426 replies to this topic

[Sjorpha]

Vellron2005, on 05 March 2018 - 04:06 AM, said:

As long as we're on the same page here, that no matter what happens with balance, LRMs should NEVER be direct fire only.. nor should they ever be balanced so that they work better when fired directly than indirectly..

That's what ATMs are for..

LRMs should always be indirect.

Well, with artemis they are already better with direct LoS than indirect. Too bad they still suck in both cases.

Edited by Sjorpha, 05 March 2018 - 07:36 AM.

[JRcam4643]

Brain Cancer, on 13 February 2018 - 12:54 PM, said:

Basically,on the last podcast for Paul, (https://soundcloud.c...164-paul-inouye) we had a little bit about LRMs. Namely, we got told why they're deliberately bad. Balancing LRMs to be good enough for T1 would cause them to destroy T4-5 play, because these players aren't skilled enough to handle an improved LRM being shot at them. To that, I ask the following question: Since AMS is zero skill (it's automatic missile busting), why can't LRMs be better and simply make AMS an automatic part of Trial robot builds? It's undodgeable missile damage reduction, functions better in large numbers, and better LRMs will actually even encourage AMS use outside of the underhive levels of play. It's a no-skill-needed way to give those unskilled players a crutch to survive standing in the rain. We even deliberately put an AMS hardpoint on stock chassis 99.9% of the time in MWO, just so people can use them. Not that we do, there's precious little WORTH using them on. For that matter, it'll even make LRM use more skill oriented, as while people might not dodge the rain, the missile boat will have to figure out how to get around all the umbrellas suddenly in use.

I'm a tier 2 player and at times I've had success with these builds.

[Brain Cancer]

Vellron2005, on 05 March 2018 - 01:41 AM, said:

OK, that was for fun

In reality, yeah, if you pump somebody full of ERLL, you might get a KMDD.. but you will also take damage yourself.. With LRMs, you probably won't take damage.. so why give the enemy anything?

Also, experience has shown that nothing in this game has the "scrambling for cover" power like LRMs.. Unless there's half the enemy team heading straight for you. Trust me.. nothing.

You should see what blowing someone's side torso or leg off does instead. They generally shamble for cover afterwards.

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Also, yes, LRMs spread damage absurdly, but given they do obscene amounts of it, they are equally fast at killing mechs like many other weapons in the game.. No, they can't compare to Gauss or 6ERLL's, but neither can 6 ERLL's to LRM80.. I can take down any mech in the game with 5 LRM80 alphas, same as anyone can take it down with 5 6xERLL alphas.. But I will do more damage, destroy more components, and even if I don't kill it, it will make it alot softer for everyone else, and I would have given the enemy no chance of retaliation.

Except, of course on whoever gave you the lock. That's the drawback- in most cases, indirect fire relies on a spotter who has to -stay- in the line of fire. Assuming they can hold it.

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Here's an extremely fun account from 2 days ago:

FP on Grim Plexus, skirmish or assault, can't remember which.. Anyway, I'm in a LRM80 Highlander IIC, and several other people are also in LRM boats..

I'm just coming out of spawn, and are in a bad position.. somebody piloting a UAC Jeagermech sees me all alone, isolated, and heads straight at me, thinking to "rush the LRM boat".

I start LRM'in him.. I fire two alphas, and see this guy intends to rush me.. He's missing half armor from fresh by this time.. so I call him in into voip, saying "Alpha, jeager, in the open" - all other LRM boats on the field, at least 4 of them with me in total, fire a salvo or two. Three seconds later, no more Jeager.. I thank my team and proceed calling targets.. Not so easy to do that with lasers, is it? They all literally just turned around on the spot, locked, and fired once or maybe twice, then proceed to do whatever they were doing. Teamwork is op.

We won that match 48:30-ish. LRMs are useful.

Yep. You just 5v1ed a single Jagermech. Congratulations on killing something a normal H2C could do by itself without the other four people shooting it if you were dumb enough to charge something 25 tons heavier than you over open terrain from range, considering you apparently didn't take significant damage while he did or get minranged.

If you'd like fun LRM stories, I've got a great one on Polar.[/color]

I'm in a Hellbringer with ECM.

The enemy team has LRMs and we've got a heavy poking away that they decide to rain on, a Warhammer. I move up and get my ECM over him, and most of the initial rain misses.

"I'm gonna bait em", says the Warhammer pilot. And he peeks over the hill. INCOMING MISSILES!

Backs up into my ECM field and we watch a few zillion missiles crater the hill. Does it again. And again.

They finally give up shooting at him after whiffed salvo #4 and being brawly (MPLs) I look for the next victim.

King Crab? Saved. Thunderbolt? Saved. Again, we get three massive salvos of LRMs to chew dirt on the T-bolt.

By that point, we've gotten decently close, and the missile fire slacks off for some reason, and I'm too busy slagging people to know why cause nobody's really shooting missiles near me. Go figure. At the end, we've got one Arctic Cheetah hiding and it's 11-3 while we all wander around looking for it, and it slips on chat that we'd ended up baiting missiles so well that they'd run out of ammo before we got close (to their credit, they did lurm a Raven to death badly enough that the enemy MG boats had very little to do and got kill-secured by missiles anyway, but the other two were a one-shot rocket kill and random laser fire respectively).

