99 replies to this topic

[Y E O N N E]

CK16, on 16 November 2017 - 02:04 PM, said:

Imo the issue is...

Large class lasers should act as primary weapons in most cases, if you noticed in lore like at most the usual mech only mounts 2 at a time, some have 3to4, and extreme cases use 6 (Supernova....)

You exactly mean like how we already do in MWO?

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Medium class weapons are back ups and are normally seen in like 2 to 4 on most chassis with primary weapons like Gauss rifles, AC's, or large lasers and PPC's

Again, just like in MWO? We take a bunch of mediums usually to supplement the larger varieties. I mean, four mediums to two larges is almost a 50/50 split between the two types on firepower, slight bias toward the Meds. Three larges and five mediums is the same, slight bias toward the Larges.

Most ballistic builds run in QP and even FW also have lasers.

Medium Lasers are also primary weapons on Lights (a few of the Locust variants, for example), again just like MWO.

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Small class are almost always in very small numbers and generally there for anti light targets (infantry and light vehicles) hardly ever boated as well....so extreme last resort back ups in most cases or filler to not waste heat/ammo on a target not requiring your primary or secondary weapons.

But yea anyway

Again, that's also where smalls get used, mostly. Especially IS smalls. Filler. Can't take another MPL but have a ton and two hardpoints left? Take two ERSL.

[Khobai]

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I will never understand why people constantly moan about this game being played the same way real combat happens - with rather extensive use of cover.

because the armor on mechs is supposed to be better than rocks and trees

not the other way around

[lazorbeamz]

I want them nerf lasers so that they are backup weapons and weapons to fill spare slots after you ve taken all ballistics and missiles you need. only this balance will make sense.

[FupDup]

lazorbeamz, on 16 November 2017 - 02:37 PM, said:

I want them nerf lasers so that they are backup weapons and weapons to fill spare slots after you ve taken all ballistics and missiles you need. only this balance will make sense.

In another thread you want Clans to be superior to IS because lore, but here you want to break the lore by making lasers unable to be used as primary weapons?

[CK16]

lazorbeamz, on 16 November 2017 - 02:37 PM, said:

I want them nerf lasers so that they are backup weapons and weapons to fill spare slots after you ve taken all ballistics and missiles you need. only this balance will make sense.

Well technically speaking the Large class lasers are suppose to be primary, not secondary.

[lazorbeamz]

CK16, on 16 November 2017 - 02:41 PM, said:

Well technically speaking the Large class lasers are suppose to be primary, not secondary.

You may have noticed that it doesnt work out all that well. Just nerf it. Lasers shouldnt give you DPS or a huge alpha. Their advantage is hitscan shooting and its too big to pass already.

Edited by lazorbeamz, 16 November 2017 - 02:46 PM.

[Jun Watarase]

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I will never understand why people constantly moan about this game being played the same way real combat happens - with rather extensive use of cover. Real soldiers only expose themselves in combat when they intend to fire their weapons or reposition.

Because real combat would involve randomly getting killed in one shot out of nowhere, everyone would be too terrified to move and everyone would just call non stop artillery/air strikes to try and kill 1 person because that entails no risk to players and they certaintly arent footing the bill for the ammo. Most people would not consider realistic combat to be very fun.

A game consisting of one option isnt very fun. Imagine chess where you have to spam queens or lose. It certaintly wouldnt be as popular as it is today.

The game has plenty of options other than mid-long range laser vomit, but theres no reason to use anything other than laser vomit outside of some very niche situations. There is no need to learn to lead targets when you can use hitscan weapons that can do the same thing but better. There is no need to learn to brawl when you can do the same damage from 400+m away with less spread. There is no need to learn to be mobile when you can hide behind a rock and poke with your uber laser alpha (this is why conquest is not popular).There is no need to time volleys to avoid ghost heat when you can fire 4-5x ER LLs at 800+m with ghost heat and then hide behind a rock to cool down.

