21 replies to this topic

[Xavori]

As everyone knows, in MWO heavies are vastly superior to assaults. They are faster. They are more agile. Those two combine to more than make up for lower armor totals (like way, way more than make up).

And worst of all, ghost heat means assaults can't pack more firepower than heavies.

In other words, assaults have no place in MWO (with the exception of a few broken OP assaults that crop up from time to time) because heavies do their job better.

At the other end, I can put up as much damage in a 35 ton light as I can in the average (but not meta) heavies. Because again, ghost heat. You simply can't fire more guns than a light can boat no matter what chassis you are in more than a couple times. And if you're smart, you don't bother trying.

But what if that wasn't true? What if lights had lower ghost heat limits and assaults higher, using the current ghost heat settings for heavies? Not cripplingly lower on lights because you don't want to nerf them into oblivion, but maybe just one mount lower limits for mediums vs heavy, and then use the same limit but 5-10% more intense in lights. At the same time, add 2-3 more mounts for assaults so they can actually do their job of being lots and lots of firepower, but firepower that is slow and clumsy and has to be protected by the rest of the team.

[SuomiWarder]

PGI tends to make marginal adjustments back and forth forever on this kind of thing but in general I agree with your principal. For whatever non-canon reason they want to make up - thicker wiring and insulation in the assault chassis or more area to dissipate heat - scaling the ability to deal with grouped heat by chassis sounds like a way to put some actual weight class differences back into the mix.

[FupDup]

Your premise is flawed because:

A. Big robots have more weight for heatsinks, so they can use their payload (however big or small) more frequently.

B. Big robots have much easier access to high-tonnage guns that trade alpha strike per ton for heat efficiency, namely ballistics. Pulse lasers similarly trade weight efficiency for heat, firing rate, duration, and sometimes damage (depending on which one). They can definitely handle PPCs (for PPFLD, worth more per point than spread damage) much better than smaller mechs, who have to stick to lasers for their energy needs for the most part.

C. There are lots of Ghost Heat loopholes anyways. Build around it.

D. Some assaults do actually have agility comparable to heavy mechs (including VTR, GAR, ZEU, and CLP).

E. We don't need to feed the arm's race towards bigger and bigger robots that has already been going on for the entire existence of Battletech.

F. Assaults are statistically not doing that bad on the whole. Look at Tarogato's leaderboard stats thread here: https://mwomercs.com...derboard-stats/

G. When you talk about "putting out as much damage in a light as a heavy," you aren't doing all of that damage all at once. You're achieving that damage over a longer match duration. Small numbers added up can eventually equal a big number, who would've thunkit?

Edited by FupDup, 07 February 2018 - 10:53 PM.

[Curccu]

Xavori, on 07 February 2018 - 10:39 PM, said:

You simply can't fire more guns than a light can boat no matter what chassis you are in more than a couple times.
But what if that wasn't true?

No worries that is not true.

PS. Yes nerf the lights! So fu***** OP, dominating battlefields totally.

[Gas Guzzler]

Xavori, on 07 February 2018 - 10:39 PM, said:

As everyone knows, in MWO heavies are vastly superior to assaults.

I stopped reading when I got here.

[El Bandito]

Xavori, on 07 February 2018 - 10:39 PM, said:

But what if that wasn't true? What if lights had lower ghost heat limits and assaults higher, using the current ghost heat settings for heavies?

I wouldn't recommend mechs like MCII, MAD-IIC, KDK-3, Cyclops, Mauler, Anni etc.. to become even more deadlier than they already are.

Edited by El Bandito, 07 February 2018 - 11:55 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

A. Big robots have more weight for heatsinks, so they can use their payload (however big or small) more frequently.

not true, big robots are limited by crit slots not tonnage

a clan heavy will often have the same number of DHS as a clan assault.

heavies are better than assaults. there are some really good assaults that are exceptions to that. but on the whole its true.

assaults only gain a situational firepower advantage over heavies if they use ballistic spam. and even then assault ballistic spam isnt always better since ballistic spam requires more facetime. so its not even an absolute advantage, its only an advantage in specific situations.

heavies have needed a nerf for a while now to balance them better against assaults and mediums.

assaults are worse heavies with situationally better firepower and worse speed, agility, and survivability.

mediums are worse heavies with situationally better agility, similar speed, and worse firepower and survivability.

Quote

I wouldn't recommend mechs like MCII, MAD-IIC, KDK-3, Cyclops, Mauler, Anni etc.. to become even more deadlier than they already are.

yeah but those are the exceptions. most assaults are worse than heavies.

and of all the weight classes, the heavy weight class has the least number of bad mechs

heavies are the only weight class that doesnt have an obvious weakness. they have the best scaling combined with the best mix of firepower, speed, agility, and armor. And their only real weakness is a purely situational encounter against a ballistic assault.

Edited by Khobai, 08 February 2018 - 12:12 AM.

[R Valentine]

Better yet, tie ghost heat to ENGINE SIZE. Those slow Deathstrike's going <50kph so they can boat 2 HLL + 4ceRML + 2cGauss can go to hell. Now your ghost heat kills you. Clan weapons do more damage, so they add more to ghost heat and IS weapons.

[process]

Why anyone would want more layers to the ghost heat mechanic is beyond me. If you really think assaults need better heat performance, give them dissipation quirks.

