Kin3ticX, on 28 January 2018 - 01:38 PM, said:
I like lore like the next person but this game is bogged down by sacred cows. From what ive gathered, the balance guy is more a lore gatekeeper than pure design. Without the sacred cows I think progress could be 10x faster at the expense of a vocal minority of lore purist whales.
When PGI takes variants and copypastas them from lore specs almost directly, thats not design, thats just translating and seeing what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it flops, sometimes it makes something broken OP.
I disagree, over your variant comment, many of the balance issues have been caused by P.G.I's take on the variants your being critical of, not the variants themselves.
Also P.G.I inflate the hard points of many I.S mechs (though these extra hardpoints are usually in terrible locations)
I'll give you four examples.
Kodiak and i'll focus on the KDK-3 and 4 but it also had impacts on all the other variants.
It you look at all the canon art work prior to P.G.I's version the highest ballistic mount on the Kodiak is slightly lower, than the lowest mount, P.G.I's design team then stuffed the second ballistic on top of the first mount, above a spot that already allowed it to be an extremely powerful double Gauss ERPPC build.
P.G.I could have easily added these second Ballistic points under the first, but they didn't.
Had they done so it wouldn't have been nerfed into the ground.
Maurader II
Whilst this is of course bulkier, and larger than the I.S heavy, the pilots seat is placed better on what is already a good design in comparison, there are less bits poking out, which makes it harder to engage.
Madcat 2
P.G.I's model is narrower, and has far less baulky missile pods than any model or art work prior on what would have been a good design.
Nightstar,If you ignore its terrible convergence, the design team put massive pods on the back of the mech making sure it would be terrible at hill humping.
Pods that NO, art or model had shown prior to P.G.I's design.
The Nightstar should by rights and lore, been a much better hill humper than either the MAD 2 or the MadCat 2 and been comparable to the Kodiak. (would still have bad convergence)
It is in fact far far worse. they then tried to drop the arms ensuring it would be even worse at everything, for a minor improvement to convergence which would still have been bad.
It launched with comparable quirks to the mad cat 2 and worse ones than the Mad 2, both clearly far superior designs.
Lore and canon has had little effect on the later model and designs, what has had an impact on balance has been P.G.I's mech design team to do the right thing for the game, in favour of their own mech favourites.
This is then exasperated by the balance crew refusing to do the obvious, like added armour quirks to the Uziel side torso.
The failings of balance has very little to do with old canon, and P.G.I have demonstrated a willingness to walk over it when they need to.
Including massive nerfs to the performance of clan weapons,
Throwing away clan stars.
If you look at it on balance there are far more times where P.G.i have ignored lore, than used it as an excuse not to change something.
The only thing P.G.I have shown a complete lack of willingness to do, is mixed tech. and unlock internals on omni mechs.
Mixed tech would almost certainly make balancing easier.
unlocking clan endo and ferro and engines on Onmi mechs would make it harder
8
