426 replies to this topic

[MrMilkshake]

Brain Cancer, on 16 February 2018 - 07:15 PM, said:

Because no weapon should be simply a weak piece of junk because "muh newbies". Every weapon should be dangerous, and "it's only good enough to shoot trash players" is a dangerous excuse that can be applied further.

How about Streaks? How about ATMs? Why not just nerf those into the ground and we can just make sure people only stick SRMs in those missile hardpoint slots? (We just nerfed MRMs, as of 2/20 BTW- plenty of room to do it some more)

LRMs are spread weapon damage (and weak damage at that, that's why we see people firing 60-80 at a time) that takes multiple seconds to lock, fire, and hit. Right there, it's already inferior to hitscan or PPFLD that can be delivered to a single point immediately and in large amounts. It doesn't win trades. It's inaccurate. It's unfocused. It has multiple pieces of defensive equipment that directly mitigate it's damage or counter it's ability to be fired with any accuracy whatsoever, some of which aren't even usually used because who needs them, it's slow, ticklish lurms that only really get the comedy kills?

You don't want to die by LRM because at this point, LRMs are so humiliatingly bad to use that dying to them means you got goofed.

So why is it that "no weapon should be simply a weak piece of junk because "muh newbies" ? Its a complex game for the new player and every game has the mario weapon. Middle of the road, a jack of all trades master at bla bla, you know the deal. If its good enough for other games why not this ?
As far as streaks, SRM's and ATM's are concerned i couldn't really care and it has nothing to do with the original topic. I get your frustration with the weapon man but if you really want to go out in something like an Archer or a MadDog and you have decent skill you can still do big damage and support your team in a big way. If you buff those things people like me will use them to make people like you misrable.

Burke IV, on 17 February 2018 - 08:28 AM, said:

Asym there is no point arguing now, they have won. Just remember that the LRM hating people wernt good enough to fight LRMs on a fair and level playing field. They cryed for nerfs endlessly and it wasnt until it got so bad you couldnt carry enough ammo there was finally no point trying anymore. They didnt beat the LRM players, they beat LRMs.

Good advice, and you're right we did win.

Edited by MrMilkshake, 17 February 2018 - 04:22 PM.

[YueFei]

MrMilkshake, on 17 February 2018 - 04:22 PM, said:

So why is it that "no weapon should be simply a weak piece of junk because "muh newbies" ? Its a complex game for the new player and every game has the mario weapon. Middle of the road, a jack of all trades master at bla bla, you know the deal. If its good enough for other games why not this ?

No reason to repeat the sins of other games.

Otherwise, you end up putting assets into a game that become under-utilized. It's a missed opportunity for variety and depth and counter-play.

There's also no reason why LRMs can only be a low-skill-cap weapon. That's just a lack of imagination, and usually it is stated as a fact by people who are ignorant of the way missiles perform in real life.

Unfortunately, mechanics changes to LRMs would likely require significant changes to MWO's underlying engine, an endeavor that PGI will not likely undertake.

[MrMilkshake]

YueFei, on 17 February 2018 - 04:30 PM, said:

No reason to repeat the sins of other games.

Otherwise, you end up putting assets into a game that become under-utilized. It's a missed opportunity for variety and depth and counter-play.

There's also no reason why LRMs can only be a low-skill-cap weapon. That's just a lack of imagination, and usually it is stated as a fact by people who are ignorant of the way missiles perform in real life.

Unfortunately, mechanics changes to LRMs would likely require significant changes to MWO's underlying engine, an endeavor that PGI will not likely undertake.

What sin ? Please explain why it's a sin for games to have a low skill ceiling all round weapon that can be used by anyone. I certainly think they are still a perfectly viable weapon (Damage number wise) in any tier of quickplay and have been proven wrong on a few occasions in CW too.

