in MWO is to rescale them back to where they were before the Great Upscale of 2016. Mechs like Firestarters and Wolfhounds were scaled appropriately for gameplay... then PGI made them so much larger that they now need massive amounts of durability quirks just to be viable. The Adder is still a huge piñata. The Jenners (both of them) are now deathtraps on legs.

Even by just tweaking current system, Lights can be made into 'non-combat' roles easily. It is purely PGI's fault that they just cannot/refuse to implement features and limitations.

1) Make only light mechs can place arty/air strikes, but buff the strikes that anything non-Assaults would be severely damaged and anything below heavies will be disintegrated if they receive direct hit.

2) Make only light/mediums can employ UAVs. Light mechs may can employ 'super' UAVs that are undetectable by enemies and last for more than 5 minutes.

3) Lights with Beagle can completely ignore line of sight and detect enemies, even behind the wall or inside of the closed area.

4) NARCs and Tagged enemies may receive additional bonus damage from missiles and increased chance of critical hits from ballistics and lasers.

I am certain that with these changes, even an light without any offensive weapon can be still very strong tool, even in current game mechanics.

Just trying to make lights into "directly dealing damage to the enemy", a.k.a wannabe mediums is such unimaginative and is probably too much from the beginning.

Quote

No.


One of the things that makes this game fun, imo, is that Clan and IS are completely different. You can't fit similar builds, you can't build them the same way. Right now it's to the disadvantage of the IS side because Clan can simply boat more weapons and boat more heatsinks and boat faster engines. So why aren't IS heatsinks, being larger in crit size... just better? Why aren't a lot of IS equipment, being larger in crit size and tonnage... just better?

I fall along the lines of the fairly conservative in terms of equipment. I don't think that tonnage, or crits, or damage should be different from Battletech. But there are ways to balance all of this equipment without stepping on the toes of the lore. For instance Clan ER lasers compared to IS are supposed to be smaller, lighter weight, deal more damage, and have more range. Better in every way. But nobody said anything about duration. In MWO, clan lasers are just too easy to use. Too effective. They need a longer duration. They can have better stats than IS, keeping true to the lore, but they wouldn't be more effective than IS, because Clan lasers would take so much longer, so much more face time to deal their damage. I might start by just increasing the burn durations by 10% on each of the cERML, the cHLL, and cLPL, and seeing how things settle before moving forward. There will be people who will complain that "clan lightsabres are unusable". Tough shjt, bros! Right now they're more than usable... they're the most universally effective weapons in the game! They need adjusted somehow. But don't think I'm not aware that their competitors (dakka, and missiles) are also in need of some buffs. The past couple years of MWO has been nothing but nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf. We need to start balancing in the other direction too. UAC5 and UAC10 are too hot. UAC20 is too unreliable. AC20 are too slow. SRMs have too much spread. IS PPCs just largely aren't effective. AC2s don't deal enough DPS. Small lasers (almost all of them, IS and Clan) don't deal enough DPS. LB5s just have too much spread. All the LBs need better crit DPS (except for maybe the IS LB10), possibly better DPS in general. LRMs need to not be garbage at direct fire. There's a lot of small buffs that need to happen to restore balance and bring everything back to par with laservomit. Oh, and the IS laser cooldowns do need to be buffed back to where they were... they don't have damage, they don't have range, what they need is the DPS in order to compete against clan tech.

What's funny, is I don't think balance was ever better then when the Kodiak was added to the game. Sure, the Kodiak was overpowered, but if you took the Kodiak out of the game, then the game was much better balanced at that point in time. Ever since then I feel like we've been regressing more and more. And it's really depressing.

Argh.... Why not?



Seriously, why not really. What OP actually wants is in fact mixtech, which is probably one last and certain way to eliminate faction imbalance altogether.


But.... BUT the difference will be gone! You'd say. But the reality is that IS Hunchback just cannot be Clan Hunchback IIC no matter what. Hunchback will be still going to have that one huge gun on its right shoulder, while IIC will have smaller guns on each shoulders. You have to shield with your left shoulder to protect that right hunch when you pilot Hunchback, but you have to torso-twist to spread damage evenly when you pilot Hunchback IIC. You still want to get close to the enemies so short-range huge ballistic can actually deal damage for IS Hunchback, while you still have to get some space when you wield quad UAC2s on Clan Hunchback IIC. Same techs, still different playstyles here.


Allowing Clan stuffs won't make non-hero King Crab into a typical laserbomb either. It will still have huge guns on its both arms and energy weapons will still exist as just support/secondary weapons for the King Crab.

The claim that mixtech would eliminate differences and thus making the game boring is pure myth, as long as this game maintains hardpoints system.

And this particular sentence.

Quote

I fall along the lines of the fairly conservative in terms of equipment. I don't think that tonnage, or crits, or damage should be different from Battletech.

I am sorry Tarogato, but only conclusions from this sentence are:


1) You do not realize that this game is like... like.... so ****ing far from TT rules / Lore that the distance between MWO and TT is greater than the distance between our milky way galaxy and MACS0647-JD galaxy.
2) You do not realize that every single Battletech-related games have been from partially ignoring to completely abandoning TT rules altogether.
3) And also do not realize that such abandonment of TT rules and lore was completely and utterly necessary to make the game actually fun to play and bring actual balance.



Sigh, where do I even start? Like... the fact that the whole "hardpoint" actually does not exist in TT? You can have, say, CT-equipped UAC20 ACH in table top. Not so much for this game.

The fact is, if we purely follow TT rules, ALL mechs can boat lasers. Yes, I said all mechs, from silly Commandos to Adders to Jagers to Mad Cat (Timber Wolf) to fatty Atlas.


ALL OF THEM.


With current balance, and if such freedom was allowed in this game, all mechs would have exactly same weapon setup (bunch of heavy/large lasers and rest all medium lasers). Just like Mech Warrior 3 where you can see enormous laserbomb of death coming out of Timber's missile pods. And that is actually one of the most accurate descriptions how TT is being played.

People would make fun of mech customization of Mech Commander 2 where you only have a huge rectangle and squeeze components as if playing a puzzle game, not realizing it is actually damn close to how things are done in TT.

The concept of hardpoint was invented by those smart folks at Microsoft Studios for MW4. Because while hardpoint never existed in any previous Mech Warrior games and table top, a Mad Cat shooting gigantic laserbomb of death from missile pods was just too comical for their taste.


