davoodoo, on 26 November 2017 - 05:26 PM, said:
Except 6 ml does barely 60 dmg in 8.5s
ac20 does even less with its 4s cooldown, merely 40 in that time.
also its not like we have shorter cooldowns in game due to nobody willing to wait 10s to fire
Its a game it still needs to be fun and weapons already lack impact and feel weak when you unleash absolute maelstorm of shells upon enemy just for him to walk normally like nothing happened.
6 ML does 30 after 1 second, 60 in 5 seconds, and in 10 seconds it does 90.
Or to use current numbers ignoring skills and quirks, 30 damage after 1 second, 60 after 4.5 seconds, 9 seconds you get 90 damage.
More if you have bonuses.
In 8 seconds without quirks or anything else, an AC/20 will deliver a total of 60 damage. Add in a 25% ballistic cooldown and you're getting 80 damage. Throw in a 50% cooldown and you'll be able to lob 100 damage in that time.
Weapons feel weak because we have double armor and structure + skills. There's also a blatant lack of effects. In closed beta if you hit someone with an AC/20, inverse kinetics gave a reaction that jerked the body in the direction you hit. Slug that Atlas in the shoulder, the upper body jerked in that direction. Sometimes a bit too exaggeratedly. But from the cockpit there was not much reaction. So they fixed that with the "flip in your chair" earthquake simulator... but that was too much and too frequent because they tried to reflect so much power so close together, with all the damage so front loaded.
Really quick, I invite you to watch this clip.
Watch as the missiles hit me, and as I die. Now how did they feel from just the sound alone? The echo of the impacts inside the cockpit? Keep that in mind. I will refer to it again as "Presentation."
Lets say you have 1x armor and 1x structure.
Your average stock Hunchback then has 160 armor (instead of 320) and 83 structure (instead of 167).
But instead of 20 damage per shot, its 20 damage per cycle. The shot count could be anything.
Instead of 30 damage per shot from 6 ML, it's 30 damage per cycle and again the shot count can be anything.
What if a medium laser had to fire 3 times to get 5 damage, but the beam length was only 0.1 seconds with maybe 2 seconds in between? What if after the three shots the laser itself would be too hot to continue using, requiring maybe 3 to 4 seconds to cool. What if another variant could (potentially) deliver all the damage in a 1 to 2 second beam that could be consumed all at once or a little bit at a time and when consumed the weapon needs to cool. In Battletech there are more than 66 truly unique standard medium lasers, each with its own brand and model name. There are also over 80+ standard IS medium lasers out there.
What if we had the canonical damage from the 180mm Tomodzuru Mount Type 20 Autocannon, which is 4 damage per shell and 5 shells per cassette?
But before you rag on that...
What if instead of 16 armor on the arm (which btw 5 shots of 4 damage would obliterate the armor in a single go and cut the arm health in half)... we had sub-hitbox, splitting armor and structure by percentages across logical points of each of the 11 body sections?
That way, assuming an Atlas is the target, lets say you decide his SRMs are a huge threat. You target a launcher, specifically, and fire. You hit some armor. You did some damage but not quite hard enough. For the sake of it, since Gauss Rifles are canonically front loaded, lets just say you hit it hard enough to break it using one. You've also -- by way of skill -- hit the launcher too. Now that Atlas still has (forgive me but I'm using stock for numbers) some 60 armor left. But in that one section, you put a hole in the mech that goes clean through after you've gone through 8 or so points of the front armor, some points of the structure, and exited through the back for another 4 points of armor.
What if you could, through focused fire, concentrate fire on and sever that mech's arm off at the elbow, or cut a section of the enemy's torso clean off?
Its not numbers that make a weapon feel powerful. It is what the weapon does, how it is presented that makes all the difference.
If I give you a weapon that has a giant projectile that just goes "ting" and makes the enemy slightly yellow without any physical reaction to your shot and we say it does 20 damage, well that feels pretty bleh.
Now if I give you a weapon that fires anywhere from 4 to 100 times, but after you've fired its entire magazine and you have sawed the enemy's arm off or torn visible holes going straight through a machine, destroying equipment and leaving myomer endtrails dangling from the target... do you really care that it's only doing anywhere from 5 to as low as 0.2 damage per shell?
MWO weapons, without factoring quirks or skill tree, generally do 3x source damage (with stragglers going up to 19x). This is against two times armor without factoring quirks or skill tree... effectively meaning you're doing 1.5 times tabletop damage.
BT weapons generally do 1x damage against 1x armor and structure, with certain weapon types able to do 2x to 3x at great risk to reward against 1x armor and structure... Meaning you're doing 1 to 3x damage, effectively making all weapons feel more powerful from the get go despite doing significantly less "numbers" in damage. Add the cosmetics and sound design, and soon you'll be melting off hands to see them swing or dangle and targeting ankles for the giggles.
It all rests in the design.
(The sub-hitbox design has an added benefit of making "fire all the stuff" alpha strikes worthless, as you'd punch a hole through the mech for sure, but likely with more damage and force than was actually necessary for any given point that you've hit... and then you've overheated your weaponry by forcing it all at once, so while the heatsinks are sucking heat from the weapons you're unable to fight or defend yourself for maybe 9 or so seconds after wasting all that potential into a single blow. As such it wouldn't take long for players to be a bit more sparing with their fire to maximize their potential.)
Edited by Koniving, 26 November 2017 - 08:17 PM.
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