426 replies to this topic

[Khobai]

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Are you kidding? Are you seriously trying to skill-troll me? Genuinely trying to say that I 'don't get it because I don't know how to deal with LRMs'? I'm going to assume you were drunk or high or something and just ignore that.

You obviously dont know how to deal with LRMs or you wouldnt be complaining about them lmao.

You keep going on about how LRMs dont require LoS which simply isnt true. If the LRM boat doesnt have direct LoS, a spotter still needs direct LoS for the LRM boat to hold its locks. The spotter can be shot at. Indirect fire is hardly infalliable.

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No what I want is LRMs to be a real decision and viable part of any loadout - especially a mixed one. If LRMs got faster at longer distances, locked, had a flat trajectory and better tracking than ATMs plus lower heat/faster cooldown I'd consider them a must-have on any mid-long range loadout.

Nobody said they wanted to make LRMs better than direct fire weapons. Thats all in your head.

And increasing their velocity to 240m/s is not going to make them better than direct fire weapons. 240m/s is still quite slow. Thats the speed ATMs travel at, and even ATMs can be dodged easily at long range.

And the rate of fire of AMS can be increased to compensate for the faster LRMs.

Edited by Khobai, 22 February 2018 - 04:19 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

MischiefSC, on 22 February 2018 - 03:59 PM, said:

No what I want is LRMs to be a real decision and viable part of any loadout - especially a mixed one.

Mixed loadouts? Seriously? C'mon, you know this game better than that- viable weapons are boated, because if it's good, it's better with more.

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As I've said, repeatedly - the issue is that if IDF is comparable to direct fire in performance it gives you the same benefits with the ability to almost completely eliminate the risks. There's no fix for that. No 'balance'. Either it provides significantly inferior results or it's totally superior and the go-to and the game becomes all about deploying or countering LRMs.

Which is why no other game has a weapon like that, it would be ****.

The magical point you seem to have missed here is that you could significantly improve LRMs doing what they do now and they'd STILL be notably inferior to direct fire. They're that bad.

LRMs are currently designed to be so weak as to not be significantly dangerous to anyone with even an average level of skill, and that's before you even take all the counters into account. That's the entire bit at the top of this topic. Paul has LRMs so weak, they're supposed to not even be worth it shooting at the average player- because he's afraid of what happens to bad ones if they're any better.

They can be inferior. Nobody here is even saying we should have LRMs so good they render direct fire weapons obsolete. Right now, they're vastly inferior and over-nerfed. That's the issue that needs fixing here. The only way to determine how badly it's overdone is to strap the most skill-not-needed gear on those droolin' newbies and see how well the system performs when it's being regularly perforated.

That means AMS on Trials. All of them. T5 games should look like a flak circus over London in WW2 every time so much as an LRM 5 flies out. Once you have data on what zero skill defense looks like (and AMS is truly zero skill, it'll even fire successfully through buildings and mountains so you don't need LOS to the missile to kill it) vs LRM use, you can tweak them until they're not utterly useless in such situations, or at least good enough to risk getting BRRRRRRTED off the field.

This will never be good as direct fire. Nothing with lock-on delays, significant flight time and huge numbers of soft and hard counters will beat poking over a hill and giving someone a full burn or a quick Gaussing. Nor does anyone here really want that, at least the sensible ones.

But the score should not be "Direct fire sixty, LRMs two."

Khobai, on 22 February 2018 - 04:04 PM, said:

And the rate of fire of AMS can be increased to compensate for the faster LRMs.

Incidentally, if this happens it also means AMS as it stands gets better at dealing with all sorts of missiles and might even be significant vs. SSRM/SRMs.

[OmniFail]

I'm just not sold on the strapping AMS to the trials is going to make things better. I get that it will teach noobs about no skill hard counters and prevent Paul's visions of lurmageddon in the low tiers. But maybe we should start with talking about how to balance LRM5s and LRM10s vs AMS without making LRM15s and LRM20s to powerful.

Because sorting out the problems of the larger launchers can be fixed by a simple spread reduction. Balancing AMS across the board is the difficult task. Keep in mind other missile types when thinking about this problem.

Edited by OmniFail, 22 February 2018 - 05:40 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

OmniFail, on 22 February 2018 - 05:39 PM, said:

I'm just not sold on the strapping AMS to the trials is going to make things better. I get that it will teach noobs about no skill hard counters and prevent Paul's visions of lurmageddon in the low tiers. But maybe we should start with talking about how to balance LRM5s and LRM10s vs AMS without making LRM15s and LRM20s to powerful.

Because sorting out the problems of the larger launchers can be fixed by a simple spread reduction. Balancing AMS across the board is the difficult task. Keep in mind other missile types when thinking about this problem.

