41 replies to this topic

[Brain Cancer]

As we know, laserboating is often the fine art of finding just the right mix of enough lasers to dodge GH penalties, followed by enough DPS to melt faces. We just got to the point where Clan lasers are sometimes down to the point of a ghost heat limit of 1.

That is, if you mount more than one HLL, or anything that links to the same weapon group, you're gonna have a bad time firing them together. Rather than all these attempts to turn Clanbots into walking inferno generators, why not look at other options?

Rather than ghost heat penalties, give massed lasers burn time penalty. Fire too many at once, the weapon generates a longer duration for it's stated damage delivery as the machine attempts to feed too many at once without turning your internals to slag. You want gigadrill eight-ER LL Supernova and hit the alpha strike button?

Rather than instantly exploding, your beams burn on...and on...and on, spreading the heat load and damage over an obscenely long period of time to compensate for the insane demands your pilot just made for MORE POWER. Of course, you now feel like you're hitting the opponent with slightly overfocused flashlights as your burn lasts long enough for the target to get into cover and you even proceed to finish the 8-ERLL burn on another nearby target, because it took that fricking long.

Extending the burn time as a penalty is a lot more friendly. Keep the GH/max weapon limiters for PPFLD weapons like ballistics and PPCs, but we can be a lot more creative with lasers.

[El Bandito]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 09:25 AM, said:

Rather than ghost heat penalties, give massed lasers burn time penalty. Fire too many at once, the weapon generates a longer duration for it's stated damage delivery as the machine attempts to feed too many at once without turning your internals to slag. You want gigadrill eight-ER LL Supernova and hit the alpha strike button?

Rather than instantly exploding, your beams burn on...and on...and on, spreading the heat load and damage over an obscenely long period of time to compensate for the insane demands your pilot just made for MORE POWER. Of course, you now feel like you're hitting the opponent with slightly overfocused flashlights as your burn lasts long enough for the target to get into cover and you even proceed to finish the 8-ERLL burn on another nearby target, because it took that fricking long.

That's literally no different than simply chain firing those 8 CERLLs 2x2x2x2.

[Brain Cancer]

El Bandito, on 12 May 2018 - 09:28 AM, said:

That's literally no different than simply chain firing those 8 CERLLs 2x2x2x2.

Except for not slagging your giant combat robot for hitting the alpha strike button. You wanna look cool and throw huge amounts of beam weaponry downrange? I'm OK with this. And it means things like the current patch HLL limit wouldn't mean putting one on your chassis isn't an instant death sentence for using any weapon linked to it. Or machines like the Nova don't turn into heaps of molten slag firing their stock weaponry- they just have that burn stretching out for an obscenely long period of time (hey, laser suppression fire!).

[Y E O N N E]

I still like my version of Energy Draw better:

• 'Mechs have an energy pool that scales with engine size
  
• Only high-energy weapons (lasers, PPCs, Gauss) and movement draws on this pool
  
• Lighter 'Mechs use less of said pool to move
  
• Weapons draw based on damage, but only on cool-down
  
• Fire an alpha that requires more power than the pool has available, suffer proportionally increased cool-down length

Bam. Now you can alpha, but you leave yourself open to attack if you don't have other weapons to fill in with. Less alphas, increased mixed builds.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 12 May 2018 - 09:36 AM.

[Brain Cancer]

That still allows the big problem of "alpha, hide, alpha again" leading to Pokewarrior 4.0, Draw Me A Picture.

PGI's issue seems to be us focusing big DPS burns over the shortest period of time possible. Ghost heat punishes lots of lasers by killing the user. Cooldown increase doesn't change how fast someone burns a target, only how long they'll be behind cover before firing again. Burn duration increase literally spreads the love, increasing the effectiveness of twisting damage and reducing the effectiveness of even short-burn lasers if they're massed on a target.

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 09:40 AM, said:

That still allows the big problem of "alpha, hide, alpha again" leading to Pokewarrior 4.0, Draw Me A Picture.

At first glance, sure. But when you are required to wait 12 seconds between shots, do you know what happens? Shorter-ranged 'Mechs move up. Then you have a very real problem with them being close enough to use their much higher DPS, and often similar-sized alphas, absolutely trashing your firing line.

[Brain Cancer]

Yeonne Greene, on 12 May 2018 - 09:42 AM, said:

At first glance, sure. But when you are required to wait 12 seconds between shots, do you know what happens? Shorter-ranged 'Mechs move up. Then you have a very real problem with them being close enough to use their much higher DPS, and often similar-sized alphas, absolutely trashing your firing line.

Also, since cooldown doesn't start until a burn ends, I've already got that folded into my proposal. If you didn't notice.

[frumpylumps]

I like PGIs changes much better. It gives you better options to deal with different situations.

Learn to stagger your lasers 0.5.

I'm so glad that the developers have the sense to ignore the masses of stupid crybabies who are upset at losing overpowered advantages.

I think I'll buy a mech pack to show my appreciation.

Edited by frumpylumps, 12 May 2018 - 10:13 AM.

[Nema Nabojiv]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 09:25 AM, said:

Rather than ghost heat penalties, give massed lasers burn time penalty.

Rather than inventing new silly penalties to solve largely imaginary problems, they could just unnerf other guns so lasers wont be the only viable option.