And it is not just Mech Warrior 4. One day I heard that HBS has completely "rewritten" everything about ballistic weapons for their upcoming Battletech game. And that really reminds me of one interview from the makers of Mech Commander 1, where they also said they had to "rewrite" ballistic weapon rules to make them work on a video game. HBS merely reinvented wheel regarding weapon balance of Battletech.


MWO, from start, used hardpoint system which is already considered as 'abomination' from the view point of lore purists. Then it got rid of some of silly stuffs like majority of crit damage stuffs (i.e gyro crit), made mechs as twice as durable (otherwise mechs would be too fragile for FPS style game) and severely increase heat of weapons. The fact is that a lot of builds, such as stock build of Awesome is heat neutral in TT. Not so much in MWO.

You cannot claim you are "conservative" toward something in MWO. Literally nothing can be held as "conservative". There are only attempts from PGI to make the game feel "Battletech" by arbitrarily following some selected rules, such as....


ISXL vs CXL differences.
Critical space requirement of weapons (and not implementing crit splitting, making some of variants and weapon systems like Arrow IV unable to be implemented)



You must, YOU MUST REALIZE pretty much all of the biggest problematic balance problems are ALL FROM THESE PATHETIC ATTEMPTS TO SIMULATE LORE. In order to this game to be actually balanced and fun game for everyone, PGI really should stop get rid of last pretense and try make a good video game instead of a good Battletech game (which never happened. None of the Battletech video games were actual Battletech games, for a very good reason.) Attempt to simulate lore only resulted in both poor video game AND poor Battletech game.

Go look at the weapon table of MW4. Yes, it does use different (I have to say "better") hardpoint system, but look at the slot sizes. Even the biggest weapons' size is as same as, say ER-PPC. Damage values, tonnage and other stuffs are all over the place. Because while the developers did use TT values as 'reference', their main focus was to make weapons fun to use and balanced (whether they were successful or not), not trying to replicate the 'feel' of TT game.


You also must realize that ballistic weapon performance of TT suck. They are insanely bad. Any sane person would not use ballistic for TT game if the person wants to win. There is a reason why HBS had to "rewritten" (or more honestly insanely buffed) ballistic. There will be no good thing coming out of holding on terribly-balanced values on the first place.


If mixtech does not happen, all of IS weapons need some serious weight loss, in both crit space AND tonnage. Almost same as Clan weaponry, maybe just slightly heavier but no more different than a ton or two.



Yeah, sure, then it would no longer be "Battletech" game, I guess. And some people will whine and cry.

But then again, so what? Mech Warrior 2 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Warrior 3 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Warrior 4 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Commander 1 and 2 were NOT Battletech games, and hell Mech Assault 1 and 2 were definitely NOT Battletech games.

MWO is already like 90% NOT a Battletech game, and if that last 10% brings detrimental effects on the game, why don't we get rid of it anyway?

Otherwise we are putting additional complexities such as Ghost Heat, Quirks and other silly PGI-only stuffs, which are, most of time, very new player hostile, again super detrimental to the game.


TT Values and Lore can go back to where they should belong : on an actual table and paperback. Let me at least enjoy a well-made, well-balanced video game where robots shoot each other. Nothing more, nothing less.




One thing I agree with you though, is that nerf waves must stop now. It was good for a year but it is no longer funny when it goes for another year.

[SeventhSL]

G’day Xorkrath. Interesting topic.

On Asymmetrical Balance - Most people really can’t see past cloning Clan Tech and calling it IS. In other words, Symmetrical balance. This is a slippery slope because once you start making things equivalent to solve problems where do you stop? A really simplified bland game? We have good asymmetry; the real issue is that the game mechanics utterly favour one side of it. This is what we need to address. A couple of suggestions on how to do this below.

Speed – You know the screen shake you get while jumping? Up to 65km you get no shake, so you are as accurate on the move as stationary. At 100km the shake is capped so that firing at targets at long range is pointless, medium range is questionable but short range isn’t an issue. The gap between Clan and IS is primarily between 70km and 90km so shake should ramp up quickly in here. The goal is a simple trade of speed for accuracy. You want IS players to stop crying because Clan goes 7-10km faster and you want Clan to throttle back the speed to obtain accurate fire.

Alpha Strike – Ghost heat and energy draw are really trying to achieve two main goals. Limit alpha strikes and encourage diversity in a Mech weapons. Given the game is currently all about alpha strikes (Read Clan) it is obviously failing. Weapons need to have an effect on accuracy when fired. The more damage a weapon does the more effect it has. In this way a big alpha isn’t hard capped, but it is like a big shot gun blast, so it has diminished effectiveness. Because different weapons will affect accuracy differently a combination of different weapons (Large, medium, small) will generally give the most optimal result. Again, this is a simple trade of Alpha size for accuracy and heat.

Battlemech vs Omnimech – This is actually Battlemech with IS tech vs Battlemech with Clan tech vs Omnimech with Clan tech vs Omnimech with IS tech (in the future). The first thing we need to do here is balance the build mechanisms of IS and Clan tech. Slots is a resource for IS tech that can be turned into free tonnage with things like Endo, Ferro, LFE. This needs to be further enhanced by giving them crit splitting as has been discussed in other threads. In contrast, Clan Battlemechs (most but not all) need to be more restrictive and lock Endo, Ferro, etc so they don’t also get the IS tech advantage of slots for tonnage.

Clan Battlemechs need some flexibility to swap engines (XL, standard). This is necessary because we can’t really balance out engines while clan Omnimechs live and die on the strength of their XLs.

IS Omnimechs will need a lot more flexibility than their Clan counterpart and will need to be able to swap Endo, Ferro, etc so that they can counter the weight and slot restrictions of IS Tech.

If I could sum all of that up, I’d say lock stuff on strong mechs and unlock stuff on week ones.

Engines – Standard engines need a buff so that people want to take them. They should give a bunch of structure points to the CT proportional to how heavy they are. IS XL and Clan XL need a crit system such that a Clan XL could die with a single torso loss, but it probably won’t, and an IS XL could survive a side torso loss, but it probably won’t.

If there is still a great a tonnage and slot disparity between IS and Clan (and there may be for larger weapons) then you can further ease the tonnage and slots by upping ammo count (less tonnage/slots in ammo) and making weapons run a bit cooler (less tonnage/slots in heat sinks).

Lights – The accuracy mechanics already covered are really going to help lights. They would be a lot harder to focus fire on. I’d also increase their role on the battle field by giving them a native increase in sensor range, target info time/sharing. I’d love to give them a class only skill tree but that is a whole other issue.