There are actually above average players who perform well with laser vomit but literally have no clue how to run anything else. I have seen some try to use something other than laser vomit for a change, do horribly, then give up and switch back to laser vomit.

I guess its partly because of laser vomit so easy to use/powerful and a lack of desire to learn. If spamming terran marines in star craft 2 could get you to the top of the leader board, there is no reason to learn anything else.

Edited by Jun Watarase, 16 November 2017 - 02:48 PM.

[Vonbach]

Mole, on 16 November 2017 - 02:06 PM, said:

I will never understand why people constantly moan about this game being played the same way real combat happens - with rather extensive use of cover.

This is a game not real life and games are supposed to be fun. Not 15 min boring sniper fests where
cowards hide on the other side of the map.

[Luminis]

I can (and frequently do) peak people to death with Gausses. Can do the same with PPCs. Better than with lasers, in some cases. Thankfully, we nerfed the combo of PPC and Gauss, though, so yeah, it's mostly lasers outside of a few specific Mechs that do dual PPC or dual Gauss very well.

As for poking itself: Yes, being able to reduce your own exposure to enemy fire is a good thing. It will always be superior to crossing open ground and fully exposing yourself. Thankfully, we nerfed the Mechs capable of flanking and ambushing peakers because "Lights OP, they live forever because I can't track them!"

I don't know if it's the same people that complained about Gauss / PPC that are now complaining about laser vomit or if the people that complain about peaking are the same people that cry havoc when Lights aren't complete garbage. If they were, though, I tell them the following: "Congratulations, you played yourself. QQ'd the natural counters to your current issues out of the game."

Edited by Luminis, 16 November 2017 - 04:02 PM.

[SeventhSL]

G’day CK16,

I agree that poke play style should be relevant but that others should be equally relevant.

As you said the poke play style requires a certain geometry. It also requires the ability to boat weapons (hardpoints) and put out a big, high precision alpha strike at range. When you put it all together it really favours Clan Tech and the Clan playstyle. In my opinion, the dominance of the poke play style is the greatest cause of imbalance in the game and the reason so many Mechs are considered uncompetitive.

There is a couple of simple things you can do to equalise other playstyles.

Diminishing returns for Alpha strikes. A simple trade between a big alpha and a precise one. Firing lots of weapons at the same time creates a lot of recoil and heat shimmer which in turn effects accuracy. We don’t need mechanics like ghost heat to limit alpha. Let people go crazy. They will soon figure out that a 100pt alpha that only lands 50pts on the enemy is not clearly superior to a 40pt alpha that lands almost entirely where you aim. Big alphas that lack precision also helps out Mech with bad geometry by not punishing them as much for exposing more. It puts DPS playstyles on a more level footing. Hello unloved mechs.

The other issue we have is map design and more specifically, idiot proof cover. Every map except Polar has plenty of cover that hides the entire mech with nice sharp edges just made to cower behind, while cooling, and poke out from. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t have maps like this. We should, but we need a lot more maps that aren’t. Descent areas with cover that doesn’t exceed the average Hight and/or width of a mech. Maps that put a smile on the face of DPS players and lights that will find it easier to hide.

There also needs to be more ways of removing entrenched pokers from hard cover. We have air strikes and artillery but nothing else. LRMs are just sitting their begging to be made competitive by filling this role. This is really an entire thread by itself as a lot of changes would be required especially to trajectory and spread based on lock source.

Of course, none of this will happen. The community is far to set in their ways. You just have to look at how people spas out about no LRM cover on Polar. If you made LRMs a soft counter to hard cover, put high alpha poke on the same level as DPS based play styles and didn’t always guarantee a safe place to cool off, then the forums would burn if they didn’t drown in tears first.

[A Really Old Clan Dude]

stealthraccoon, on 16 November 2017 - 10:12 AM, said:

My Urbanmechs take offense to being called turrets; we prefer the term ‘semi-stationary projectile dispensing refuse receptacles’.

But who doesn’t love being painted by clan lasers at extreme ranges for the first 5 minutes of every game?

