24 replies to this topic

[Papaspud]

Why do, as a general rule, IS new mech releases mostly have to be buffed to not suck- many still do even after, yet new clan mechs for the most part need to be nerfed to not be quite so powerful.......................?

Hardpoint inflation?

[Khobai]

because PGI wont balance the two tech bases at the fundamental level

as long as CXL, CDHS, CFF/CES are way better than their IS counterparts, IS is always going to need superquirks.

They need to make ISXL survive side torso blowout (and yes buff LFE and STD engines), buff all IS DHS to true doubles, and buff ISFF/ES so its not outright worse. And thats also assuming clan vs IS weapons get satisfactorily balanced at some point.

clan vs IS will never be properly balanced as long as clantech remains outright superior. sure they can try to balance it with superquirks but that makes the game horrendously lopsided. like bushwhackers with the survivability of timberwolves...

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Hardpoint inflation?

ghost heat for the most part stops hardpoint inflation from being a big deal. its certainly a contributing factor but its not the major contributing factor.

obviously theres some exceptions like the piranha though

and some of the older IS mechs like the catapult could definitely use more hardpoints

Edited by Khobai, 27 February 2018 - 01:53 PM.

[FupDup]

Many of the meta mechs in MWO are directly translated from the source material, and the same thing applies to mechs that are bad in MWO. Of course there are exceptions of mechs that suck in MWO but were great in TT and vice-versa, but for the most part you can look at the TT stuff and get a fairly decent idea of how a mech will perform in MWO.

The Clans, by coincidence, had a larger number of well-designed mechs in TT than the IS did. The current advantages of Clan tech amplify this.

Hardpoint inflation is a factor in it. A lot of the Clan mechs come with oodles of stock hardpoints or only receive a little inflation, while most of our IS mechs come from years ago where hardpoints didn't need to get inflated as much since the power level baseline wasn't set so freaking high.

Edited by FupDup, 27 February 2018 - 01:42 PM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Papaspud, on 27 February 2018 - 01:34 PM, said:

Why do, as a general rule, IS new mech releases mostly have to be buffed to not suck- many still do even after, yet new clan mechs for the most part need to be nerfed to not be quite so powerful.......................?

Hardpoint inflation?

Hardpoint inflation is generally done to IS mechs, no clan omnimechs have any hardpoint inflation, its mostly clan battlemechs that have that, and its rare and usually not to the same level as IS mechs. You'll see clan battlemechs have a slot that normally would hold a single UAC/LBX 20 turned into 2 ballistic hardpoints (MCII-B and KDK-3), while you'll see an IS mech turn a single LRM10 into 3 missile slots (CP-10-Q).

Also recently we've had the Annihilator as a mech that was released with high quirks then nerfed for being far too tanky, and its still the tankiest mech in the game by a good margin. The Assassin also released without its armor quirks being high, then got buffed to have more, only for it to then be toned down. The most recently released clan mech that took a nerf was the Supernova getting its mobility decreased, which just made more people move back to the Marauder IIC which also had its mobility decreased but has a higher top speed.


As a general rule, IS mech balance relies on quirks in a case by case basis, so without quirks an IS mech generally isn't seen as good. Also due to the incredibly tanky nature of the more popular IS mechs, the moment one is released that goes for mobility or offense rather than having those *and* high durability everyone whines about it.

[Brain Cancer]

Because PGI compounded the error of superior Clantech by having PGI state that they'd somehow magically 1:1 balance it with IS tech, despite that being impossible after decades of effort in tabletop.

There will never be balance between two fundamentally unequal tech bases 1:1, the only possible balance is between various IS stuff and various Clan stuff. And PGI should never have tried, but when you've got people willing to buy $500 gold robots, the lure is irresistible.

[LordNothing]

clan still gets the bigger end of the hardpoint inflation stick, especially energy hardpoints. more energy weapons that are better and are supplemented by superior heat sinks. this has kind of relegated clan mechs into a one trick robot role. the result is that clan mechs can only use laser vomit effectively (dispite huge nerfs) and suck at every other role (because nerfs). so we need a lot more energy nerfs in conjuction with some durability buffs. what good is lfe survivability for xl costs when your legs are paper? thats how i deal with clan mechs.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

LordNothing, on 27 February 2018 - 02:07 PM, said:

clan still gets the bigger end of the hardpoint inflation stick, especially energy hardpoints. more energy weapons that are better and are supplemented by superior heat sinks. this has kind of relegated clan mechs into a one trick robot role. the result is that clan mechs can only use laser vomit effectively (dispite huge nerfs) and suck at every other role (because nerfs). so we need a lot more energy nerfs in conjuction with some durability buffs. what good is lfe survivability for xl costs when your legs are paper? thats how i deal with clan mechs.