Weapons – Slot and tonnage disparity is already dealt with as above. All weapons need to some spread. This starts to balance less traditional week weapons like LBX.

Ballistics – AC both IS and Clan need to be one shot while UAC on both side need to be the same multiple shots but double tap ability. Slot and tonnage disparity is already dealt with. This is the kind of area where we should be seeing more symmetry.

LRM Missiles – We have a strong poke meta and LRMs just sitting there begging to be made competitive. On top of this we need to make them less effective against noobs and more effective in competitive play. I’d do this by changing lock time, spread and trajectory based on lock type. If you lock yourself then lock time would be near instant (when stacked with artemis, tag, etc) and the trajectory would be much lower with tighter spread. This would help make them more competitive vs direct fire weapons and encourage players to obtain their own locks. If someone else was holding the lock for you then they would function close to how they do now. Just a bit longer on the lock times and a some more spread. Now to make them really useful we need an indirect fire mod without locks. Open the map, position a lock marker (you get one) and then you can lock onto that in game. When you use this lock type you have the longest lock times, a huge spread and a near vertical decent for the missiles. The idea of this is simple. LRMs can be used as an anti-poke tool. Hello competitive play.

[Tarogato]

The Lighthouse, on 07 November 2017 - 10:26 PM, said:

Even by just tweaking current system, Lights can be made into 'non-combat' roles easily. It is purely PGI's fault that they just cannot/refuse to implement features and limitations.

1) Make only light mechs can place arty/air strikes, but buff the strikes that anything non-Assaults would be severely damaged and anything below heavies will be disintegrated if they receive direct hit.

2) Make only light/mediums can employ UAVs. Light mechs may can employ 'super' UAVs that are undetectable by enemies and last for more than 5 minutes.

3) Lights with Beagle can completely ignore line of sight and detect enemies, even behind the wall or inside of the closed area.

4) NARCs and Tagged enemies may receive additional bonus damage from missiles and increased chance of critical hits from ballistics and lasers.

All of those things to me sound extremely unfun.

UAVs that you can't see or shoot down? That constantly spot you so that you have crosshairs on you every time you poke? And probably even get lurmed to death? Auto-kill strikes that only lights can use? (Mind you, lights are already the best at using strikes naturally, because of their speed). Lights getting legit wall hacks? That would be broken. And Narc/TAG boosting damage makes no sense. Especially for ballistics/lasers. Very counter-intuitive. I don't like any of these suggestions at all. Those are the kinds of changes that would chase me away from this game.

Quote

What OP actually wants is in fact mixtech, which is probably one last and certain way to eliminate faction imbalance altogether.

But.... BUT the difference will be gone! You'd say. But the reality is that IS Hunchback just cannot be Clan Hunchback IIC no matter what. Hunchback will be still going to have that one huge gun on its right shoulder, while IIC will have smaller guns on each shoulders. You have to shield with your left shoulder to protect that right hunch when you pilot Hunchback, but you have to torso-twist to spread damage evenly when you pilot Hunchback IIC. You still want to get close to the enemies so short-range huge ballistic can actually deal damage for IS Hunchback, while you still have to get some space when you wield quad UAC2s on Clan Hunchback IIC. Same techs, still different playstyles here.

Allowing Clan stuffs won't make non-hero King Crab into a typical laserbomb either. It will still have huge guns on its both arms and energy weapons will still exist as just support/secondary weapons for the King Crab.

The claim that mixtech would eliminate differences and thus making the game boring is pure myth, as long as this game maintains hardpoints system.

The question is, how far do you go down the mixtech road? Do you only allow for mixtech weapons? Or do you also allow mixtech equipment? Because if you allow everything, then immediately all of the IS equipment is 200% obsolete. No reason to ever use Endo, Ferro, LFerro, or DHS ever again. Every single mech in the game switches to cEndo, cFerro, and cDHS. If you don't allow mixed equipment, then we're still basically stuck at square one - IS mechs still have less tonnage to work with, and less crit slots. Even if they can mount Clan weapons, the actual Clan mechs will be better at wielding them because of the lighter and smaller equipment. If you do allow fully mixed equipment, you open up an entire can of worms that I have no idea what the implications are. Other then the obvious one... most IS weapons just won't be used anymore in their current state... everybody just equips Clan weapons on their IS mechs. So you see... this doesn't fix or improve balance, it just enables us to ignore the bad weapons. It's almost like removing half the weapons from the game is the solution to our problem, which is preposterous.

Quote

1) You do not realize that this game is like... like.... so ****ing far from TT rules / Lore that the distance between MWO and TT is greater than the distance between our milky way galaxy and MACS0647-JD galaxy.
2) You do not realize that every single Battletech-related games have been from partially ignoring to completely abandoning TT rules altogether.
3) And also do not realize that such abandonment of TT rules and lore was completely and utterly necessary to make the game actually fun to play and bring actual balance.

You, like so many others, are misunderstanding that three of major tenets I am clinging to...

1. Damage values as close as possible
2. Tonnage values absolutely must match
3. Crit slots absolutely must match
... there are other things, but let's keep this simple for both our sanity. I could write a whole post on "if I was making a new Mechwarrior from the ground up", but that would be its own topic.

Do you not realise that these three are already true in MWO? We already have the correct damage (mostly), the correct tonnage, and the correct slots for everything. It's already the way I want it to be. We never abandoned this, and we don't need to. The only thing I am insisting on is that we not discard these established constants. This game has had proper balance in the past, it's basically been proven that these particular stats are not the problem, and we can certainly balance around them. We're actually quite close to being balanced right now, we only need to see tweaks happen to certain weapon parameters to achieve parity.

Quote

Sigh, where do I even start? Like... the fact that the whole "hardpoint" actually does not exist in TT? You can have, say, CT-equipped UAC20 ACH in table top. Not so much for this game.

The fact is, if we purely follow TT rules, ALL mechs can boat lasers. Yes, I said all mechs, from silly Commandos to Adders to Jagers to Mad Cat (Timber Wolf) to fatty Atlas.

ALL OF THEM.

With current balance, and if such freedom was allowed in this game, all mechs would have exactly same weapon setup (bunch of heavy/large lasers and rest all medium lasers). Just like Mech Warrior 3 where you can see enormous laserbomb of death coming out of Timber's missile pods. And that is actually one of the most accurate descriptions how TT is being played.