What do you mean by "require significant changes to MWO's underlying engine" ? As far as im aware its just numbers on a sheet that can be changed at will. Genuinely curious on this one

[Khobai]

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What sin ? Please explain why it's a sin for games to have a low skill ceiling all round weapon that can be used by anyone

the thing is lrms arnt even that weapon

its not even like a grenade launcher in other games where any noob can just one shot kill a vet player that walks around a corner

lrms are far more limited than that.

people are literally complaining about them for no good reason

maybe because they got killed by lrms once and theyre so embarassed they cant let it go lol

Edited by Khobai, 17 February 2018 - 04:55 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

MrMilkshake, on 17 February 2018 - 04:22 PM, said:

So why is it that "no weapon should be simply a weak piece of junk because "muh newbies" ? Its a complex game for the new player and every game has the mario weapon. Middle of the road, a jack of all trades master at bla bla, you know the deal. If its good enough for other games why not this ?

Because LRMs aren't even a generalist weapon. First off, they spread and the spread cannot be undone, nor do they get any compensation for that spread (like ATMs do, since those reward you for getting closer to the target). They're below-average on accuracy despite being a guided weapon, because they're slower than molasses, require time to even get tracking (lock-ons) and are skunked by ECM or simply having too much time before more agile guns are fired and the target moves back to cover. They're even below average on effective damage, because unmitgated spread means automatic loss of some damage (auto-miss) and still more ends up wasted hitting as many locations as possible (except the head, barring freak hits like a jumping opponent).

They're deliberately designed to be as weak as possible, and that's before taking either the usual player countermeasures or "no-skill" ones like ECM or the barely-used AMS. And despite this magical fear Paul apparently has for a newbie lurmageddon, he doesn't even bother strapping AMS on the very machines he fears will get drizzled to death by equally noobie newbs whose general LRM firing protocol is launching from behind hills at 900m away with a miserable hit rate that only becomes notable if the target has gone full spud. Assuming they actually understand how to get an LRM from launcher to target, that is.

Heaven help us if there's a trial Streakboat. In PGI's world, that'd be the terror without end, not only are they guided missiles but every single one hits the target!

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As far as streaks, SRM's and ATM's are concerned i couldn't really care and it has nothing to do with the original topic. I get your frustration with the weapon man but if you really want to go out in something like an Archer or a MadDog and you have decent skill you can still do big damage and support your team in a big way. If you buff those things people like me will use them to make people like you misrable.

Big damage number doesn't mean jack, it's where you put it- and right now, LRMs put it on more locations than they ever have post-Artemis nerf. Now, you're KMDDing and killing stuff? Good. And if you actually make LRMs functional, guess who went T5-T2 in missile boats?

This guy. I'd have more fun with working missile launchers, not LRMs that I've watched steadily get nerfs/ignored as the game progressed, barely improved and almost inevitably nerfed more afterwards. It's a wretched example of balance amidst a near-endless series of other balance decisions, and worse, it seems to be made without taking into account existing counters to the weapon in question. The proper view should have been.

"Oh, we're worried LRMs are going to be too hard on newbies."
"Do we have anything we can do to make it easier for newbies vs. LRMs?"
"Yes, we don't usually put anti-missile equipment on new player Trial chassis."
"OK, next Trial build series, everything gets AMS/ECM/both and let's see the results."

*Newbie town becomes a shooting gallery of dead missiles*

"Newbies don't have LRM problems anymore."
"Great, now we can give other players another weapon that doesn't suck."

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Good advice, and you're right we did win.

Boasting about that kind of "win" is like boasting we "won" on poptarting because now jump jets barely function for half the weight classes.

[MischiefSC]

Indirect fire. If you have indirect fire as effective or even nearly as useful as direct fire you've just made direct fire inferior.

For the same reason poptarting led to the nerf of JJs, ghost heat, gauss/PPC nerfs and gauss/PPC link. It is oblivious in the extreme not to understand this.