Which mechs on clan side actually got energy hardpoint inflation other than the Supernova? Which of them are actually meta?

[Mole]

If you want someone to blame you should probably blame whoever designed the Clans in Battletech. As it stands, Clans are supposed to be insanely overpowered. They've been severely watered down in MWO in the name of balance, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But because PGI is somewhat stuck with the lore they have a hard time striking balance between the two tech bases when one was designed from the ground up to be superior. That on top of the fact that clan 'mech designs tend to have better hardpoint placement than IS designs, which is again the fault of the creators of battletech, makes Clan 'mechs a lot better off than IS 'mechs in a lot of cases. I heard from an experienced TT player one time that Battletech was on its deathbed because a game of battletech could last for something insane like 5 hours and no game stores wanted to tie up their tables to let people play Battletech. The answer to this was to introduce the clans which, due to their power, made a game of Battletech go much faster and made game stores willing to host it again. I don't know how true that is though.

[Exilyth]

With omni mechs, you can at least play mech lego and recombined pods (and thus hardpoints) to your liking.
Battlemechs are stuck with what they've got.

[LordNothing]

Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood, on 27 February 2018 - 02:30 PM, said:

Which mechs on clan side actually got energy hardpoint inflation other than the Supernova? Which of them are actually meta?

almost any clan mech that can stack more than 9 hardpoints, because thats the max number of energy points is mechs have to work with. kodiak-5 gets 11 out of the box. nova can stack 14 last i looked, the dire can stack 15, il exclude the 14/15 hardpoint pirhannas because there isnt much you can do with such low tonnage. clans have the holy trinity of good heat sink density lots of energy hardpoints and better energy weapons. but this is a double edged sword where by you loose viability when you operate outside the established vomit mode.

meta? who knows. my experience is that anything with high alpha and a good pilot is meta. then we get into the philosophical debate of whether the meta makes the pilot or vice versa. it is such an ephemeral concept. i just know that my clan deck is a wall of beams while my is deck is a bunch of pure fun mixed builds. the clan deck wins about as much as the is deck. but to do that i had to abandon things that are fun, like viable brawlers and skirmishers. the only clan mech that is both fun and deadly is my 8cac dire which i wont even take into fp because its too damn slow (despite its ability to get fast kills and a klick). run full tilt to the front and you still get accused of camping.

i should also point out that high hardpoint count also comes with the added bonus of getting to cherry pick the best hardpoints, even if you dont use them all. use micros to boost your hlls, and you have a knife fight weapon in reserve.

should point out that this is my current campaign about trying to get viable non vomit builds out of clan so that i can have fun when i go kitty.

Edited by LordNothing, 27 February 2018 - 03:41 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

Mole, on 27 February 2018 - 02:33 PM, said:

If you want someone to blame you should probably blame whoever designed the Clans in Battletech. As it stands, Clans are supposed to be insanely overpowered. They've been severely watered down in MWO in the name of balance, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But because PGI is somewhat stuck with the lore they have a hard time striking balance between the two tech bases when one was designed from the ground up to be superior. That on top of the fact that clan 'mech designs tend to have better hardpoint placement than IS designs, which is again the fault of the creators of battletech, makes Clan 'mechs a lot better off than IS 'mechs in a lot of cases. I heard from an experienced TT player one time that Battletech was on its deathbed because a game of battletech could last for something insane like 5 hours and no game stores wanted to tie up their tables to let people play Battletech. The answer to this was to introduce the clans which, due to their power, made a game of Battletech go much faster and made game stores willing to host it again. I don't know how true that is though.

What's ironic is that with DHS and the general new-tech in the Inner Sphere., TTK in the tabletop game had already gone down considerably.

With the rules as written, in 3050 post-Clantech you could quite reasonably one-shot kill people in Clan pulse laser/TC boats simply by called-shotting them, especially with an ISXL. They actually had to alter the rules soon (but not too soon) afterwards. Note: The IS didn't start with TCs of their own, just to make it even more fun. That came later, the IS version of pulse cheese showed up with the Saggitare, and shortly after THAT they made it so you couldn't called shot with a pulse laser/TC combo.

[Seranov]

Exilyth, on 27 February 2018 - 03:33 PM, said:

With omni mechs, you can at least play mech lego and recombined pods (and thus hardpoints) to your liking.
Battlemechs are stuck with what they've got.

That would be a problem if most Battlemechs didn't have solid hardpoints to start with. There are surely ones that don't, obviously, but Clan Battlemechs are almost always better than Omnimechs because of the range of stuff you can do on them. In a game where it takes literally seconds to refit a mech's whole loadout, Omnis don't have a single real advantage besides "I can cram as many of a specific hardpoint on this mech as I want".