But that is of course too sensible approach for PGI, better impose progressive ghostheat for each owned clan mech.

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 10:06 AM, said:

Also, since cooldown doesn't start until a burn ends, I've already got that folded into my proposal. If you didn't notice.

Your proposal requires you to actually be exposed or just be firing into a wall.

It's not functionally the same. I'm creating windows of opportunity for other styles to work without making one style worthless because it has to sit there and eat a lot of return damage to actually get used. If I want to expose that long, and my targets are exposed that long, I can do more and better damage with UACs or ATMs.

The nuances of your version are far and away sloppier than mine.

[Dogstar]

My personal proposal is to hard limit all weaponry to 30 dps.

As in you can't fire any more weapons for a second once you've done 30 damage in a second

Note that high duration weapons are largely unaffected by this - a 45 damage alpha can be fired in 1.5 seconds and a 60 alpha over two.

Edited by Dogstar, 12 May 2018 - 10:21 AM.

[Khobai]

Quote

Rather than ghost heat penalties, give massed lasers burn time penalty.

no.

just lower the damage on clan lasers.

that is the most sensible nerf and doesnt require anyone to change builds or relearn the game

[Brain Cancer]

Yeonne Greene, on 12 May 2018 - 10:14 AM, said:

Your proposal requires you to actually be exposed or just be firing into a wall.

It's not functionally the same. I'm creating windows of opportunity for other styles to work without making one style worthless because it has to sit there and eat a lot of return damage to actually get used. If I want to expose that long, and my targets are exposed that long, I can do more and better damage with UACs or ATMs.

The nuances of your version are far and away sloppier than mine.

Or, you know, you could just not alpha huge amounts of pinpoint burn with minimal exposure, which is itself a big advantage to laservomit.

[Luminis]

Question: What's the primary goal of Ghost Heat?
Answer: Preserve TTK.

Question: Are there other means to preserve TTK?
Answer: Yes, increased armour and structure, which has already been implemented.

Question: If armour / structure was increased further, would that not shift the focus towards sustained damage?
Answer: Probably, we can see this trend in Solaris were poking and fading isn't as viable as it is in 12v12.

Question: Are increasingly convoluted solutions better than bumping up armour / structure across the board?
Answer: ???

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 01:06 PM, said:

Or, you know, you could just not alpha huge amounts of pinpoint burn with minimal exposure, which is itself a big advantage to laservomit.

It's the entire point of laser vomit. Taking it away is akin to taking away the ability for LRMs to lock and do indirect fire.

[Bombast]

Diminishing returns on weapons boated has been something I've been suggesting they try for quite some time.

[Brain Cancer]

Yeonne Greene, on 12 May 2018 - 01:31 PM, said:

It's the entire point of laser vomit. Taking it away is akin to taking away the ability for LRMs to lock and do indirect fire.

But this way, smaller numbers of lasers don't get hosed like the HLL was due to be, and without ghost heat, total heat load isn't increased as a punishment which also restricts your use of other weapons. Laservomit is clearly in the crosshairs here for maximum damage reduction/control in some form. Heat is by far the worst nerf you can apply to an already hot weapon system. Increasing duration doesn't.

[SPNKRGrenth]

Super easy nerfs to curb the Clan laser boating issues.

C-ERML Damage: 7 > 6
C-HML Damage: 10 > 9
C-HLL Damage: 18 > 16

Then give some small heat and cooldown buffs to compensate. Maybe nerf duration slightly if nerfing damage isn't enough.

Or, just reverse the old laser duration buffs from over a year ago. Remember when C-ERLL had a duration of 1.5 and C-ERML had a duration of 1.35? Or when C-HLL were going to have a duration of 1.75 and C-HML a duration of 1.55-1.65? PGI should give that nerf a try.

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 12 May 2018 - 02:22 PM, said:

But this way, smaller numbers of lasers don't get hosed like the HLL was due to be, and without ghost heat, total heat load isn't increased as a punishment which also restricts your use of other weapons. Laservomit is clearly in the crosshairs here for maximum damage reduction/control in some form. Heat is by far the worst nerf you can apply to an already hot weapon system. Increasing duration doesn't.

Smaller numbers of lasers are hosed anyway because small numbers of lasers do insufficient damage for the exposure.

I don't disagree that heat is not a good idea, I just disagree about duration being the way to go because lasers are all about high alpha and low exposure, with the trade-off being poor sustained DPS. If you increase the exposure, ballistics and certain classes of mikssiles win. You will end up having to make more changes to everything to accomodate this, whereas with a scaling cool-down you will not.

[Brain Cancer]

The point is that a longer cooldown does nothing to change the one burn the laserboat gets.

Point at CT, burn armor off in Hellbringer ironically brrrrt to death with a few dinky machineguns or something. And if the opponent is crippled or dead from the first burn, why there's nothing stopping you from moving on unless you're getting bum rushed, in which case who cares about exposure time, you aren't in cover so just patiently melt armor until you can alphahose the target anyway.

Duration stretching out does precisely what they're aiming to do with laservomit- reduce the ability to quickly burn out someone's robot. Cooldown does zero for this, although it certainly means you'll get laser-to-90% heat builds that need the time post-alpha to cool down anyway, possibly even with a laser or two extra to pew pew with while the main battery resets it's extended cooldown. Frontloading damage is the goal, after all.