People would make fun of mech customization of Mech Commander 2 where you only have a huge rectangle and squeeze components as if playing a puzzle game, not realizing it is actually damn close to how things are done in TT.

The concept of hardpoint was invented by those smart folks at Microsoft Studios for MW4. Because while hardpoint never existed in any previous Mech Warrior games and table top, a Mad Cat shooting gigantic laserbomb of death from missile pods was just too comical for their taste.

This is a bit of an off-topic tangent, something I didn't even mention... but I'll bite. =D

Sure, "hardpoints" didn't exist in lore, but in lore it was very expensive and time-consuming to replace components, and even more expensive to engineer weapons to fit in places they weren't designed to fit in. The result was that practically all mechs fielded weapons that are recognised as "variants" in the TT, and it would be rare to see mechs that deviated from those standardised refits. Key word here being "refit". While it became rather common for Jagermech users to replace a ballistic in the arms with large lasers, something you couldn't do is dump an AC20 into each side torso, because the torsos were not designed to accomodate a weapon of that size and type, and fitting one in would require substantial engineering. The hardpoint rules devised for Mechwarrior titles are intended to simulate this limitation, and only allow us to replace weapons that would constitute a field refit. Of course, there are holes... such as being able to place AC20's into Machine Gun mounts, but nobody as of yet has tried implementating a solution that solves that without just replacing the entire crit system altogether à la MW4 (which in turn gave us entirely non-canon loadouts for reasons unknown anyways.)

Quote

And it is not just Mech Warrior 4. One day I heard that HBS has completely "rewritten" everything about ballistic weapons for their upcoming Battletech game. And that really reminds me of one interview from the makers of Mech Commander 1, where they also said they had to "rewrite" ballistic weapon rules to make them work on a video game. HBS merely reinvented wheel regarding weapon balance of Battletech.

MWO, from start, used hardpoint system which is already considered as 'abomination' from the view point of lore purists. Then it got rid of some of silly stuffs like majority of crit damage stuffs (i.e gyro crit), made mechs as twice as durable (otherwise mechs would be too fragile for FPS style game) and severely increase heat of weapons. The fact is that a lot of builds, such as stock build of Awesome is heat neutral in TT. Not so much in MWO.

You cannot claim you are "conservative" toward something in MWO. Literally nothing can be held as "conservative". There are only attempts from PGI to make the game feel "Battletech" by arbitrarily following some selected rules...

Conservative meaning trying to keep the things that make Mechwarrior part of a the Battletech universe. Like I said, damage, tons, and crits. There are people that want to abolish those three characteristics and start over. I don't want to. I can see that the current implementation can be balanced as-is, there is no need to mess with things that have not only been a constant in this game for five years, but have been well established and used for 30 years.

Quote

There are only attempts from PGI to make the game feel "Battletech" by arbitrarily following some selected rules... [...]

--> Critical space requirement of weapons (and not implementing crit splitting, making some of variants and weapon systems like Arrow IV unable to be implemented)

You complain about the critical slot limitations of IS equipment, but admit that crit-splitting could solve a lot of the issues? Can't have an AC20 with an XL engine, can't have an LB20 or HGauss with an LE engine? Can't have an AC20 in an arm with lower arm actuators? That's not the fault of Battletech. Lore has a solution to that. PGI just didn't implement it for whatever reason. So don't blame the source material in instances where it is entirely the folly of PGI.

Quote

Mech Warrior 2 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Warrior 3 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Warrior 4 was NOT a Battletech game, Mech Commander 1 and 2 were NOT Battletech games, and hell Mech Assault 1 and 2 were definitely NOT Battletech games.

Actually, I thought MW2 and MW3 kept the damage, tonnage, and crit values from Battletech. MW4 abandoned them, MechAssault was an abomination (and I don't know anything about MechCommander, but cursory googling suggests that it completely abandoned all systems that resembled battletech.)

Quote

MWO is already like 90% NOT a Battletech game, and if that last 10% brings detrimental effects on the game, why don't we get rid of it anyway?

I would say that MWO is a lot more than 10% of a Battletech game.

Things similar:

- weapon damage
- weapon crits
- weapon tonnage
- weapon range
- weapon heat is kinda similar, but also adjusted more loosely
- certain weapon and equipment behaviours
- equipment tonnage
- mech chassis and variants
- hardpoints according to lore configurations
- scale (ish)
- how running speed is determined
- treatment of armour and structure as individual health pools
- same base armour and structure hitpoints, only doubled
- eight components on mechs
- damage transfer, arm loss on ST destruction
- a similar (mostly identical?) critical hits system
- very similar heat tracking (as far as I'm aware)



And here are the things that have changed:

- altered weapon fire rates
- certain weapon and equipment behaviours
- weapon heat is kinda similar, but also adjusted more loosely
- no crit-splitting
- some non-canon variants and hardpoint locations (like the KDK-3, and MCII-DS)
- hardpoints system allows unrealistic flexibility (such as AC20 in Machine Gun ports)
- no costs associated with maintaining mechs, so Endo, Ferro, and XL engines are essentially free of cost
- mechs typically run faster because of the larger engines
- omnimechs given unrealistic freedom to mix omnipods (I think)
- quirks system adding arbitrary amounts of armour and structure
- much weaker heatsinks
- first-person simulation of aiming mechanics instead of dice rolls



Mosts of the things in the first list are very major aspects the govern the feel of the game. Most of the things in the second list are nit-picky details. If anything, this game is more than 50% Battletech, in my opinion.

Quote

Otherwise we are putting additional complexities such as Ghost Heat, Quirks and other silly PGI-only stuffs, which are, most of time, very new player hostile, again super detrimental to the game.

Mind you, quirks is a lore thing... there are quirks in TT. Though, mostly negative quirks concerning the unreliability of certain equipment, especially retrofits iirc. And I don't care how much you completely rewrite the entirety of Battletech to make it into a Mechwarrior game, you're never going to balance the cERML without ghost heat or cone of fire. The Nova Prime is a stock mech. With 12 cERML. That's 84 damage to a single location, something that couldn't happen in tabletop. You can't balance that without making the cERML a bad weapon when used in smaller quantities. You just can't. So quirks and/or a "pinpoint-alpha-mitigating-system" will always need to be in place in ANY Mechwarrior game. And before anybody says, "easy, just lower the heat capacity so that it can't fire an 84-point alpha", let me remind you that you've just invalidated the reason behind mounting that many lasers in the first place. If you can't fire them all, you might as well take some off and add heatsinks instead. So you didn't balance it... you just broke it. Which is no different from how ghost heat treats that alpha - the difference being that ghost heat only specifically targets weapon combinations that are problematic, and allows weapon combinations that are not problematic.