Buff LRMs to work as direct fire solidly well. Almost, but not quite as MRMs, then give them indirect fire with a spotter. With much higher velocity they bypass most of AMS. Give them like a 25% reduced cooldown. With tracking it means as a weapon group you don't need to aim separately with them. Have them track on CT so if someone isn't twisting it's particularly dangerous. A lot of ways to make LRMs strong in direct fire.

Indirect fire is a **** mechanic in a FPS, for the same reason every other game avoids or nerfs it and why even poptarting got nerfed. Not rocket science.

[Mystere]

MrMilkshake, on 17 February 2018 - 04:22 PM, said:

... and every game has the mario weapon. Middle of the road, a jack of all trades master at bla bla, you know the deal. If its good enough for other games why not this ?

And this is why most games are just rehashed versions of previous ones, just with (hopefully) better graphics.

Real innovation is few and far between.

[Fleeb the Mad]

LRMs and other guided missile weapons will always have to pay a damage tax because they don't carry the risk of botching a shot when all other things are equal. Direct fire weaponry carries more risk because players miss. They sweep parts of their laser volleys into terrain. It's a thing that happens that is greatly mitigated by guided missiles. Streak boats aren't particularly effective against lights because their damage model is efficient. It's because hitting fast moving mechs with direct fire gunnery is hard.

The problem is there's no convenient way to scale a weapon system to the player environment its being used in. LRMs are garbage against direct fire when most players hit what they're shooting at. Problem is the ability of players to inflict damage with point and shoot guns varies greatly by tier all guided weapons will always need to be normalized to some point in the middle or lower third. As much as people complain about LRMs being inadequate, gameplay where LRMs are strong is actually rather awful. It's anti-fun to be the target of an LRM barrage from multiple mechs.

Yes, there are hard counters. Thing is there are also specific counter-counters. Except every one of them is harder to use than LRMs themselves are. Mechs must expose themselves and also close range for TAG/NARC and the like. I might even argue they don't see heavy use because the skill set required to use them effectively is also one that works fine with other types of weapons that do more damage for the effort.

The only way LRMs are ever going to get buffed is if their mechanics are made more complicated so that there is a difference for players who expose themselves to return fire and maintain LOS on a target. You need that skill-centric element to remove the need to balance around only one part of the player pool. That would have to manifest as better tracking, grouping or flight path while keeping the reticle on the target similar to using a TAG.

[Asym]

MischiefSC, on 17 February 2018 - 06:56 PM, said:

Indirect fire is a **** mechanic in a FPS, for the same reason every other game avoids or nerfs it and why even poptarting got nerfed. Not rocket science.

MWO was designed as a team centric, open world game, without arena's and limited space. MW has had IDF since inception as do all real world Army's now, and well into Science Fiction....

If you want a twitch, FPS Arcade game, play Doom.......

MW in it's previous incantations all had IDF and some aircraft !!! Every scholarily reviews of successful video games conclude that 3D weapons are what make tactics valid and provide variation that is difficult to "hack" the best solutions, because of the variation.....

Solaris is the opposite direction where MWO is right now. Yes, we had Solaris in the games before, and, it was just "OK" because you could figure out on each map, with each weight class, certain physical locations that were "safe" and the AI wouldn't challenge those spots..... This variation of Solaris will be no different and the pilots who have figured out the "hacks" used now, will most certainly find the "sweet spots" on the new Solaris maps and exploit those "gaps" and game play mechanics that will create a new meta for those maps and gameplay.........

Good luck there......a large number of us aren't going there.

[Brain Cancer]

MischiefSC, on 17 February 2018 - 06:56 PM, said:

Indirect fire. If you have indirect fire as effective or even nearly as useful as direct fire you've just made direct fire inferior.

For the same reason poptarting led to the nerf of JJs, ghost heat, gauss/PPC nerfs and gauss/PPC link. It is oblivious in the extreme not to understand this.