[Scyther]

Mostly what Mole and others have said. The original BattleTech crafted the Clans to be bigger, badder, faster, more reliable war machines than what the IS had. Storywise a lot of that was also due to matching genetic breeding, a warrior culture, and endless training of the Clan mechwarriors to their mechs. Techwise Clan machines were developed after the BT writers had a chance to review everything they had done awkwardly with IS designs and could go back to the drawing board and make them better.

It led to major problems even in the TT version, which led to development of a 'Battle Value' system which was intended to bring some degree of balance back to lopsided BT fights... sound familiar?

The fact that some people can even argue that IS and Clans in MWO are 'close to balanced' is actually a significant victory on PGIs' part. It's a very hard thing to do on mechs and tech alone, which is why outside factors (eg, quirks) have to be brought into play.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

LordNothing, on 27 February 2018 - 03:38 PM, said:

almost any clan mech that can stack more than 9 hardpoints, because thats the max number of energy points is mechs have to work with. kodiak-5 gets 11 out of the box. nova can stack 14 last i looked, the dire can stack 15, il exclude the 14/15 hardpoint pirhannas because there isnt much you can do with such low tonnage. clans have the holy trinity of good heat sink density lots of energy hardpoints and better energy weapons. but this is a double edged sword where by you loose viability when you operate outside the established vomit mode.

meta? who knows. my experience is that anything with high alpha and a good pilot is meta. then we get into the philosophical debate of whether the meta makes the pilot or vice versa. it is such an ephemeral concept. i just know that my clan deck is a wall of beams while my is deck is a bunch of pure fun mixed builds. the clan deck wins about as much as the is deck. but to do that i had to abandon things that are fun, like viable brawlers and skirmishers. the only clan mech that is both fun and deadly is my 8cac dire which i wont even take into fp because its too damn slow (despite its ability to get fast kills and a klick). run full tilt to the front and you still get accused of camping.

i should also point out that high hardpoint count also comes with the added bonus of getting to cherry pick the best hardpoints, even if you dont use them all. use micros to boost your hlls, and you have a knife fight weapon in reserve.

should point out that this is my current campaign about trying to get viable non vomit builds out of clan so that i can have fun when i go kitty.

The Kodiak-5, Nova, Dire Wolf, and Piranha have no hardpoint inflation, they just had that many weapons in their stock builds. Hardpoint inflation is when PGI artificially increases the hardpoint count of a mech that normally wouldn't have had them.

Still, I agree with the concept of making the other weapon types as useful as lasers on clan side. Its gotten pretty sad over there. I used to love having a UAC20 and some CSPLs on things, now it just sucks and I get more damage for less weight just going full lasers and dropping the UAC.

[PocketYoda]

Because people here are so stuck to the tabletop lore that this game can never be balanced.. Sure the table top was fun but this isn't the tabletop, people should just realize this and then this game can move on with better balance.

Edited by Samial, 27 February 2018 - 04:48 PM.

[Vellron2005]

Papaspud, on 27 February 2018 - 01:34 PM, said:

Why do, as a general rule, IS new mech releases mostly have to be buffed to not suck- many still do even after, yet new clan mechs for the most part need to be nerfed to not be quite so powerful.......................?

Hardpoint inflation?

Simple reason - PGI makes "lore based" loadouts / variants... and in TT, balance between IS and Clans was done by pitting lances Vs. stars.. and that doesn't translate very well..

They can't make completely new variants without adding in the lore-ones first..

Just imagine how cheated you would feel if saaay, the Timberwolf Prime didn't come with it's standard 2xCLRM20+2xCERLL+2CERML+2CMG, but instead came with something completely made up?

It would not be your childhood Timberwolf, would it?

Edited by Vellron2005, 28 February 2018 - 01:43 AM.

[Gradnuko]

Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood, on 27 February 2018 - 01:43 PM, said:

Also recently we've had the Annihilator as a mech that was released with high quirks then nerfed for being far too tanky, and its still the tankiest mech in the game by a good margin.

I had one for a few days, and sold it for being a big, walking coffin. It's not the slightest bit tanky. Sure, it has big armor numbers in the mechlab, but in practice it's a deathtrap. The arm hardpoints have worse than King Crab tier horrible placement so if you're anywhere but a large expanse of perfectly flat ground at least half your shots will be wasted on the environment. You're massive even compared to other 100 ton assaults, and you have the same max engine size as the short school bus the Annihilator's designer rode as a kid, so good luck using cover. It's so big that Michael J. Fox during an earthquake could hit it with a ERPPC from the other side of the map without even zooming in. It instantly gets focus fired as soon as anyone sees it. Plus you're so ridiculously tall you're constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, getting stuck on things you can't even see. It's by far, BY FAR the absolute worst assault I've ever driven, hands down. There's no competition.