Quote

TT Values and Lore can go back to where they should belong : on an actual table and paperback. Let me at least enjoy a well-made, well-balanced video game where robots shoot each other. Nothing more, nothing less.

Or we keep keep as much of the TT/lore as reasonable, and only change what is absolutely necessary to change. I think that everybody can agree to that, but we all draw the line at different places - which is why we can sit here and discuss it for hours... for years. =]

Edited by Tarogato, 08 November 2017 - 12:12 PM.

[MischiefSC]

Joshua Winters, on 07 November 2017 - 09:43 PM, said:

I see. Thanks for the info.

Beyond that are other balance issues - this is a PvP FPS where everyone plays 1 mech at a time, not a turn based tabletop strategy game. Skill is not a dice roll. A balance system based on "this guy is much stronger but this guy gets to die repeatedly" isn't going to draw equal populations at all. Especially not equal skill distribution. You'd end up with vets in OP Clan tech farming new players in IS and the population would collapse.

Beyond which balancing 10 v 12 isn't easier in a FPS than 12 v 12 would be - again, piloting and gunnery checks are done via keyboard and mouse, not 2d6.

We had good balance before but it got messed up again. We just want to get back to that point.

[Bud Crue]

MischiefSC, on 08 November 2017 - 12:25 PM, said:

Beyond that are other balance issues - this is a PvP FPS where everyone plays 1 mech at a time, not a turn based tabletop strategy game. Skill is not a dice roll. A balance system based on "this guy is much stronger but this guy gets to die repeatedly" isn't going to draw equal populations at all. Especially not equal skill distribution. You'd end up with vets in OP Clan tech farming new players in IS and the population would collapse.

Beyond which balancing 10 v 12 isn't easier in a FPS than 12 v 12 would be - again, piloting and gunnery checks are done via keyboard and mouse, not 2d6.

We had good balance before but it got messed up again. We just want to get back to that point.

Alas, I don't know if getting back to that point is possible anymore. Between the skills tree exasperating exisitng value differences, the every increasing hard point inflation (height and/or number) disproportionately on the clan side of the divide, and the unfortunate belief by the powers that be that quirks are the cause of powercreep; leaves me with little hope.

[The Lighthouse]

Tarogato, on 08 November 2017 - 12:05 PM, said:

All of those things to me sound extremely unfun.

UAVs that you can't see or shoot down? That constantly spot you so that you have crosshairs on you every time you poke? And probably even get lurmed to death? Auto-kill strikes that only lights can use? (Mind you, lights are already the best at using strikes naturally, because of their speed). Lights getting legit wall hacks? That would be broken. And Narc/TAG boosting damage makes no sense. Especially for ballistics/lasers. Very counter-intuitive. I don't like any of these suggestions at all. Those are the kinds of changes that would chase me away from this game.

Unfun? We had these wall hacks for very long time until MWO arrived. We were doing fine with the wall hacking radar.

Now I think about it... this may really reduce massive poking / alpha strike oriented builds and may bring actual teamfights again.

(Well, then now I remember MW4 was all about poking with ERLL jumpjet laserboats anyway despite radar difference.)

And you are blaming wrong things. Everyone knows the way lrms is implemented is the problem. Get rid of that high-attitude trajectory behavior and we can start from there.

And sure Narc/TAG may be counter-intuitive, but they are really examples of what this game could had done. As I said, just trying to make lights as "faster and smaller mediums" have definite limit, especially regarding fire support slow lights.

Quote

The question is, how far do you go down the mixtech road? Do you only allow for mixtech weapons? Or do you also allow mixtech equipment? Because if you allow everything, then immediately all of the IS equipment is 200% obsolete. No reason to ever use Endo, Ferro, LFerro, or DHS ever again. Every single mech in the game switches to cEndo, cFerro, and cDHS. If you don't allow mixed equipment, then we're still basically stuck at square one - IS mechs still have less tonnage to work with, and less crit slots. Even if they can mount Clan weapons, the actual Clan mechs will be better at wielding them because of the lighter and smaller equipment. If you do allow fully mixed equipment, you open up an entire can of worms that I have no idea what the implications are. Other then the obvious one... most IS weapons just won't be used anymore in their current state... everybody just equips Clan weapons on their IS mechs. So you see... this doesn't fix or improve balance, it just enables us to ignore the bad weapons. It's almost like removing half the weapons from the game is the solution to our problem, which is preposterous.

This whole paragraph ironically acts as a really good example of why sticking to Lore/TT is such a bad idea. OF COURSE YES IS stuffs are terrible..... as long as you adhere Lore/TT.

Actually, MWO already has some ways to make stuffs not obsolete due to mixtech.

Like, I would equip all of my laserbomb Novas and Mr. Gayle with IS mediums and throw those silly C-ERSLs and C-SPL.

I would exchange some of lasers with IS LPL.

I would use some of IS ballistics for true pinpoint strikes.

And yeah I will definitely use IS missiles instead of Clan's all day as long as tonnage and critical slots allow.

A lot of IS weapons can be made to viable... if we adjust their tonnage and critical space.

You have to realize that "entire can of worms" was already opened, about 16 years ago, 19 years ago and so forth. Yes, half of weapons got useless, but it did not stop people from using IS mechs as well. As far as I remember, the best mech of MW4 was laserbomb Black Knight, an IS mech. You do not have to worry or fear about it. We all experienced it, a long time ago.

Also, why "ignoring the bad weapons" is not "fix or improve balance"? I mean....

1) Nobody, except the ones trying to put two Clan Gauss Rifles on just one ST, uses Standard Engine on Clan mechs despite it is available.

2) In current state, nobody is using microlasers. And I actually doubt Piranha would change that.

3) Nobody is using normal small lasers, ERSL completely replaced it.

4) Now almost nobody is using SPL and CSPL.

5) Everyone is doing their absolute best to NOT use bigger UACs, instead trying to boat smaller UACs because of Jam mechanics.

6) Heavy Machineguns?

7) Have you ever seen ENTIRE normal Clan AC outside of that stupid ballistic challenge event period?