LRMs were never even "nearly as useful" as direct fire. You could add 50% to LRM velocity and cut spread by a third, and they'd still be much more inefficient than direct fire...and that's before you take AMS into account. The only time LRMs actually seriously whupped the heck out of anything was when they were bugged, CT or head seeking death missiles. You never, ever saw players lining up to pwn scrubs with arsenals of lurms outside of those points.

Quote

Indirect fire is a **** mechanic in a FPS, for the same reason every other game avoids or nerfs it and why even poptarting got nerfed. Not rocket science.

Unless, of course it's costing you 40,000 Cbills a shot and can be carried for 0 tonnage or space on a Locust.

Because airstrike spam is pro and lurms is for scrubs.

Fleeb the Mad, on 17 February 2018 - 08:43 PM, said:

LRMs and other guided missile weapons will always have to pay a damage tax because they don't carry the risk of botching a shot when all other things are equal. Direct fire weaponry carries more risk because players miss. They sweep parts of their laser volleys into terrain. It's a thing that happens that is greatly mitigated by guided missiles. Streak boats aren't particularly effective against lights because their damage model is efficient. It's because hitting fast moving mechs with direct fire gunnery is hard.

LRMs already auto-miss. They auto-spread what they don't auto-miss, too. And even if they don't, they generally trade some level of increased team exposure- theirs or whatever's spotting to deliver their inferior, inefficent and ultimately inaccurate shots to a target. Of course, overexposure in a LRM boat generally leads to death, so it's not like sitting there getting your own locks isn't a risk- if you have to get out of the way, you've wasted seconds of time lining up and firing to shoot dirt.

Take my stats. Yeah, I know. PGI stats, lol.


I'm pretty good with guided missiles. Play them almost constantly, have thought about making my second address "Supernova-A, PGI servers". Missile numbers aren't evenly divided 15 or 20 because when I run dry, you only get partial salvos.

I could talk about my higher laser hit percentage, but that's silly. Hitscan is easy to get hits, and of course people will easily point out that it's how much of that burn is on-target that counts. So let's talk hits to damage ratio.

CERML: 3.43, CHML: 4.35, CMPL: 3.72, CLPL: 5.35. This is of course hitscan damage that can and is aimed at specific locations.

CLRM15+A: 1.08, CLRM20+A: 1.37. This is spread damage that cannot be aimed at specific locations and in fact, is designed to hit as many locations as possible lest it actually kill someone. AND it's a third of the laser's potency.

We could do fired to damage too, but that's even more depressing.

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The problem is there's no convenient way to scale a weapon system to the player environment its being used in. LRMs are garbage against direct fire when most players hit what they're shooting at. Problem is the ability of players to inflict damage with point and shoot guns varies greatly by tier all guided weapons will always need to be normalized to some point in the middle or lower third. As much as people complain about LRMs being inadequate, gameplay where LRMs are strong is actually rather awful. It's anti-fun to be the target of an LRM barrage from multiple mechs.

LRMs aren't even in the bottom third. They're at the bottom, period at this point. Given the sheer number of and even un-used counters to LRMs on top of common counters, they are underbalanced severely. I'd say an LRM at least needs to be challenging to the average player, a challenge that can be mitigated readily by use of ECM and/or AMS.

Right now, LRMs are not a challenge to the average player, and are readily mitigated simply by the nearest piece of cover.

As for anti-fun? I think that's due to LRMs being spam weapons. If PGI wanted to slow the ROF and boost damage accordingly, I'd have zero problems with that- and indeed, I think that's better for everyone. It doesn't make LRMs better or worse, it makes them unable to generate something that only causes frustration and blinding explosion spam. Slower ROF also means players would be punished less getting to cover or closing with a target. Seriously, I don't think the only thing needed is "improve stats". But I do think that the LRM is a weapon system that can be crafted into a better thing without becoming the super noob-slayer, the next lurmageddon, or a weapon that will instantly turn MWO into Indirect Fire Online. And that it needs to be, and that this will improve the game itself.