Oh, there's stuff that should be done to keep AMS from simply devouring ATMs utterly and such, too.

But first, we need to demonstrate exactly how screwy things are when you take existing counters and apply them to the wonderful world of T5 play. Because that's where Paul is afraid of lurms.We need to show exactly how little effort it takes to protect even the most window-licking, ignorant players in the game from LRMs.

That is, we need to make the worst case scenario. An anti-lurmageddon, as it were.

[BreakinStuff]

Honestly in my experience, four or more AMS on the field within reasonable range of each other usually makes LRM swarms more akin to a five year old trying to tickle torture people to death. This has been running primarily mad dogs and Timber wolves in the T4 solo queue. But people are rapidly wising up.

Over the last 48 hours the effectiveness of the weapons against a population largely unused to seeing them lobbed en masse has dropped sharply. People are no longer impressed by the shock factor of volley after volley slamming in, nor are as many volleys getting launched or striking.

I'm almost OUT of the t4 queue, and I bluntly have more fun driving my cyclops in the group queues with T-2 or 3 players.

LRMs are... interesting, but I have more fun running Cyclops, King Crabs, Annihilators and Locust, particularly the variants not rocking the LRMs.

I tend to agree with the idea that leaving Indirect Fire about like it is for overall performance.

Given the failings of LRMs in direct fire, I'd say if you give them a flat trajectory during any circumstance you'd gein a spotting bonus on the target, and better acceleration woudn't hurt. But you'd have to specify the condition under which they'd do that. I suggest Spotter bonus conditions because you can physically see the target, and by that token, he can see you.

this would eliminate a lot of the problems with buffing IDF, especially if you maintain the locks or they go pure dumb-fire and accelerate to max in a straight line. The flatter trajectory and faster speed would mean that there's less room for the LRMs to suddenly change directions into the target.

By this same token, ATMs have the same time-to-target in flight as LRMs and their ridiculous arc. That would likely need to be addressed.

For the record, my opinions:
Removing the need to hold the lock for missiles to track is a bad idea.
Buffing LRM capability in indirect fire is similarly terrible.
Eyes-on, pointing-at-target is whereany LRM buffs should happen.
Minimum ranges need to die in a fire, the clan LRMs don't suffer the minimum range and their savings in tonnage and size more than beat the IS out there, even if you compare clumped and stream fire.

Edited by BreakinStuff, 22 February 2018 - 08:40 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

BreakinStuff, on 22 February 2018 - 08:26 PM, said:

Minimum ranges need to die in a fire, the clan LRMs don't suffer the minimum range and their savings in tonnage and size more than beat the IS out there, even if you compare clumped and stream fire.

Actually, they do suffer from minimum range, but they don't suffer from a deadzone like IS LRMs. It's just damage reduction to the point of zeroing out at point-blank.

[YueFei]

MischiefSC, on 22 February 2018 - 03:59 PM, said:

What you're describing isn't LRMs though, it's consumables.

You absolutely do not and can not balance LRMs to that concept.

If you want LRMs to be viable they need balanced to the existing direct fire weapons. In the CS context they need balanced to pistols/rifles/smgs/etc. You'll notice the M72 got cut from CS btw, for this very reason. If you took, say, an M16 and gave it an attachment to fire grenades you'd need a significant negative side effect or you'd bone balance; it would become absolutely critical to success for the very reasons you've listed above.

Because IDF is a **** mechanic. You can have it so long as it's nerfed/limited in other ways. Otherwise it breaks balance.

Look, we're quibbling over semantics of an analogy. The point is that you have weapons/utility in a competitive FPS which can be deployed without line-of-sight, and it doesn't break balance.

To say that we can't have LRM IDF because it would dominate everything is an overly-simple unsupportable assertion. We obviously already have LRM IDF, and it doesn't break the game. Hell, even with IDF, LRMs are underperforming.

Hence, this is not a binary discussion, it's a matter of degrees, which is a good thing. That means it can be tuned to be balanced, whether thru simple stat edits or mechanics changes. Although I think simple stat edits are insufficient to truly make LRMs interesting.

In terms of mechanics changes which I've suggested, many of these raise the skill ceiling for LRM use, provide multiple options for the shooter, and give the shooter the possibility of direct control over the impact area of his missile salvo.

Imagine being able to launch immediately without first having a lock, and then providing guidance mid-flight to bring the missiles toward an enemy, stutter-stepping / wiggling defensively as the missiles are in mid-flight, then making a last moment correction to pin your reticule to the enemy's left torso to get your salvo to hit that area (spread can be tuned as needed for balance).

