8 replies to this topic

[Doctor Dinosaur]

An atlas pilot complained on the battlefield being killed by flamers. His own ones, of course. So I looked into it and found something strange.
First the PGI notes about the flamer mechanics:
---
• The standard Cooldown Bar for a Flamer in the Weapon Group HUD will now gradually increase as the Flamer is engaged; the bar will appear yellow during this build-up phase.
• The Flamer Cooldown Bar will turn red when the Flamer has been engaged long enough to start generating an exponential amount of heat in the firing 'Mech.
• The Flamer Cooldown bar will revert to yellow when the Flamer has been disengaged and the bar has begun to deplete.
• Engaging a Flamer during this depletion phase will cause the gauge to start increasing again.
• The above behaviors will apply to all Flamers that are equipped, regardless of whether they are being fired.
---
Additionally (now or since ever?) something seems to happen:
Everytime you fire a flamer there's an internal clock ticking, counting the time. If the yellow bar turns red, this timer will start counting down, not until this timer has reached zero, the bar stays red, THEN starts to cool down.
In my test I had four flamers, spammed them every few seconds to stay in the red area which resulted in a total cooldown time of around 25 seconds after ceasing fire.

Is this new or old behaviour? Is this intended?

This may or may not have a relation to the poor Atlas (I knew him well), but I found two complains about the flamer, which I will refer to, just in case someone of PGI stumbles over this thread will surfing the web during coffee break

https://mwomercs.com...ut-overheating/
https://mwomercs.com...heating-glitch/

[TheSilken]

It is intended and it has been around for a long time for Flamers. After 4.75 seconds of continuous use (when the yellow bar turns red) both the Flamer and Clan Flamer start generating additional heat per tick at a linear rate of +0.13 heat per second. Just to keep this in perspective an IS Double Heatsink that is not true dub has 0.15 heat dissipation per second. So basically every additional 1.0 seconds after the 4.75 second mark you lose ~ an additional DHS' worth of dissipation.

Here is the file that has all the relevant information on the Flamer and Clan Flamer: http://www.mediafire...m82/Weapons.xml

What you are looking for are " heatinctime= " (Heat Increase Time) and " RampDownDelay= ". " heatinctime= " deals with how long it takes in seconds before MWO starts applying additional heat to the weapon with that field. This in game is represented by the yellow bar you are seeing. For both the Flamer and Clan Flamer (ClanFlamer in the file) that field is set to 4.75 seconds. " RampDownDelay= " I believe is how long in seconds it takes for the weapon's bar to start to decrease, which on the Flamer and Clan Flamer is when the bar has turned red for you and you are waiting for it go away. This puts it at 5.0 seconds for the Flamer and Clan Flamer. The RAC 2 and 5 both have this field also but only using 0.3 seconds.

If you would like to find the file's location on your pc go to your Mechwarrior Online folder > Game > GameData.pak > Libs > Items > Weapons

Edited by TheSilken, 01 February 2018 - 12:25 PM.

[Leone]

So, if you 'O'verride and continue to flame, you can, indeed kill yourself. It's not new behavoiur, but the flamers were rebuilt to nerf some of the old brokenness.

https://vimeo.com/149093008 showcases a run of the old system right before they fixed it. Essentially though, they used to reset heat when you stopped using them, which those of us in the know just used chain-fired flamers to keep our heat down.

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 01 February 2018 - 12:28 PM.

[Koniving]

Doctor Dinosaur, on 01 February 2018 - 12:01 PM, said:

The most elabroate, user-informing version of weapon heat retention, a mechanic previously invisible and originally did not announce itself, and also didn't 'linger' but only worked while firing the specific weapon.

In the old days chain firing two flamers would allow you to ignore the whole mechanic.


This used to affect a lot of weapons, which was hard to tell as for most weapons it was pretty slight. Silken has proven that the mechanic no longer affects anything except both versions of Flamers. If he'd get off his lazy bum and stop arguing with me and just tell me where to find that file (or tomorrow after work I can find it on my own since he seems afraid of me proving it did originally exist), I can dig up the weapons.xml file of the final closed beta install and show just how many weapons were originally affected by the far less user-informative version of this mechanic's fight against the 2012 heat neutrality DPS/HPS seekers.

Edited by Koniving, 01 February 2018 - 12:37 PM.