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Yes, there are hard counters. Thing is there are also specific counter-counters. Except every one of them is harder to use than LRMs themselves are. Mechs must expose themselves and also close range for TAG/NARC and the like. I might even argue they don't see heavy use because the skill set required to use them effectively is also one that works fine with other types of weapons that do more damage for the effort.

And as we all know, no other weapon requires that reliance on another pilot entirely to do so.

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The only way LRMs are ever going to get buffed is if their mechanics are made more complicated so that there is a difference for players who expose themselves to return fire and maintain LOS on a target. You need that skill-centric element to remove the need to balance around only one part of the player pool. That would have to manifest as better tracking, grouping or flight path while keeping the reticle on the target similar to using a TAG.

Strangely, we had this better missile performance before when you fired with LOS.

It was called Artemis. They nerfed it significantly, because apparently the idea of rewarding "get your own locks" is alien to how PGI desires the weapon to function. Heck, they even narrowed how far you can swerve your sights off the box before lock is instantly lost, because we can't have players skillfully flicking missiles over or around cover when launching. I find all that counter-intuitive to rewarding more complex behaviour with missile fire, but that must just be me. I'm just the guy shooting them.

[YueFei]

MrMilkshake, on 17 February 2018 - 04:42 PM, said:

What sin ? Please explain why it's a sin for games to have a low skill ceiling all round weapon that can be used by anyone. I certainly think they are still a perfectly viable weapon (Damage number wise) in any tier of quickplay and have been proven wrong on a few occasions in CW too.

Having it have a low skill floor is fine. But making it disproportionately effective at lower skill levels, and capping it with a low skill ceiling is a bad practice.

By making it disproportionately effective at lower skill levels (getting indirect fire for free, essentially), you turn off a bunch of newbies. Some of them might stick around and git gud, but you'll lose quite a few as they get wrecked by LRMs. That's not good for new player retention.

"Easy to learn, difficult to master" should be the watchword. Effectiveness of a weapon would be tied to the skill of the user versus the skill of the defender, across a variety of skill levels.

This way, you don't end up having a weapon that's way more effective at lower skill levels, and you also continue to see it used even at high level play, contributing to the variety and depth of the game.

Streak SRMs have the same problem, BTW. They are very low skill ceiling, very ineffective against most mediums and anything heavier than that, but brutal against Light mechs.

MrMilkshake, on 17 February 2018 - 04:42 PM, said:

What do you mean by "require significant changes to MWO's underlying engine" ? As far as im aware its just numbers on a sheet that can be changed at will. Genuinely curious on this one

Those numbers on a sheet have been tweaked before in the past, but usually just cause wild fluctuations in LRM performance. For example, at one point, LRM flight paths were programmed such that they'd do a 90 degree nose dive, and there was essentially almost no hard cover from them except overhead cover, as the missiles would just fly over most cover and dive straight down.

The base mechanics of it could be changed instead, such as having the shooter influence missile flight path with his reticule placement. Use this to control the arc of the missiles, or use it to target specific body parts. Give the shooter different guidance modes they could use, as it is in real life.

For example, while the shooter's lock guides the missiles via datalink, the missiles could also have their own terminal guidance. The shooter can choose between holding their reticule closer to the target and exposing their torso to return fire, in exchange for a tighter spread and direct control over the body part the missiles will go for, or they can cut the missiles loose on their own guidance so they can maneuver defensively and shield in exchange for the missiles' spread growing wider and tracking more poorly. It doesn't have to be binary either/or, it could even be some combination of the two, such as a shooter guiding the missiles for the first 300 meters before deciding to cut them loose to defend himself, and letting the missiles guide themselves over the last 200 meters.

A shooter could even launch the missiles ballistically toward a target without any lock-on, just lobbing them where he predicts the target will go, then have the missiles pick up the target when they get close enough.