Samial, on 27 February 2018 - 04:47 PM, said:

Because people here are so stuck to the tabletop lore that this game can never be balanced.. Sure the table top was fun but this isn't the tabletop, people should just realize this and then this game can move on with better balance.

Tabletop balance is fine as long as it's used with common sense. Weapons and torso hitboxes for example are things where it's fine to deviate from TT since hit locations aren't dice based in MWO. Where it becomes a problem is when things are half way based on TT with no thought put into what effect the changes will have. IS vs clans balance was designed on the assumption of IS having more mechs on the field, but clans mechs being better. It would be fine if they'd just do a proper job and have different size teams like they're supposed to instead of trying to reinvent the wheel for no apparent reason with quirks.

It's obviously going to be a balance nightmare if you give the team with mechs designed to be inherently superior an equal number of mechs. Where the devs screw up is trying to mix and match. If you stick as close to TT as is reasonable in a realtime shooter you're fine. If you make up all the stats and such from scratch you're fine. It's arbitrarily making one thing TT accurate and another thing different that's causing problems. In the immortal words of Mr. Miyagi; "Walk on road, hm? Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [squishing gesture] get the squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do "yes" or karate do "no." You karate do "guess so," [squishing gesture] just like grape. Understand?" Either give us TT team sizes or redesign clan tech to be equal and keep the team sizes even. You can't just do things half way and expect it to work out.

Edited by Plaid Ninja, 28 February 2018 - 02:42 AM.

[Khobai]

Plaid Ninja, on 28 February 2018 - 01:59 AM, said:

It's obviously going to be a balance nightmare if you give the team with mechs designed to be inherently superior an equal number of mechs

Yep. The only way to fix it properly is to make IS tech just as good as clan tech

You cant have a CXL 300 weigh 15.5 tons and make IS pay 20.5 tons for the same thing with an LFE 300. Youre just cheating IS out of a whole 5 tons for no good reason. And that disparity gets even worse with the bigger engines.

thats not balanced. the same goes for CDHS/CES/CFF vs ISDHS/ES/FF. You cant just give clans outright superior versions of the same thing then expect the game to be properly balanced.

PGI tried to balance it by giving IS superquirks and giving clans agility nerfs. But the game is now an unfun lopsided mess because clan mechs drive like porcelain garbage trucks and IS mediums have more survivability than clan heavies.

And for what? because PGI doesnt want to upset the lore crowd by making ISXL survive side torso destruction? Thats ridiculous.

Quote

It's by far, BY FAR the absolute worst assault I've ever driven, hands down. There's no competition.

Yeah the king crab is pretty bad. They need to rescale it and make it at least 15% smaller. And even then it would still be the biggest assault.

Edited by Khobai, 28 February 2018 - 03:11 AM.

[Gradnuko]

Khobai, on 28 February 2018 - 03:04 AM, said:

Yeah the king crab is pretty bad. They need to rescale it and make it at least 15% smaller. And even then it would still be the biggest assault.

I was talking about the annihilator. I was just making the comparison that the arm hardpoints are even more badly positioned than the king crab, which up until now had the record for worst arms. The king crab is actually not bad size wise. You realize it's like belly button high to an annihilator, right? I actually like the king crab way more than the annihilator.

Edit: On the king crab I'm always hitting the environment because the arms are way too far to the sides, but at least then you still have one arm that'll hit the intended target. On the annihilator the problem is vertical. The cockpit is way too high compared to the arms, so you think you're giving yourself plenty of room to shoot over something when you're actually not. Same problem, different axis. But vertical is worse than horizontal because with vertical it wastes both arms' shots. Plus you have to expose yourself more. In the king crab you just have to stick one arm around the corner and you can fire just that arm. In the annihilator to shoot down from a ledge you have to expose at least half of the mech. If your team decides to go top in HPG Manifold you're going to have a very bad time.

Edited by Plaid Ninja, 28 February 2018 - 04:38 AM.

[Khobai]

Quote

I was talking about the annihilator. I was just making the comparison that the arm hardpoints are even more badly positioned than the king crab, which up until now had the record for worst arms. The king crab is actually not bad size wise. You realize it's like belly button high to an annihilator, right?

the king crab has the worst volumetric scaling of any mech in the whole game. its like 20%-25% bigger than it should be for its tonnage.

and the annihilator is easily the best 100 tonner in the game right now.