And this was on Polar. Shoot, I'm good with missiles. I've easily gotten 5,6 kills straight up on it with LRMs before when the situation was right and I was the only missile boat on the team. But it only took one ECM carrier to hose the entire strategy (and yes, I was it for ECM and no AMS) and a little patience, as we ended up whittling down the enemy direct fire spotters while ruining the shots the lurmboats took. All I was doing was motoring back and forth a few meters at a time on whoever was in the "sweet spot". One guy. Three lurmboats trying to do their job on the best map possible with dozens of tons in launchers and ammo, and I hosed the lot with a no-brainer one-ton piece of equipment. The best one barely cleared 300 damage (the one that got the Raven) and the other two were just over 100 damage each. I even ended up airstriking two of them because they were so focused on trying to hit, they weren't moving enough to dodge.

That is far, far too easy to disable the effective use of any weapon in MWO.

Edited by Brain Cancer, 12 March 2018 - 08:28 PM.

[Vellron2005]

Brain Cancer, on 12 March 2018 - 08:27 PM, said:

You should see what blowing someone's side torso or leg off does instead. They generally shamble for cover afterwards.



Except, of course on whoever gave you the lock. That's the drawback- in most cases, indirect fire relies on a spotter who has to -stay- in the line of fire. Assuming they can hold it.



Yep. You just 5v1ed a single Jagermech. Congratulations on killing something a normal H2C could do by itself without the other four people shooting it if you were dumb enough to charge something 25 tons heavier than you over open terrain from range, considering you apparently didn't take significant damage while he did or get minranged.

If you'd like fun LRM stories, I've got a great one on Polar.[/color]

I'm in a Hellbringer with ECM.

The enemy team has LRMs and we've got a heavy poking away that they decide to rain on, a Warhammer. I move up and get my ECM over him, and most of the initial rain misses.

"I'm gonna bait em", says the Warhammer pilot. And he peeks over the hill. INCOMING MISSILES!

Backs up into my ECM field and we watch a few zillion missiles crater the hill. Does it again. And again.

They finally give up shooting at him after whiffed salvo #4 and being brawly (MPLs) I look for the next victim.

King Crab? Saved. Thunderbolt? Saved. Again, we get three massive salvos of LRMs to chew dirt on the T-bolt.

By that point, we've gotten decently close, and the missile fire slacks off for some reason, and I'm too busy slagging people to know why cause nobody's really shooting missiles near me. Go figure. At the end, we've got one Arctic Cheetah hiding and it's 11-3 while we all wander around looking for it, and it slips on chat that we'd ended up baiting missiles so well that they'd run out of ammo before we got close (to their credit, they did lurm a Raven to death badly enough that the enemy MG boats had very little to do and got kill-secured by missiles anyway, but the other two were a one-shot rocket kill and random laser fire respectively).

And this was on Polar. Shoot, I'm good with missiles. I've easily gotten 5,6 kills straight up on it with LRMs before when the situation was right and I was the only missile boat on the team. But it only took one ECM carrier to hose the entire strategy (and yes, I was it for ECM and no AMS) and a little patience, as we ended up whittling down the enemy direct fire spotters while ruining the shots the lurmboats took. All I was doing was motoring back and forth a few meters at a time on whoever was in the "sweet spot". One guy. Three lurmboats trying to do their job on the best map possible with dozens of tons in launchers and ammo, and I hosed the lot with a no-brainer one-ton piece of equipment. The best one barely cleared 300 damage (the one that got the Raven) and the other two were just over 100 damage each. I even ended up airstriking two of them because they were so focused on trying to hit, they weren't moving enough to dodge.

That is far, far too easy to disable the effective use of any weapon in MWO.

WOW.. way to miss points and point out common misconceptions... o7

[Brain Cancer]

I went from T5-T2 in LRM boats. It's not common misconceptions- I used the things for 100s of games getting up the ranks until the CW update, where I ended up rapidly swapping to ATMs (I'll still use them once in a while in mixed builds, but...). I know those things backwards and forwards, if it has 3+ missile hardpoints, I probably stuck LRMs on it and missile-bombed them to death, from Kit Fox to Supernova.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should at this point. Yes, you can turn a bunch of missile boats at a target in the open from a large chunk of the map and hose it down, and that's one of the few remaining virtues of LRMs. It still doesn't change the fact that five not-LRM boats are going to outperform five LRM boats most of the time, to the point where the odds strongly favor the former over the latter. It doesn't change the fact that LRMs are massively overnerfed, or that the Balance God Himself has said they're statted to be effective only against the bottom rung of the playerbase.

Fix LRMs, and I'll be the first in line to walk that Supernova-A out to bomb the other guy. I like using LRMs, a lot. I just feel that I'm doing my team a disservice to equip them in significant amounts at this point, with the Artemis nerf being the final straw.

[Darbbo]

mogs01gt, on 13 February 2018 - 12:57 PM, said:

AMS isnt taken because team play isnt valued in the current game setup. Kill or be kill is all that matters and winning is an after thought.

Plus,its a bit moronic to balance LRMs based on T4-T5 players when so many hard counters exist.

But you are speaking as a lone mechwarrior who has no ties to any faction or team play so your statement is invalid.

[Brain Cancer]

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But you are speaking as a lone mechwarrior who has no ties to any faction or team play so your statement is invalid.

T5, by it's nature is neither faction nor team play. AMS isn't taken because the missiles it significantly has an effect on are generally the weakest in the game, while the most effective tend to overpower it entirely (SRM, MRM). That people don't give a flying fig about their team-mates in QP is besides the point.

That they managed to turn a defensive system that has proportional effects on any salvo in TT into one that devalues small-tube-count weapons if they're too slow but is virtually useless versus Streak/SRM/MRM is a testament to the derp of PGI design philosophy.