211 replies to this topic

[Mercarryn]

Quote

Banshee:

• BNC-3S

- Ballistic cooldown increased to -15% (from -10%)

- Missile cooldown increased to -15% (from -10%)
- Has received a new Weapon Heat Gen -10% quirk
- Has received new Armor quirks across front torso, arms, and leg locations.
Banshee Design notes: Compared to its more mobility based counterparts, the BNC-3S' has lagged a bit behind its alternative variants. As a Banshee Variant that heavily reconfigured the classic mobile configuration into a more traditional Tank / Weapon platform role, we wanted to provide the 'Mech with a bit of an upgrade to better position the 3S into this role.

Wow, I did not expect something like this to happen, but as a Banshee 3S fanboy, I will gladly just shut up and take these buffs. This is going to be interesting.

On another note, you could perhaps revise the Banshee 3E and 3M and give them a buff in torso speed. Since engine desync the two variants are the ones that got hurt a lot by that, because now they cannot properly use the shield arms anymore. And that is something they might need to be viable again.

About the weapon and air strike changes, I like them somehow. The small lasers might be better used for DPS with the heat reduction. Though it all comes down to whether or not they might be able to outstand the regular laser vormit hellbringers etc. in close range

Regarding Faction play: From my understanding about these changes, this is just another slap to the face of the loyalists. In that case you could actually close down the loyalist pledges altogether. There is no more give and take in the contract options.

Edited by Mercarryn, 17 March 2018 - 02:42 AM.

[Buenaventura]

Nice to get patch notes where you don't have to increase browser zoom level to read them.

A bit worried about those new event tracking categories, as some highly depend on the enemy team and/or your team actually making use of that ECM counter or UAV you provided. Matt, please, before using these ever, please do some hours of solo drops in QP trying to score these.

[Gasoline]

Hm... not sure what to make of these patch notes quite yet... have to actually see/feel the changes ingame.

Mech changes sound nice, but still no word about the Night Gyr that still is as agile as a Mad Cat Mk. II.

I don't think the buffs to the small laser lineup will make them any better as they're now. Heat was never the problem.

Clan ACs will still be inferior to ultras and LB-Xs. Other than a reduction of their projectile count no patch will make them actual good weapons.

[Lionheart2012]

Sigmar Sich, on 17 March 2018 - 12:12 AM, said:

I like this patch, mostly. Mech buffs are great.
Not sure about CW changes. Many people will be glad because of them, but i'm afraid people will abuse them to rapidly switch sides, to avoid strong opposing units. You probably heard those petty "can't beat them - join them". Now it will be unrestricted. Very poor design.
Weapon changes however are lacking. This "microchanges" stretch over half a year, is not a sound strategy. This design was born out of devs PTSD after several failures. It made the game very stale. And after many years of this Waitwarrior, it is much harder to be patient.
Do the balance changes as game needs them, don't stretch them over several months. Please.

Do which balance changes? Unfortunately, there is no agreement about which should be done. Further, any change has a dynamic effect, so incremental changes over time allows for these changes to be measurable and adjusted accordingly. Rome was not built in a day....

[Bud Crue]

I like the AC changes, among others.

This patch is mostly a step in the right direction. A small step. But at least its a step.

[Lionheart2012]

Navid A1, on 16 March 2018 - 08:38 PM, said:

Find the problem in this image:




Knowing PGI's track record of knowing this game well!!!.... I give them a hint, the king crab is not the one with a problem

The mobility of the Firestarter compensates. 'Mechs have advantages and disadvantages to use. If all had the same attributes, (e.g. pitch angle, torso twist angle, hard points, armor) then it would not make much sense to have such a diversity of them, would it?

[Sigmar Sich]

Lionheart2012, on 17 March 2018 - 03:55 AM, said:

Do which balance changes? Unfortunately, there is no agreement about which should be done. Further, any change has a dynamic effect, so incremental changes over time allows for these changes to be measurable and adjusted accordingly. Rome was not built in a day....

I'm not talking about community ideas and consensus about them. I'm talking about development pace.
Devs did agree/acknowledge something must be done about state of the game. And dev / s who regularly play the game have ideas. But "micro changes" strategy stretches targeted goals over many patches. For further details listen to Paul's podcast.
After years of waiting for this game to flourish (it didn't), i find this "micro changes" strategy painful and no longer tolerable, and would prefer "just do it!" strategy.
And please don't sell me that about Rome. If Rome was built by PGI, we would be naming planets by phoenician or celtic names

[D V Devnull]

Well, I just read the News Post and the Forum Thread up to now. Except for the Consumable Changes and Clan DHS Changes, everything else looks pretty good. Now the Consumables and Clan DHS are only going to work alright for High-Skill Pilots, while Casual-Class Pilots and other Non-Top-Tier Pilots will get horribly screwed. If PGI really had to change these, the following values would have worked better and would be more incremental...