I love ER large painting mechs at extreme range when in a clan mech. Most however just aim at the center of mass, I try to aim for the legs of mediums and even heavies as they often dont max out the legs. For an er-large at 1300 you might only do 3-4 points of damage. Now with 4 lasers doing this the damage starts adding up. If a mech only has 30-40 amour on the leg a few well placed long shots can strip them down before the fight has begun.

[Trissila]

lazorbeamz, on 16 November 2017 - 02:45 PM, said:

You may have noticed that it doesnt work out all that well. Just nerf it. Lasers shouldnt give you DPS or a huge alpha. Their advantage is hitscan shooting and its too big to pass already.

But lasers don't give you DPS.

A pair of RAC-5s, which can be run by anything 50 tons and up, spits out just shy of 22 DPS while they're spinning.

2xHLL + 6xCERML, the ZOMG HUEG ALFA clan laser boat? It puts out less than 13. If you ignore heat.

It turns out that DPS doesn't really matter in a game with no form of healing and only one life. Defensive play and burst damage are king, and they always will be. Nerf lasers all you like, people will just switch to gauss rifles and/or PPCs until you nerf those (again) too. In point of fact, they already did, and laser-heavy meta is the direct result of absurd ghost heat on GaussPeeps builds because people didn't like getting popped by all that projectile PPFLD, either.

Hitscan is not the reason that lasers are good. It's not hard to land shots with projectiles in this game, except at extreme ranges where laser damage drops off anyway. If you can hit it for full damage with a laser, you can hit it with any AC or PPC of your choice.

Exposing yourself to fire for extended periods of time is a very silly idea, in this or any combat game. People build their 'mechs around that simple, basic fact. They will always do so. Nerf whatever is currently the most efficient way of doing that, you won't change the fundamental nature of the game.

[Y E O N N E]

That is not entirely true. DPS matters when you have a full-engage situation such as a called push, a brawl, or power-position cover.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 16 November 2017 - 04:43 PM.

[The6thMessenger]

I honestly don't like poke warfare too, but given the current mechanics of the game, it's only advantageous to do so. I don't think we can address Poke Warfare unless we can modify the game specifically to make poking somewhat unnecessary, that it wouldn't provide the optimal survivability etc. etc.

I had an idea precisely for this: https://mwomercs.com...getting-system/

[panzer1b]

The biggest reason this game is all about poke warrior is the combination of no/limited respawn with a lack of HP regeneration/healing capability. Every single game ive ever played that shared these 2 things revolves around one and only one playstyle, minimal exposure and maximum damage application during said exposure. Why do you think poptarting and various vomit builds have always been a thing at higher levels of play, because they allow (assuming player is capable of hitting target) one to deliver a very punishing salvo to a single target with relatively little exposure time, and if you break LOS, very few things can touch you.

The second thing, is the fact that laser vomit has both a very VERY low skill floor, and a decently high skill ceiling which allows every caliber to play it, from the total potato (anyone can slap on some ERLL/ERML and do damage to a target even if they spread it all over, it still adds up eventually), to the top players which can use it so well as to murder anyone that looks at em wrong. Its friggin hitscan, so provided you have LOS and are within range to even use your lazor, you are almost 100% guaranteed to deliver damage on target (discounting broken hitreg or bad lag), and you have a very good chance to deliver a decent chunk of that damage to a single component too (post skill tree engine desync few mechs that can even afford to get hit by a 60-80 point alfa strike are agile enough to spread damage in a meaningful way).

Then comes the fact that game mechnics severely favor lazors and disfavor most of the other guns outside of niche situations. Ghost heats allows you to get 78 alfa strike with 0 penalties, and no other pinpoint weapon combo comes close to that after gauss+ppc went away (even then the most you could potentially do was ~60 with HPPCs, 80 with HGRs but those are niche). Map heat works in such a way that going pure laser and boating 25-30 DHS is super optimal regardless of whether you end up on caustic or frozen, you loose ~1DPS when going from a cold to a hot environment, and because this is more or less a flat tax, the more DHS you have the less this affects you (unless ur using near heat-free guns like GR, low heatsink count builds suffer considerably more then high heatsink builds on hot maps). Missiles and LBX has spread damage outside of point blank, so a 80 point alfa strike is comparable to maybee 40 with lasers. UACs jam stupidly often and spread their damage everywhere unless target is a dire). And ACs, on clan side are worthless junk, and on IS side dont really offer enough DPS to justify the tonnage.