[Vellron2005]

YueFei, on 22 February 2018 - 11:38 PM, said:

Imagine being able to launch immediately without first having a lock, and then providing guidance mid-flight to bring the missiles toward an enemy, stutter-stepping / wiggling defensively as the missiles are in mid-flight, then making a last moment correction to pin your reticule to the enemy's left torso to get your salvo to hit that area (spread can be tuned as needed for balance).

That's a great idea.. and it would make LRMs alot more skill focused.. I would love the ability to lock, launch missiles, lose lock, re-lock to a different target, and have the missiles hit that second target..

[Mystere]

MischiefSC, on 22 February 2018 - 03:59 PM, said:

You're also either unwilling or unable to understand exactly what the issue is. LRMs as locking IDF weapons are either inferior to direct fire, which is what we have now, or they are comparable - which instantly makes them absolutely superior and the game shifts to being about deploying or countering LRMs and everything else is in a tertiary role.

This is when I now ask you to explain in much more detail because:

comparable = superior

just does not make sense, especially if all you do is repeat it over and over again.

MischiefSC, on 22 February 2018 - 03:59 PM, said:

Because IDF is a **** mechanic.

And again, you're going to actually have to do a much better job explaining things.

Saying it over and over again without actually showing why other than via bad examples -- and your grenade example was a terrible one -- will not convince anybody,

Edited by Mystere, 23 February 2018 - 04:25 AM.

[Burke IV]

Vellron2005, on 23 February 2018 - 12:09 AM, said:

That's a great idea.. and it would make LRMs alot more skill focused.. I would love the ability to lock, launch missiles, lose lock, re-lock to a different target, and have the missiles hit that second target..

You would get situations where somebody would get hit by LRMs with no travel time and no warning.

[Mystere]

Burke IV, on 23 February 2018 - 07:56 AM, said:

You would get situations where somebody would get hit by LRMs with no travel time and no warning.

No travel time? Please explain.

As for having no warning, I'm perfectly fine with that.

[Burke IV]

Launch early at sometihng behind your target, when they are right up close lock the target you want and they come down with no notice. Might even hit people in back.

From the point of view of the guy that gets hit they come from nowhere, so no travel time

im not complaining if people want it implemented

Edited by Burke IV, 23 February 2018 - 08:40 AM.

[Dago Red]

Burke IV, on 23 February 2018 - 08:41 AM, said:

Launch early at sometihng behind your target, when they are right up close lock the target you want and they come down with no notice. Might even hit people in back.

From the point of view of the guy that gets hit they come from nowhere, so no travel time

im not complaining if people want it implemented

I mean allowing for trick shots would certainly raise the skill ceiling on LRM's.

[Burke IV]

You can alread drop the lock and get it back for the same target. Thats how LRMs do those 90 degree turns unless they fixed that. Some might cry exploit if you evade the LRM warning mechanic

[Stinger554]

Burke IV, on 23 February 2018 - 09:06 AM, said:

You can alread drop the lock and get it back for the same target. Thats how LRMs do those 90 degree turns unless they fixed that. Some might cry exploit if you evade the LRM warning mechanic

IIRC the warning doesn't go away just because they lose lock. Though I could be mis-remembering that.

[BreakinStuff]

Stinger554, on 23 February 2018 - 10:56 AM, said:

IIRC the warning doesn't go away just because they lose lock. Though I could be mis-remembering that.

You are not misremembering.

The warning doesn't stop until the missiles explode.

[Novakaine]

This discussion is just rich continue please

[OmniFail]

Novakaine, on 23 February 2018 - 04:16 PM, said:

This discussion is just rich continue please

A linguistic tumor in the body of the text. It serves no purpose, it takes no stance, and provides no insight into the subject matter.

[Mystere]

YueFei, on 22 February 2018 - 11:38 PM, said:

Hence, this is not a binary discussion, it's a matter of degrees, which is a good thing.

I am really wondering why a bunch of people think everything should be a binary decision, black or white, 0 or 1, true or false, etc. <smh>

I mean look at the so-called "community-based" balance "discussion". It's the same damned problem.

[Fleeb the Mad]

Mystere, on 24 February 2018 - 03:59 PM, said:

I am really wondering why a bunch of people think everything should be a binary decision, black or white, 0 or 1, true or false, etc. <smh>

I mean look at the so-called "community-based" balance "discussion". It's the same damned problem.

I'm not actually finding many people being against LRMs becoming better in a direct-fire mode where the shooter has and maintains LOS on the target. That may actually be something there is a consensus about.

Most people, myself included, are against blanket buffing of LRMs in their current form because indirect fire doesn't need to be better. Indirect fire is anathema to good gameplay.