These modes would be roughly analogous to how pilots in real life can use their long-ranged air-to-air missiles. A pilot can launch a missile at a target locked up by his own radar, then turn away as far as his radar's gimble limits will allow, and hold that angle, so that his own radar holds the lock while the datalink guides the missile, in a maneuver known as the Crank. But, if the enemy shoots back, the pilot has to judge how long he can afford to wait before he must break away completely in order to evade the incoming enemy missile, and let his own missile guide itself. However, the missile's own radar is far less powerful (it's a lot tinier than the fighter's own radar), so it may not pick up the target right away until it gets closer.

Also, even if the missile picks up the target, the target can still evade it. Contrary to the usual movie portrayal, the rocket motors of missiles actually only burn for a few seconds, after which they are basically steering toward the target with no further thrust. That's how a fighter which pulls 9 g's can dodge a missile that can pull 40 g's, because the missile can really only pull 40 g's early in the launch. Evasive maneuvers by the fighter can force the missile into turns to track it, and each turn the missile makes bleeds it of kinetic energy that it cannot regain (unlike the fighter which can regain energy), so that hopefully by the time the missile gets close, it doesn't have enough energy to keep up with the fighter's turn. Again, unlike Hollywood where the hotshot pilot waits until the last possible moment to make a break turn to evade an incoming missile, in real life you want to be maneuvering early and often to force excessive turns upon the missile.

Anyways, it's very possible that the exchange of missiles forces both opposing fighters to break off well before either sides' missiles gets within range, so that the BVR exchange nulls itself out, and then it turns into a WVR dogfight. That possibility is why fighters are still designed with good kinematics in mind, rather than just stealth and speed and long-ranged missiles. Because even as BVR capabilities improve, the problem is that your enemy's BVR capabilities also improve, and the improvements may just cancel out.

Next generation concepts involve datalink sharing, such that a missile launched by Fighter-A can be guided by the radar of Fighter-B, which would free up Fighter-A to maneuver defensively immediately after his shot.

[Khobai]

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Indirect fire. If you have indirect fire as effective or even nearly as useful as direct fire you've just made direct fire inferior.

but no one is even suggesting making indirect fire as good as direct fire. its an irrational fear.

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Buff LRMs to work as direct fire solidly well. Almost, but not quite as MRMs, then give them indirect fire with a spotter. With much higher velocity they bypass most of AMS

That makes LRMs worse not better.

The only reason to use LRMs is indirect fire.

If you make indirect fire way worse than it is now by requiring 2 mechs to use you have effectively killed the weapon system completely.

And no, with higher velocity they will not bypass AMS because the suggestion to buff LRM velocity also included buffing either AMS rate of fire or range. AMS will remain about as effective against LRMs as it is now.

LRMs need the higher velocity so they can hit things better at long range. Theyre LONG RANGE missiles and theyre barely effective past 500m. Theyre supposed to outrange ERLLs. But the ERLL has like x3 the range of LRMs in MWO. Its a joke. Ideally the absurd max range of the ERLL should be reduced too, but thats a different topic entirely.

to balance out the faster velocity they should get a cooldown nerf (but increased damage per missile) to cut down on how quickly they can be spammed. As well as a penalty to tracking/spread when firing LRMs indirectly. But that penalty should be entirely negated by tag/narc. artemis should also get buffed back upto where it was before; nerfing artemis was pointless.

Edited by Khobai, 18 February 2018 - 03:22 AM.

[Burke IV]

Brain Cancer, on 18 February 2018 - 12:11 AM, said:

Strangely, we had this better missile performance before when you fired with LOS.

It was called Artemis. They nerfed it significantly, because apparently the idea of rewarding "get your own locks" is alien to how PGI desires the weapon to function. Heck, they even narrowed how far you can swerve your sights off the box before lock is instantly lost, because we can't have players skillfully flicking missiles over or around cover when launching. I find all that counter-intuitive to rewarding more complex behaviour with missile fire, but that must just be me. I'm just the guy shooting them.

Instant lock drop you say? Didnt happen last i played but i think i know why. Once upon a time you could engage two targets at the same time in a LRM boat. A skill unworthy of top teir no doubt, but now i read your post im starting to get this suspicion.