[Xavori]

process, on 08 February 2018 - 08:12 AM, said:

Why anyone would want more layers to the ghost heat mechanic is beyond me. If you really think assaults need better heat performance, give them dissipation quirks.

Because I think it'd make more sense to simply adjust ghost heat by chassis size than to go through and add quirks to every single mech in the game.

As to everyone who pointed out a handful of decent assaults...I kinda mentioned that in my original post. There are overperforming mechs...in every weight class. But if you look at it objectively, say use 1k damage in quick play as your guideline (far from perfect, but we're kinda limited in trying to evaluate individual mechs in a team based game), My MAD-IIC-D can put that up. It does so quite a bit. But so does my Grinner at a fraction of the tonnage. And my most consistently high damage mechs are things like the Pahket (a medium) and the Hellbringer (a light heavy). In fact, I'd put the Hellbringer up against any assault in the game simply because it can boat so many lasers.

Oh, and ballistics balance ghost heat??? ROFLMAO. Ballistics in Battletech, not just MWO, bite. Too much tonnage cost, even in assaults. Damage output limited by ammo, and of course, ammo can blow up except for gauss where the ammo is safe, but the gun blows up. You're far better off taking a laser and using the saved tonnage to throw in more heatsinks.

[process]

I'm not advocating for it, but I would think a, say, flat 10% flat dissipation quirk to every assault mech is a helluva lot easier than having to remember ghost heat limits on a per-weight class basis for each linked-weapon-group.

[ramp4ge]

Khobai, on 07 February 2018 - 11:52 PM, said:

yeah but those are the exceptions. most assaults are worse than heavies.

Nightstar.

When you're in a 95 ton 'mech that makes an Ebon Jaguar look tanky, you know it's a broken 'mech.

Edited by ramp4ge, 08 February 2018 - 08:55 AM.

[mogs01gt]

This is an odd thread. Lights should always be less heat efficient than a larger mech due to lack of available hard point space.

[ramp4ge]

Game logic usually doesn't follow real logic.

Take any age of sail game. Most of the time, larger ships with more sail area were faster than smaller ships with less sail area. In most age of sail games it's the exact opposite because everyone likes a little ninja boat.

Same for 'modern' naval games. In most 'modern' naval games, destroyers turn tighter than battleships when in the real world most battleships have smaller turning circles than destroyers. The Iowa-class battleship, for example, had a tighter turning circle than a Fletcher-class destroyer. This is never emulated in games though because game logic > real logic in a game where everyone loves a ninja boat.

So even though a light 'mech would have less hardpoint space and less actual area to spread the heat out over to dissipate it, it should obviously be more heat-efficient. Because that's game logic.

[FupDup]

Kiran Yagami, on 08 February 2018 - 07:59 AM, said:

Better yet, tie ghost heat to ENGINE SIZE. Those slow Deathstrike's going <50kph so they can boat 2 HLL + 4ceRML + 2cGauss can go to hell. Now your ghost heat kills you. Clan weapons do more damage, so they add more to ghost heat and IS weapons.

That's just as bad as the OP's idea, if not even worse. Dire Wolves would have a lower Ghost Heat cap than most heavies, for example. Slow lights with really small engines would get shafted hard. Any chassis with a low engine cap like the Vindicator gets kicked in the balls while it's already down.

[Christophe Ivanov]

Anyone who pans Assaults have not strapped one on long enough to understand how best to use one. It's takes a very patient understandable Pilot who knows the good and bad aspects of their mech (not just assaults, but ANY mech) their weapons and their use to get the best out of it.

Like the Flying Tigers of WWII fame did, they used an AOK airplane called the P-40B/C and went toe-to-toe against a Premier top-of-the-line combat airplane called the Zero and the best Pilots of the Japanese navy and did quite well. Same here for the Assaults in this game.

[Mechteric]

• ghost heat is dumb.
  
• assault mechs can already carry more more heatsinks to compensate for more weapons. problem solved.

Edited by CapperDeluxe, 08 February 2018 - 11:45 AM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

I don't like ghost heat at all, but I don't really see raising the ghost heat limits for assaults really helping them much. A lot of the great builds for them now wouldn't be affected.

I guess maybe an Executioner or Gargoyle could fire some extra ERMLs or something at once, but its already marginal and could just be saved by some actual defensive quirks instead of those tiny little bits of nothing given if you take bad omnipods, same could be said about many other mechs.

[ramp4ge]

Christophe Ivanov, on 08 February 2018 - 11:40 AM, said:

Like the Flying Tigers of WWII fame did, they used an AOK airplane called the P-40B/C and went toe-to-toe against a Premier top-of-the-line combat airplane called the Zero and the best Pilots of the Japanese navy and did quite well. Same here for the Assaults in this game.

The Flying Tigers faced the Japanese Army Air Service more often than the Navy. The Zero was a navy fighter. The AVG's P-40s went up against Ki-43s and Ki-61s mostly, not really A6Ms.

While the Ki-61 was a superior fighter to the P-40B, the Ki-43 wasn't really. The only thing the Ki-43 did well was turn.

[JediPanther]

Another nerf the least class used in the game thread. OP is only number 4,986,734,897,649,386,734,986,739,834,689 to make one. Tell you what you can add all the ghost heat to lights you want in exchange for undoing engine desync and rescale so light go back to the way they were before that happened. You'll make a nerf jenners and commando op thread shortly after.