If you just look around carefully, there are already tons of useless and rarely used weapons. No one is perfect, and there always will be 'never used' stuffs all the time. There will be always compromise, and we are never going to get everything we want.

If throwing half of weapons and equipment would fix faction balance, I'd chose faction balance over trying to hold on these bad weapons, every single time.

Quote

You, like so many others, are misunderstanding that three of major tenets I am clinging to...

1. Damage values as close as possible
2. Tonnage values absolutely must match
3. Crit slots absolutely must match
... there are other things, but let's keep this simple for both our sanity. I could write a whole post on "if I was making a new Mechwarrior from the ground up", but that would be its own topic.

Do you not realise that these three are already true in MWO? We already have the correct damage (mostly), the correct tonnage, and the correct slots for everything. It's already the way I want it to be. We never abandoned this, and we don't need to. The only thing I am insisting on is that we not discard these established constants. This game has had proper balance in the past, it's basically been proven that these particular stats are not the problem, and we can certainly balance around them. We're actually quite close to being balanced right now, we only need to see tweaks happen to certain weapon parameters to achieve parity.

Sigh, good thing we have Arrow IV in this game... oh wait. WHERE IS MY NUKE URBIE?

Seriously, Taro, just stop. You are really going nowhere. Those Tonnage values and Critical slots only make sense when we have actual complete freedom like we have in TT. We simply don't in MWO due to hardpoint system which does not exist in TT/Lore. There are variants that are impossible or near-impossible to import to MWO because of this very issue.

Also, I must mention that in actual real Mech Warrior games, we have just more than mechs, such as Elementals, Airplanes, tanks.... some of the weapons are meant to be engage non-mech targets, and make little sense for mech-to-mech combat.

We don't have any non-mech stuffs other than silly turrets to justify specifications of some of weapons such as LBX (even without talking about ammo changing stuff) and lighter ACs.

Quote

This is a bit of an off-topic tangent, something I didn't even mention... but I'll bite. =D

Sure, "hardpoints" didn't exist in lore, but in lore it was very expensive and time-consuming to replace components, and even more expensive to engineer weapons to fit in places they weren't designed to fit in. The result was that practically all mechs fielded weapons that are recognised as "variants" in the TT, and it would be rare to see mechs that deviated from those standardised refits. Key word here being "refit". While it became rather common for Jagermech users to replace a ballistic in the arms with large lasers, something you couldn't do is dump an AC20 into each side torso, because the torsos were not designed to accomodate a weapon of that size and type, and fitting one in would require substantial engineering. The hardpoint rules devised for Mechwarrior titles are intended to simulate this limitation, and only allow us to replace weapons that would constitute a field refit. Of course, there are holes... such as being able to place AC20's into Machine Gun mounts, but nobody as of yet has tried implementating a solution that solves that without just replacing the entire crit system altogether à la MW4 (which in turn gave us entirely non-canon loadouts for reasons unknown anyways.)

Hehehehehe.....

You acknowledge that this game allows change of mech's structure and engine, right? Guess what, if you read lore a bit, changing engine and skeleton are basically no different from completely re-building mechs from stretch. They are the hardest customization that can be applied on mechs; modifying/adding/removing weapons is trivial compared to changing the mech's skeleton or engine.

Then one should ask: If I have an ability to completely change internal of any battlemechs, which is super crazy hardcore customization, the most extreme customization allowed by TT/Lore setting, why can't I drill some holes on that mech's side torso and put MOAR weapons?

If you have ability to do what MWO allows in Battletech world, it means you have...

1) Complete, insanely advanced mech factory that basically manufacture any known mechs.

2) With completed infrastructure and finance to maintain such factory.

3) With enough engineering personal to use such equipment and facilities.

Oh my god, all great houses and all Clans will do whatever they can do capture you and your stuffs that go beyond lostech!

From point of view of Lore/TT, It is purely illogical that we have hardpoint limitation when we have no limit on mech's structures and engine customization. This is why purists call hardpoint system abomination.

Then again, we have such illogical limitation because the game should be a good video game instead of trying to be a good Battletech game. Why? because being good Battletech game does not mean it is going to be a good video game, and people buy good video games, not terrible video games.

Quote

Conservative meaning trying to keep the things that make Mechwarrior part of a the Battletech universe. Like I said, damage, tons, and crits. There are people that want to abolish those three characteristics and start over. I don't want to. I can see that the current implementation can be balanced as-is, there is no need to mess with things that have not only been a constant in this game for five years, but have been well established and used for 30 years.

There is no such thing as "established" like seriously.... Bluntly, there are far more Mech Warrior 4 fans than previous Mech Warrior games fans for the simple reason that MW4 was a really, really good video game, and as you said earlier, MW4 is a huge departure from previous Mech Warrior games. Purists hated that but ironically those departure made the game popular.

Even there are quite differences between MW2 and MW3 (some due to tech limitations, others balance reasons). Small things from ammo counts to some difference in tonnage of weapons. Not to mention developers tried to tweak fire rate all the day so the ballistics won't be completely dead out of water.

We always faced massive changes for each series. If you stop moving, it means you are dead. It's been long past the game has to progress.

By the way, Lore/TT actually had a "start over" because of all of problems it had. So that jihad came and Dark Age came to achieve 1:1 balance again by starting from near-blank. Of course old people did not like that, but it was necessary.

Quote

You complain about the critical slot limitations of IS equipment, but admit that crit-splitting could solve a lot of the issues? Can't have an AC20 with an XL engine, can't have an LB20 or HGauss with an LE engine? Can't have an AC20 in an arm with lower arm actuators? That's not the fault of Battletech. Lore has a solution to that. PGI just didn't implement it for whatever reason. So don't blame the source material in instances where it is entirely the folly of PGI.

You understand the biggest problem of IS mechs in this game is hugely limited critical space, right? IS mechs in general need far more than just crit-splitting. Unless we bring back super crazy insane offensive/defensive quirks back (like 50% B-cooldown reduction of Dragon), IS mechs will be forever bad unless we bring mixtech or some serious modifications on weapon stats.

Quote

Actually, I thought MW2 and MW3 kept the damage, tonnage, and crit values from Battletech. MW4 abandoned them, MechAssault was an abomination (and I don't know anything about MechCommander, but cursory googling suggests that it completely abandoned all systems that resembled battletech.)