The people that begged PGI to do this stuff are truly lame. How PGI let themselfs be infuenced ill never understand.

[Kroete]

Burke IV, on 18 February 2018 - 03:19 AM, said:

Instant lock drop you say? Didnt happen last i played but i think i know why. Once upon a time you could engage two targets at the same time in a LRM boat. A skill unworthy of top teir no doubt, but now i read your post im starting to get this suspicion.

The people that begged PGI to do this stuff are truly lame. How PGI let themselfs be infuenced ill never understand.

Every mech with more then a single weapon can hit more then one enemy, dont know why do you think this is lame. And why its only lame with lrms although its a lot easier to do with every other weapon?

It was worthy in t1, as bending was it worth and getting your own locks because artemis was also worth it. But all the metawhores that dont take ams were whining enough about getting killed from a 3-dimensional weapon that needs more then moving a little left or right to evade it, using newplayers as excuse. And they get the worst weapon even more nerfed ...

Edited by Kroete, 18 February 2018 - 03:48 AM.

[Roughneck45]

Kroete, on 18 February 2018 - 03:31 AM, said:

But all the metawhores that dont take ams were whining enough about getting killed from a 3-dimensional weapon that needs more then moving a little left or right to evade it, using newplayers as excuse. And they get the worst weapon even more nerfed ...

What a bunch of nonsense.

[Khobai]

the "metawhores" do use T4-T5 players as the convenient excuse not to buff LRMs

meanwhile every other agenda they try to pass has zero regard for those same players

like how does bringing back 45 damage poptarting at all benefit T4-T5 players? Theyre the ones that suffer the most from 45 damage poptarting being reintroduced since they lack the skill to be able to do it.

T4-T5 players is not a good reason why LRMs shouldnt be buffed. At some point every player needs to learn how to dodge LRMs anyway.

Edited by Khobai, 18 February 2018 - 10:52 AM.

[ThreeStooges]

When do they remove guass from play? Lrms they might as well just delete out now. Such a waste of everything. After Guass we can nerf into nothing-ness the next weapon until the game becomes nothing more than mechs ramming each other. They have that mode in the works yet? I mean they can always add in knock downs again. Add IK back too and it would be really fun going back to the Dragons. We love you balance guys no really lets play on the live server and see how fast they die in t5.

[Fleeb the Mad]

Brain Cancer, on 18 February 2018 - 12:11 AM, said:

LRMs already auto-miss. They auto-spread what they don't auto-miss, too. And even if they don't, they generally trade some level of increased team exposure- theirs or whatever's spotting to deliver their inferior, inefficent and ultimately inaccurate shots to a target. Of course, overexposure in a LRM boat generally leads to death, so it's not like sitting there getting your own locks isn't a risk- if you have to get out of the way, you've wasted seconds of time lining up and firing to shoot dirt.

Take my stats. Yeah, I know. PGI stats, lol.


I'm pretty good with guided missiles. Play them almost constantly, have thought about making my second address "Supernova-A, PGI servers". Missile numbers aren't evenly divided 15 or 20 because when I run dry, you only get partial salvos.

I could talk about my higher laser hit percentage, but that's silly. Hitscan is easy to get hits, and of course people will easily point out that it's how much of that burn is on-target that counts. So let's talk hits to damage ratio.

CERML: 3.43, CHML: 4.35, CMPL: 3.72, CLPL: 5.35. This is of course hitscan damage that can and is aimed at specific locations.

CLRM15+A: 1.08, CLRM20+A: 1.37. This is spread damage that cannot be aimed at specific locations and in fact, is designed to hit as many locations as possible lest it actually kill someone. AND it's a third of the laser's potency.

We could do fired to damage too, but that's even more depressing.

LRMs aren't even in the bottom third. They're at the bottom, period at this point. Given the sheer number of and even un-used counters to LRMs on top of common counters, they are underbalanced severely. I'd say an LRM at least needs to be challenging to the average player, a challenge that can be mitigated readily by use of ECM and/or AMS.