Yeah you can make any weapon work, but lazors are dominant if you want a weapon that remains useful on every map and in every situation.

Still, to start out, id link HLLs with medium class lasers, the ERLL and LPL was never that big of a deal when linked with ERMLs since you could do this back in the day and the most you can pull off is mid 60s, not that far beyond what IS could do which was mid 50s. SInce the HLL dropped, clan alfa strike has gone up by ~10-15dmg, with more heat efficiency compared to ERLLs and enough range to not be a niche weapon like the HML. If that gun is linked with mediums, itll be a good step in the right direction without screwing over the ERLL and LPL combos that arent really that broken. Another option would be to increase burn times on both ERLLs and HLL, to make the ERLL a little bit more of a choice and not a no-brainer compared to teh LPL which didnt get any duration buffs unlike teh ERLL and never had as much range, so after the ERLL got buffed noone used the LPLs.

[Jun Watarase]

Trissila, on 16 November 2017 - 04:40 PM, said:

But lasers don't give you DPS.

A pair of RAC-5s, which can be run by anything 50 tons and up, spits out just shy of 22 DPS while they're spinning.

2xHLL + 6xCERML, the ZOMG HUEG ALFA clan laser boat? It puts out less than 13. If you ignore heat.

It turns out that DPS doesn't really matter in a game with no form of healing and only one life. Defensive play and burst damage are king, and they always will be. Nerf lasers all you like, people will just switch to gauss rifles and/or PPCs until you nerf those (again) too. In point of fact, they already did, and laser-heavy meta is the direct result of absurd ghost heat on GaussPeeps builds because people didn't like getting popped by all that projectile PPFLD, either.

Hitscan is not the reason that lasers are good. It's not hard to land shots with projectiles in this game, except at extreme ranges where laser damage drops off anyway. If you can hit it for full damage with a laser, you can hit it with any AC or PPC of your choice.

Exposing yourself to fire for extended periods of time is a very silly idea, in this or any combat game. People build their 'mechs around that simple, basic fact. They will always do so. Nerf whatever is currently the most efficient way of doing that, you won't change the fundamental nature of the game.

DPS absolutely matters if you are not trading. This is why UAC boats are preferred for pushing.

Hitscan is a massive advantage. Try hitting a fast moving mech spamming JJs with burst fire UACs vs point and click 0.5s burn duration lasers. Most projectile speeds are far far too low given travel times, if a target makes any unpredictable direction/speed changes while you are firing (things outside of your control), shells will miss or hit a different location. Hitscan allows you to land most or all the damage on one location depending on how good you are at tracking the target.

What most people forget about the gauss/PPC meta was that poptarts were the main cause of its popularity and lasers werent as powerful as they are now, we didnt have ER MLs and LL ghost heat was capped at 2, and 2x PPCs were obviously better than 2x LLs. ER LLs had a horrible damage:heat ratio nearly as bad as ER PPCs. All mechs ran hotter back then too because of no skill tree bonuses. I remember running a 5x ML/2x SRM-6 thunderbolt for a while and it was just way too hot.

[Kiiyor]

I don't think you can address it. Pretty much any fight that isn't a concerted push will have people looking for cover.

It's all about maximizing your damage potential and minimizing your exposure to return fire. It's why poptarting was so popular for so long, and it's only mechanical changes to poptarting that have stopped it in MWO. Even strikers and harassers like lights and fast mediums minimise their exposure time by doing mad bombing runs from one piece of cover to another.