Clan Double Heat Sink Health -- 4.3
(Seriously, taking away a full 1.0 is a bit too much, and anyone who's not already at the top in skill will be hurt by this.)

Cool Shot Base Cooling -- 16
(Dropping from 18 to 14 is a tad too much, and High Alpha Builds will just duck into cover to shrug off the heat. All this did was hurt the DPS-based builds that require maintaining a constant stream of fire.)

Aerial Strike Shells -- 8
Aerial Strike Duration -- 0.75
Aerial Strike Lateral Radius -- 8.6
(Again, the nerf was too big in bringing them down to 6 Shells with 0.6 Duration and bumping the Radius to 10... Now only someone who can place this item perfectly is going to be using it. The rest of us will suffer with constant misses and wasted (C-Bills) and/or (MC) lost from Player Inventories. This will cause a massive shift back to the Artillery Strikes, which I am sure would not have been intended.)

...with the point being that smaller, more incremental changes would have resulted in a better finding of balance. Due to there being a limit of 91 Skill Tree Nodes at this time, making such heavy nerfs badly hurts the balance because people just don't end up with much to spend in the Auxiliary Tree in most cases. PGI is going to start seeing a lot more 'PugStomps', a lot more frustrated people, and therefore more leaving the game than are joining. Not a good way to have MWO go, given a previous statement by Russ Bullock that he was trying to make the game last at least 7 more years. Perhaps it's time that they had the thought to up the Skill Node Limit to 100 finally, so that the game and its' Community can function and behave better?

~D. V. "gets really tired of 'overkill nerfing' of things" Devnull

[LT. HARDCASE]

InnerSphereNews, on 16 March 2018 - 05:05 PM, said:

- The Sparky has received a light mobility increase
- Has received a moderate mobility increase
- Has received a moderate mobility increase
- Mobility has been Lightly increased, Deceleration more then many other attributes
- Has received a moderate mobility increase

Okay so why aren't actual hard before/after numbers being provided for all of these?

These are supposed to be patch notes. Right now I'd need to go get all of the numbers off of Smurfy myself so I can compare them after the patch drops. Why should I need to do so?

Help. SOS. Please drop rescue directly on smoke.

Sereglach, on 16 March 2018 - 09:50 PM, said:

Also, the Flamer . . . can we please see it be addressed and fixed? I've outlined it a number of times before and recently have outlined it several times in phased implementations that are right up Paul's alley for incremental changes. Fixed Flat values are the goal, though. Restore the pre-flamergeddon damage, get rid of the exponential scaling and firing windows, and bring the Heat DPS and HPS into controllable values that prevent any balancing headaches. Please . . . this weapon has been left to languish for far too long.

Well they have outright banned the Flamers in Solaris, so I'm guessing that means that making adjustments isn't on the list of things to do.

[Sjorpha]

Most of these changes look ok, but there are a few missing the mark.

Atlas brawling for example, what makes you think more yaw is going to help? It already has enough yaw radius, the problem with the Arlas is that it twists too slow, if the intention is to improve brawling the appropriate buff is to yaw speed, not radius. Some more pitch would also help, but the most crucial buff it needs is torso twisting speed so it can spread laser alphas better.

Clan heatsink "nerf" is the same kind of problem. You are nerfing health when the problem is that they are easier to boat resulting in clan being superior at laser vomit. A health nerf doesn't adress this problem, the appropriate nerf would be to the cooling itself, IS DHS needs to cool better since you can't put as many of them on your mech.

Those are my only real problems with this patch, you identified two real balance problems but your fixes don't actually do anything to fix them. I guess they also don't actively make anything worse either so there's that at least, but you really need to look a little more closely at what the actual problem with specific underpowered equipment is and adress that specific problem rather than just apply some seemingly random buff and hope it helps.

To recap: Atlas can't twist fast enough, so fix that problem. Clan DHS are too massable and efficient , so fix that problem. Your changes doesn't adress either of these actual problems and therefore ends up being completely insignificant.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

good:

-art fixes, sound fixes.
seriously thanks for those
-event fixes; more things to do events on.

bad:
-small lasers, small pulse etc still being useless. yes, yes.. your spreadsheet tells you they're too good... pls try them ingame.
pls think about why NOBODY (except special/fringe builds maybe) uses them, still.
it's no rocket science. pls up the damage on those things.

same for the micros. er and pulse.
NOBODY uses them - NOT EVEN the special snowflakes.
be generous with the buffs here, or just ax them from the game - atm they're being in it by name only, anyway.

let somebody you listen to explain to you why the atlas yaw' is not the problem, but yaw speed is.
let somebody you listen to explain to you what the difference is.
let somebody you listen to show to you both ingame.
..again, no rocket science. and yet....

too much to rant on, so I'm not gonna. not that it changes anything, anyway.

Edited by Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie, 17 March 2018 - 06:12 AM.