Right now, LRMs are not a challenge to the average player, and are readily mitigated simply by the nearest piece of cover.

As for anti-fun? I think that's due to LRMs being spam weapons. If PGI wanted to slow the ROF and boost damage accordingly, I'd have zero problems with that- and indeed, I think that's better for everyone. It doesn't make LRMs better or worse, it makes them unable to generate something that only causes frustration and blinding explosion spam. Slower ROF also means players would be punished less getting to cover or closing with a target. Seriously, I don't think the only thing needed is "improve stats". But I do think that the LRM is a weapon system that can be crafted into a better thing without becoming the super noob-slayer, the next lurmageddon, or a weapon that will instantly turn MWO into Indirect Fire Online. And that it needs to be, and that this will improve the game itself.

I'm afraid the point still stands. The reason why LRMs have spread and poor damage is because they presently lack a means for a more skilled player to get more out of them. It's also the reason they just can't be made better without a serious change in mechanics for maintaining LOS. Making them stronger in ways that buff their indirect fire is anathema to good gameplay.

That's simply because indirect fire is fairly ******** as far as game mechanics go. People hate on it so much because there's nothing more frustrating than getting shot by someone (or several someones) outside of LOS who you can't shoot back and who can also focus fire with impunity. It pretty much has to be massively inefficient by design. Go figure that it is.

Stepping behind cover is a solution for every single weapon system, though LRMs and ATMs are the only ones that can deal damage when the target is outside LOS from the shooter. People say cover is a hard counter for LRMs like standing behind a rock doesn't work for gauss rifles. You can dodge long range PPC fire by rocking in place. That doesn't make the weapon broken. If you fire on a target that can easily break your lock by stepping out of LOS that's the shooter's problem. LRMs defeat more forms of cover than any other weapon.

Making them 'challenging' to the average player is going to be about giving the shooter more things to do to improve their performance, not about making the current mechanics harder to avoid. ECM and AMS shouldn't be mandatory, or even neccessarily full counters. That's simply because ECM only exists on a small minority of chassis. It would be a terrible decision to make a standard countermeasure one that 95% of mechs don't have. AMS has also always been a damage mitiigation measure, not a hard counter.

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And as we all know, no other weapon requires that reliance on another pilot entirely to do so.

Strangely, we had this better missile performance before when you fired with LOS.

It was called Artemis. They nerfed it significantly, because apparently the idea of rewarding "get your own locks" is alien to how PGI desires the weapon to function. Heck, they even narrowed how far you can swerve your sights off the box before lock is instantly lost, because we can't have players skillfully flicking missiles over or around cover when launching. I find all that counter-intuitive to rewarding more complex behaviour with missile fire, but that must just be me. I'm just the guy shooting them.

Well uh, I'm going to say that if you rely entirely on another player to make your weapons effective you're doing something wrong. There's no reason why an LRM boat can't TAG and NARC their own targets, or maintain locks. It's just harder and carries much more risk than getting someone else to do it. That's exactly why I said that most people who can do these things just use other weapons, because if you can poke and land a hit with a NARC or can train a TAG on a target reliably you can also be shooting people with weapons that work the same way.

I'd also argue that launching from behind cover should always result in mediocre results, no matter how it's done. You're still removing the risk of exposing yourself to return fire and relying on someone else for the lock. Most people seem to agree that granting some sort of bonus for maintaining LOS and keeping the reticle on the target is reasonable and warranted, though. Putting some of the old artemis bonus back in seems like it'd be just fine.

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I would also add that, in an environment devoid of cover, you can still dodge a PPC or ballistic projectile where you cannot dodge an ATM or LRM volley, or even a Streak volley.

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Anything with JJ can at least mitigate LRMs. The lighter you are the easier. In a huntsman dodging a big LRM volly is easy, even with no cover at all.