[TheSilken]

Koniving, on 01 February 2018 - 12:36 PM, said:

Silken has proven that the mechanic no longer affects anything except both versions of Flamers. If he'd get off his lazy bum and stop arguing with me and just tell me where to find that file (or tomorrow after work I can find it on my own since he seems afraid of me proving it did originally exist),...

I did tell you Koniving where the Weapons.xml file is and I even specified where it is again in my post to this thread. Reading comprehension man, it's right there. Also, why would I care if it did originally exist? I only care about how the game is right now or will be, not back in "the good 'ol days".

Here it is for the 3rd time:

Mechwarrior Online folder > Game > GameData.pak > Libs > Items > Weapons

Edited by TheSilken, 01 February 2018 - 12:52 PM.

[Doctor Dinosaur]

My point is, that the RampDownDelay is NOT 5 seconds (as specified in the XML file, thanks for that btw.), but it increases with every second you are shooting DURING the 5 second ramp down delay.

Example:
You start shooting -> yellow bar raises
After 4.75 seconds -> the yellow bar turns red
NOW it would take 5 seconds for the bar to turn yellow again. Instead I keep shooting for few seconds every <5 seconds.
NOW it will take longer than 5 seconds for the bar to turn yellow again. And THIS is, where I am wondering if that's correct.

[Daggett]

Doctor Dinosaur, on 02 February 2018 - 02:16 AM, said:

My point is, that the RampDownDelay is NOT 5 seconds (as specified in the XML file, thanks for that btw.), but it increases with every second you are shooting DURING the 5 second ramp down delay.

Example:
You start shooting -> yellow bar raises
After 4.75 seconds -> the yellow bar turns red
NOW it would take 5 seconds for the bar to turn yellow again. Instead I keep shooting for few seconds every <5 seconds.
NOW it will take longer than 5 seconds for the bar to turn yellow again. And THIS is, where I am wondering if that's correct.

The problem is as follows:
The heat-bar only stops visually at the red zone. Internally however the heat-bar rises further. You can imagine this with the bar getting longer and longer, the game UI just caps the length so it does not look awkward.

So the RampDownDelay is only the time which needs to pass until the flamers start to cooldown. If you fired them for 30s then you need 35s until the flamers are cold again regardless of what the bar says. This also means that every time you fire the flamers within the RampDownDelay, you will still increase the heat-bar although it's actual length is not visible for you. And you will of cause also reset the RampDownDelay.

So when using flamers it's important to have longer periods where you are not using them in order to cool them down. You basically need to cool every second of usage, so it is possible that the bar stays red for a very long time.

It's intended this way but i think i would like a display of the seconds remaining until the flamers are cold again. Currently we need to guess how many seconds we are beyond the visual heat-bar cap.

Edited by Daggett, 02 February 2018 - 02:53 AM.

[Doctor Dinosaur]

Thanks a lot, that's exactly what I wanted to hear (well, not really, because that's some dumb mechanic, but you know what I mean )

[Tier5ForLife]

4.75 seconds of Flame time. My guess was about 6 seconds or less so this is good to know. If you never let your flamers run for over 4 seconds then you should not add any heat to your own mech.

If I'm running a very cool build I've found that I can run flamers for longer without any problems.

One thing I always wanted to test is the difference the numbers of flamers make to an enemy mech. Do two flamers heat it up twice as fast? Do 4 flamers heat it up 4 times as fast?

In theory, not only would 4 flamers overheated them in a 1/4th of the time but would send them back to overheating (I think it is topped at 90%?) in a 1/4th of the time.

So while one flamer would need 4 seconds, 4 flamers would only need 1 second.

The 2nd part of this is the size of the enemy mech and the number of heatsinks it is carrying. Again, in theory, a light or medium mech without a lot of heatsinks should heat up very quickly. While an Assault with 22 heat sinks should take longer.

The only way I know to find this out would be to find someone as bored/interested as I am. For us to set up a PVP match (something I've never done) and just test Flamers.

P.S. I've found that normally I have to use Flamers twice to kill an enemy mech. Once at the beginning and once after it comes back and takes one shot. So the faster I can heat them up the better. I've also learned that when it comes up and is able to take it's one shot, move and be out of the way when it happens.

Edited by LikeUntoBuddha, 03 February 2018 - 08:34 PM.