MW2 may have been, but from my memory MW3 did have some differences such as certain weapons a ton less and ammo counts. MW4 abandoned them and it grabbed the most number of people into the franchise, simply because (despite some people would disagree) it is far better video game than MW2 and MW3. It is a terrible Battletech game, just for laughable (from lore perspective) hardpoint system, but made perfect sense as a video game, so huge amount of people bought MW4.

You really, really should play Mech Commander 1. You really should. The perfect example of mimicking TT/Lore feel without using any bad numbers from TT. It still has flaws (e.g ballistic still admittedly bad) but it is near perfect.

Play Mech Commander without watching numbers too carefully for a while. When you get used to it, look at the numbers and be surprised how far are they from TT/Lore numbers. Yet, so far, among any other Battletech video games, nothing is even remotely close to Mech Commander 1 in terms of simulating Battletech feel. Nothing can hold the candle.

Quote

I would say that MWO is a lot more than 10% of a Battletech game.

Things similar:

- weapon damage
- weapon crits
- weapon tonnage
- weapon range
- weapon heat is kinda similar, but also adjusted more loosely
- certain weapon and equipment behaviours
- equipment tonnage
- mech chassis and variants
- hardpoints according to lore configurations
- scale (ish)
- how running speed is determined
- treatment of armour and structure as individual health pools
- same base armour and structure hitpoints, only doubled
- eight components on mechs
- damage transfer, arm loss on ST destruction
- a similar (mostly identical?) critical hits system
- very similar heat tracking (as far as I'm aware)

Only acceptable things are really weapon damage, tonnage, running speed, individual health pools, component number, damage transfer and maybe heat tracking. Things like component number is really small detail.

No, critical system is utterly alien from Battletech (otherwise hello gyro crit!, and Clan mech would died from just some opened ST instead of current super durable CXL this game has).

Range is arbitrary. See what they did on Heavy Gauss and how they used weird weapon damage slope on range of a lot of weapons to get around purists regarding range.

Heat is far more brutal than Battletech, which a lot of heat-neutral mechs from Battletech would explode really quick from overheat in MWO. Even before we talk about ghost heat system.

We have no such things like C4 system, which pretty much threw away equipment behaviors.

PGI, due to their self-imposed restrictions from Lore/TT, had to create non-existent variants because actual TT variants cannot be imported perfectly, contradiction at its best.

"Hardpoint according to lore configurations" is oxymoron when lore does not actually have hardpoint limitation from the first place.

OH and scale, god-****ing scale.

https://i.pinimg.com...db9372c1613.jpg

See 20 tons fire moth almost as big/tall as Timber Wolf? I rest my case here.

Quote

- altered weapon fire rates
- certain weapon and equipment behaviours
- weapon heat is kinda similar, but also adjusted more loosely
- no crit-splitting
- some non-canon variants and hardpoint locations (like the KDK-3, and MCII-DS)
- hardpoints system allows unrealistic flexibility (such as AC20 in Machine Gun ports)
- no costs associated with maintaining mechs, so Endo, Ferro, and XL engines are essentially free of cost
- mechs typically run faster because of the larger engines
- omnimechs given unrealistic freedom to mix omnipods (I think)
- quirks system adding arbitrary amounts of armour and structure
- much weaker heatsinks
- first-person simulation of aiming mechanics instead of dice rolls

That "unrealistic flexibility" stuffs are actually the closest to lore! The irony!

And that "first-person simulation of aiming mechanics instead of dice rolls" really takes cake here. We are talking about the whole genre change, even before discussing video game vs table top game difference. This point alone takes about 80% of difference between this game and TT/Lore.

You wrote this sentence yourself, yet you don't understand the implication and consequence of the difference. Suddenly a lot of "cool looking" mechs are complete nonsense because they are actually easy targets on FPS shooting game. No too-much extruded missile pod ears on a lot of mechs such as Catapult and Timber Wolf. Weapons that are tuned for mechs shooting different parts of components due to dice rolls suddenly became insanely overpowered when a player can accurately shoot them into the certain parts of the target.

It is like translating religious texts. While I am not a Muslim, I kind of understand their stubbornness of not labeling translated version of Quran. They understand that something that is translated is more of re-creation of the original work, at best reflection of the original work, but it cannot ever be the suitable copy of the original work.

Mech Warrior games are really translations of Battletech. They are indeed good translations and you may get some information about Battletech, but in reality Mech Warrior games are Mech Warrior games themselves.

The problem of MWO is that it is a machine-translated version of Battletech. It tries to perfectly translate Battletech bit by bit, only to completely loses the nuance and eventually the actual meaning of sentences.... I mean the feeling of Battletech, a robot-to-robot fighting game.

Quote

Mind you, quirks is a lore thing... there are quirks in TT. Though, mostly negative quirks concerning the unreliability of certain equipment, especially retrofits iirc. And I don't care how much you completely rewrite the entirety of Battletech to make it into a Mechwarrior game, you're never going to balance the cERML without ghost heat or cone of fire. The Nova Prime is a stock mech. With 12 cERML. That's 84 damage to a single location, something that couldn't happen in tabletop. You can't balance that without making the cERML a bad weapon when used in smaller quantities. You just can't. So quirks and/or a "pinpoint-alpha-mitigating-system" will always need to be in place in ANY Mechwarrior game. And before anybody says, "easy, just lower the heat capacity so that it can't fire an 84-point alpha", let me remind you that you've just invalidated the reason behind mounting that many lasers in the first place. If you can't fire them all, you might as well take some off and add heatsinks instead. So you didn't balance it... you just broke it. Which is no different from how ghost heat treats that alpha - the difference being that ghost heat only specifically targets weapon combinations that are problematic, and allows weapon combinations that are not problematic.

Quirks are good. Uber quirks are even better. Quirks are actually best way to balance the game, even better than mixtech and/or tweaking weapon stats. Because super strong quirks will fix not just game balance, but the game finance as well.

Problem is that PGI's current Chris absolutely despises quirks (especially offensive quirks) and this will unfortunately greatly damage and destroy the game. But then again this is PGI's decision and their responsibility. Not mine.

Quote

Or we keep keep as much of the TT/lore as reasonable, and only change what is absolutely necessary to change.

Again, the existence of Mech Commander 1 and Mech Warrior 4 blatantly disagree this paragraph. Those two games are successful (with Mech Commander 1 actually got expansion and mission pack) and some of the most balanced games (not without flaws).

You have to understand that MWO is based on 'old' TT/Lore mindset. As I said in earlier comment, from current TT/Lore side a tons of stuffs have changed via Dark Age to start clean. 'Superior Clan Tech" is actually very, very old and outdated mindset.