[Gasoline]

D V Devnull, on 17 March 2018 - 04:25 AM, said:

Clan Double Heat Sink Health -- 4.3
(Seriously, taking away a full 1.0 is a bit too much, and anyone who's not already at the top in skill will be hurt by this.)

I see where you come from, but tbh. item health is most of the time a useless stat with all the crit weaponry around.

[Rhialto]

Lionheart2012, on 16 March 2018 - 09:25 PM, said:

Priorities....

Sure but it's well been over a year to fix shadows... they did it for the Jagermech in an acceptable delay after it was reported.

And why not fix decals before adding bolt-on? Not many programmers would keep adding code and new modules without fixing problems along the way because no company would want to keep such programmers.

[D V Devnull]

And I just realized something, having looked at the bottom of the Patch Notes post again. The section where the "Manual Download" should be is MISSING. I really hope they get that added in time, otherwise there are going to be a lot of people with problems in trying to Patch the MWO Install.

~D. V. "I'll be one of them!" Devnull

[Nema Nabojiv]

Fuсk off from heatsikns please. There is already too much frustrating critting going on and there is no need to increase it even further.

[Arkhangel]

Navid A1, on 16 March 2018 - 08:16 PM, said:

You want to make us think you really "analyse" things PGI?

then take a look at the Atlas and the Firestarter... specifically the torso pitch values. See if you can find the problem.!

They can analyze it better than you. you don't get the data of every match. they do.

[Arkhangel]

BTGbullseye, on 16 March 2018 - 11:48 PM, said:

It can't actually hit on the other side of most cover anymore... Why wouldn't people get upset? They just need to start the bombing run 40% of the way further down the bombard line of the original, and keep all other changes. The range is what makes this useful, but having effectively the same hit distance as the arty is going to make it worthless for many.

and that's a good thing. Airstrikes were wayyyy too damn overused. I mean, look at the World Championships this past year. There was like at least 6 Airstrikes dropped per side per match. they're too good how they are, so they'll getting balanced out by losing range, but getting slightly wider.

[LT. HARDCASE]

Arkhangel, on 17 March 2018 - 08:51 AM, said:

They can analyze it better than you. you don't get the data of every match. they do.

Having data and performing proper data analysis are two monumentally different tasks.

PGI does not employ an actual data analyst.

[Jep Jorgensson]

InnerSphereNews, on 16 March 2018 - 05:05 PM, said:

Equipment Changes
- Clan Double Heatsinks:
Health reduced to 4 (from 5)



Clan Double Heat Sink Design Notes: Due to the reduced Critical locations on Clan Double Heatsinks, we have seen a heavy amount of loadouts in the heavy and assault class' lean on heatsink boating as an easy way to supplement the heavy amount of firepower that the Clans can often acquire for minimal tonnage through certain weapon selections. We do not wish to separate the capabilities of heat sinks to the detriment of those clan 'Mechs that occupy the lighter half of their roster which are often restricted more by Tonnage, and not critical space, or those loadouts that rely on heavier payloads such as ballistic or missile weapons. But we do want to target a change that provides heatsink boating loadouts with a bit more natural give and take by making mass heatsink stacking more venerable to attrition through critical hits.

Come again? Our heatsinks are getting nerfed yet again? Aside from nerfing them from true double heatsinks, you guys already nerfed their health by cutting it in half a while ago! As it stands now, one Clan double heatsink is 5 health spread over two slots for 2.5 health per slot. The IS double heatsink has 10 health spread over 3 slots for 3.33 health per slot. Only in the PGI universe could IS tech be 30%-65+% (current and proposed double heat sink health per slot values) more durable as the supposedly more advanced Clan tech. So our heavies and assaults like to use heatsinks to keep them as cool as possible. How exactly is this a new thing? I thought that was why every single mech in the game has heatsinks. Was I mistaken somehow?

Furthermore, I seem to recall extra heatsinks needing to be mounted in lighter mechs with engines rated below 250. Since said heatsinks are outside the engine, then would they not also become more vulnerable as well? If a heavy or assault shutdown from overheating because its heatsinks were critted out, that is bad enough. But they have plenty of armor to protect them and may not even be close to the enemy. If a light shutdown because of it, that is a death sentence. Unlike heavies and assaults, a light mech's greatest armor is their speed and since most of them are short range, take away their speed in the face of the enemy and they will be motionless clay pigeons. Seems to me that this never occurred to anybody in PGI (not surprising when considering who we are talking about, but still irritating to say the least).

Conclusion: In short, this is going to hit the lighter mechs harder than the heavies or assaults and PGI is all for it since the IS'ers have been complaining about our lights a lot the past number of months and in all likelihood, nerfing our lights just because they no longer suck was their true primary aim to begin with. Par for the course yet again, PGI!

I really hope that PGI gets bought out and the game gets saved before they completely run it into the ground.

Edited by Jep Jorgensson, 17 March 2018 - 11:17 AM.

[DerHenker]

any chance that, lets say in the next 2439years, the loading times before and after the match get better ?