Some mechs are better at it than others. Mechs that concentrate their hardpoints in such a way as to minimize their profile when they fire will always be better at poking than other mechs (like the Awesome, with it's hardpoints all at crotch height and spread out over all the mech's considerable girth).

People don't poke for some nefarious purpose; they do it because it's the most natural and sensible way to fight, and because it helps them avoid weapons like LRM's and ATM's that become exponentially more powerful in extended facetime engagements.

8v8 isn't likely going to solve the problem, as any entrenched fight will have poking. It may make people braver when they feel they have an advantage though.

[Anjian]

I am not in favor of going back to 8 vs.8. As bad as stomps are in this game, it is not as bad as it was during the 8 vs. 8 era.

8 vs. 8 may probably increase processing demand on the servers, since you are going to host more games for an equal amount of population, and there is a going to be a fixed overhead for each game session.

I tend to think that its two separate factors, quirking and Clan tech, that has reduced TTK in the game. At least until the new skill tree came, which by the way did raise my TTK experience at least in my personal observation.

My experience with other games is that the best way to get rid of peek and poke game play is through a combination of game mode and map level design.

Edited by Anjian, 16 November 2017 - 07:19 PM.

[Trissila]

Jun Watarase, on 16 November 2017 - 05:32 PM, said:

DPS absolutely matters if you are not trading. This is why UAC boats are preferred for pushing.

Hitscan is a massive advantage. Try hitting a fast moving mech spamming JJs with burst fire UACs vs point and click 0.5s burn duration lasers. Most projectile speeds are far far too low given travel times, if a target makes any unpredictable direction/speed changes while you are firing (things outside of your control), shells will miss or hit a different location. Hitscan allows you to land most or all the damage on one location depending on how good you are at tracking the target.

What most people forget about the gauss/PPC meta was that poptarts were the main cause of its popularity and lasers werent as powerful as they are now, we didnt have ER MLs and LL ghost heat was capped at 2, and 2x PPCs were obviously better than 2x LLs. ER LLs had a horrible damage:heat ratio nearly as bad as ER PPCs. All mechs ran hotter back then too because of no skill tree bonuses. I remember running a 5x ML/2x SRM-6 thunderbolt for a while and it was just way too hot.

The only lasers with 0.5 burn time are IS small pulse and Clan micro pulse. Those weapons aren't even remotely in competition with UACs. Most lasers are near or over a second of burn time, which is plenty of time for the target to twist, or for you to lose tracking and lightsaber the target for much less effective damage. If they truly are maneuvering so quickly that you can't reliably hit them with a UAC -- and it would have to be one of the more agile light 'mechs for that to be the case -- you're not going to fare much better with anything more substantial than a medium pulse laser.

The vast, overwhelming majority of 'mechs in the game simply are not capable of changing direction or even speed quickly enough to cause misses in all but the most rushed snap-shots of projectile weapons.

Bear in mind that UAC/10s have an effective range of about 500 meters, and a projectile speed of 1,100 meters per second. Full Velocity skill nodes is +15%, adding 165m/s for a total of 1,265m/s. At that speed, the 500 meter effective range is covered in just under 0.4 seconds. 5s and 2s are similar, at 0.42 and 0.35 respectively.

Less than half a second at maximum effective range is not much lead time at all. The closer they are from the edge of your effective range, the lower that time gets, so unless they're an ultra-fast light moving perpendicular, they're not adjusting enough to throw off your shot with that little time to do so, unless you were aiming for the edge of an arm or something silly like that.

And while I will concede that DPS is a factor in the niche (for QP) scenario of an actual coordinated push, it's clearly not the only or even the most important factor -- else we'd be seeing tons of RAC-5s, the highest-DPS weapons in the game. They're certainly FAR more reliable than UACs in terms of sustained high DPS.

[Vellron2005]

Peek and poke playstyle is simply a necessity these days, cose' people are running such absurd alphas that you can't do a standard wall-of-iron push..

an Atlas gets shredded in seconds, or backshot by a light..

If you are not part of an organized push, you have 2 options really.. Peek and poke or LRM.. the rest will get you killed really really fast.