Actual Lore has moved on from that, it's time for MWO to move on as well.

[Rusharn]

My Balance changes would be:

Restore IS laser weapons to pre nerf values.

Remove Ghost heat, Half the current heat capacity of the mechs. This would off set the prominence of alpha strikes.

Double Heat sinks = double heat dissipation. Going with double heat sinks would be aiming for a DPS build.

Single heat sinks = increase per heat sink to maximum heat capacity, standard heat dissipation. Going with single heat sinks would allow for some level of alpha, but at the cost of heat dissipation, increasing the time between Alpha strikes, and making alpha heavy mechs weaker in a brawl situation. Also would allow IS mechs to have a reasonable alternative to IS double heat sinks. The actual amount of heat capacity increase per heat sink would have to be balance for the best effect.

Increase IS AC, LBX, Guass, UAC, and AMS ammo per ton to offset weight of IS ballistic weapons.

Increase all Ballistic weapons HP, they should be vastly more resistant to damage than lasers

Make Clan AC's single shot and increase ammo per ton to offset increased size and weight.

Restore missiles to pre nerf missile spread and target angle.

Add MASC nodes to the mobility tree, one to boost acc/dec and turn rate, the second to double the time before damaging legs.

Give mobility summary on mech information panel so non-numbers people can get a rough idea of the agility of the mech on a scale of say 1-10.

Give IS XL engines two free heat sink slots in the engine, larger sizes allows more room for heat sinks. Helps offset critical requirements, and destruction on loss of side torso.

Add Reactive and Reflective armor to the game. 50% damage reduction verses their respective damage types.

Add an decreased chance of crit damage to Standard Endo and Ferro

Reduce the weight of IS C.A.S.E to zero, and have it take one slot.

Increase the bonus to IS structure and armor from the skill tree slightly. net increase 10% structure, 5% armor if all nodes are taken.

Increase IS bonus to crit reduction slightly from the skill tree.

All IS mechs get one extra consumable slot for "home field" advantage.

That is where I would start, and then going from there aim for an asymmetrical balance. IS, would have more armor, be more agile, with cooler, faster firing weapons for higher DPS, with better pin point damage. Clan would be longer range, more raw spike damage from lighter weapon systems, with higher top speeds.

Edit: Spelling correction

Edited by Rusharn, 10 November 2017 - 04:45 PM.

[Trenchbird]

Honestly, I'd buff agility on most mechs, increase IS DHS effectiveness, get rid of IS XL death-on-ST-loss, completely redesign the Skill Tree's setup to be unique for every mech chassis, and dole out positive and negative quirks to both tech bases like candy.

On the subject of the quirks? Mostly so that the entire collection doesn't end up homogeneous. If you want each mech to be unique in basic behavior, attempting to delete all weapon quirks is one of the worst ways to go about it.

[InvictusLee]

Allow the clan batchhall for better c-bill boost.

[Xmith]

The main issue with balance is the fact this game is primarily PvP. It's not the mech, the pilot is the issue. Mech vs Mech is tough to balance because of different skillsets of pilots. The good pilots give the illusion that certain mechs are OP. Mechs are OP because of OP pilots. A lesser skilled pilot will not put up the same numbers as the OP pilot while piloting the exact same mech.

Pilot skill can not be balanced.

[Snazzy Dragon]

IS weaponry: DPS and frontloaded damage focused. Shorter laser durations, higher DPS, moderately lower heat generation (gotta make up for 3 slot DHS). Damage buffs to the crappiest of their weapons (light gauss and small laser family). Buffed rate of fire and/or damage on MGs, since they are double the weight that of clan MGs, which is severely prohibitive coupled with fewer average hardpoind counts. Ballistics in general, especially lbx and the 11 slot ****stains, should some reason for all of their inherent disadvantages, espeically regular autocannons in the face of the totally superior ultras. I would tighten the spread on their SRMs due to the weight, clans get basically a free Artemis upgrade and it's the only way I see that makes a significant factor to consider without mucking with slots/tonnage. MRMs should stream slightly faster than they do, lowering the facetime.

Clan weaponry: Heavy mediums and heavy larges either need even longer duration (not a fan of this but its an obvious way to do it) or lowered damage and slightly lower cooldown. cERLL also needs a good hard look. ER mediums are just a bit hot, I'd drop the heat from 6.3 to 6.1, but increase duration by 4-7%. The trend is obvious, the larger heavy lasers and ER lasers should lose frontloading potential and should emphasize high alphas with lower focus overall to single components, coupled with their heat and cooldown limitations. The cSPLs and micro lasers need some buffs, but the cSPL really doesn't need more than 1 damage tacked on with 5% lower duration to bring them back into the fold of weapons worth using, but right now they don't even have a niche like the cER small laser does. If we HAVE to keep cACs, normalize their slots with cUACs. It's a made up weapon anyway so i don't see lore accuracy as an issue, and if PGI ever DOES implement ammo switching, cACs won't be needed anymore at all. So. Meh. LBx in general for both factions are pretty weak, though the cLB10x and 20x are probably better off staying how they are now. it's their 2 and 5 that suck.

LURMS/ATMs: Make direct fire lock ons not suck and the LRM 5 and 20 launchers better because they also suck horribly. LRMs are already bad but those two launchers take it to a new level of horrible. ATMs are awkward to use because of the minimum range and low angle flight, and with all launchers sharing a 5 second cooldown.. Iunno. It's a bit icky. I'd give the smaller launchers more missile health though (not the launcher itself, the actual projectile.)

Engines: Buff STD in some way significantly because it has no reason to exist for anything other than two completely awful weapons and a couple of mechs with awfully low engine caps. Sure, the "scary STD clan battlemechs" argument is there, but so is a 50% weight savings no side torso death penalty alternative. LFE should have no penalty to heat/speed but still die on duoble torso loss. isXL is too controversial but buffing side torso health when installed is probably the least ugly way to do it.

Lights vs everything else: buff lights, information warfare is not thing, role warfare is not a thing, scouting is not a thing (maps too small with predetermined drop points; there's no point whatsoever). You either change the game at a very, very fundamental level (unlikely) or buff the class to perform on par with the big boys. There's no other alternatives. Bads will be bad and if they can't hit a locust because of their 12 fps joystick gameplay, sucks for them, MW5 is coming out soon™

Edited by Snazzy Dragon, 12 November 2017 - 04:59 AM.