72 replies to this topic

[ZippySpeedMonkey]

Hello ?

You lot should know what I consistently play.

Lord knows I've killed most of you repeatedly with it...

[Alexander of Macedon]

FupDup, on 21 May 2018 - 05:40 PM, said:

Paying lights lots of spacebucks for pressing the R key for friendly Lurmboat potatoes wouldn't be a very compelling reason to use the weight class. Especially not the slow ones like the Puma and Urbie.

They need to be effective at fighting. Not necessarily toe-to-toe starefest arm-wrestle fighting, but some sort of guerilla fighting. This is a first person shooter. People enjoy shooting. Shooting is fun.

There need to be meaningful rewards for successful squirreling and skirmishing beyond the damage you do. Drawing a third of the opfor's tonnage halfway across the map can have vastly greater consequences than doing an extra 200 damage, but it has essentially no reward.

The problem, of course, is how you measure stuff that's not raw stats.

[RoadblockXL]

IS side, I think lights have pretty good build diversity.

You can probably attribute it to having lasers without atrocious duration and SRMs that don't fly all over the place.

On Clan side, all their light-weight weapons are kind of sucky because boats like the Huntsman and Arctic Wolf (for SRMs) and the Nova (for lasers) carry so many of them that even slight buffs make a huge difference to their damage output.

I would give the individual mechs/omnipods offensive quirks to bring them back into line with their pre-nerfed forms so they're viable again without ruining the balance of heavier mechs.

[Khobai]

most lights will always be crap at combat.

thats why we need role warfare. adding things like electronic/sensor warfare would give lights the ability to do things other weight classes cant and supplement their lack of combat prowess in other ways.

[Erronius]

There's just not a lot of balance between the individual light mechs right now. Some are way too big, some aren't very agile, a lot are starved for hardpoints and the weight differences between IS/Clans really compounds the issue, too. And when you factor in how unforgiving they are to new pilots and how vulnerable they can be, it's no wonder that not a lot of pilots really want to bother with them.

Another thing about non-brawl type of light mech builds...even if you try to spot or snipe or whatever...you're taking a big risk for minimal reward by taking a build that can't go 1v1 with a brawl light when they track you down trying to be sneaky. Imagine running around in a NARC Raven and a Pirahna finds you...GL with that, LOL.

[LordNothing]

FupDup, on 21 May 2018 - 05:40 PM, said:

Paying lights lots of spacebucks for pressing the R key for friendly Lurmboat potatoes wouldn't be a very compelling reason to use the weight class. Especially not the slow ones like the Puma and Urbie.

They need to be effective at fighting. Not necessarily toe-to-toe starefest arm-wrestle fighting, but some sort of guerilla fighting. This is a first person shooter. People enjoy shooting. Shooting is fun.

of course shooting is fun, but being strictly anti assault tends to limit your build options.

[Old dirty B]

Of all things you can do with a light mech, it will do brawling the best because in that particular combat style the light mech makes most from its excellent mobility and limited tonnage.

But there are other things you can do, like capping, spotting, tagging, anti-missile duty, dropping strikes, running fuel cells and what else... can't imagine what fun that really brings but you can already do quite a lot when you cant stand the heat of the kitchen!
Why do people want to play light mechs (in mwo) and then not do combat?

[Bishop Six]

I love my Commandos...my TDK can compete with every other light!

[Bishop Six]

Erronius, on 21 May 2018 - 08:35 PM, said:

There's just not a lot of balance between the individual light mechs right now. Some are way too big, some aren't very agile, a lot are starved for hardpoints and the weight differences between IS/Clans really compounds the issue, too. And when you factor in how unforgiving they are to new pilots and how vulnerable they can be, it's no wonder that not a lot of pilots really want to bother with them.

Another thing about non-brawl type of light mech builds...even if you try to spot or snipe or whatever...you're taking a big risk for minimal reward by taking a build that can't go 1v1 with a brawl light when they track you down trying to be sneaky. Imagine running around in a NARC Raven and a Pirahna finds you...GL with that, LOL.

Yeah...so this week i had the joy to play 6-8 matches with a guy (greetings Sir o7) in FP who ONLY drove Ravens. I dont know his full Dropdeck because i only saw him in his 2 Ravens...1 Narc-Raven & 1 Fighting-Raven.

It was magical to watch him playing these old garbage-bins. You know...no matter what enemy we faced or what mode we played, that guy ALWAYS needed about 2-3 minutes to narc the whole enemy team, even if we attacked!

I never saw something like this and it was 10x more impressive for me than all the Damage-Dealer-Pro-Player together. You did 3,5 k damage? Nice, but this Raven-Pilot is a damn hero!

You see...you can do everything in this game if you just want to

[BurningDesire]

40t meds are in the same boat too since this skill tree, they nuked the cicada 3c and took all its acceleration quirks and ppc quirks are stripped to. No matter how i try and run it your doing around 200 damage and thats it. Before this skill tree it was tough to use but rewarding when you pulled it off.
If the nova is the C-spl issue how about take the quirks off it for a start, then give it neg quirks for using the spl so its not a go to build.
God damn it i just wanna run medusa more

[Weeny Machine]

I haven't played for 7 months and logged in yesterday. I was sad that the number of light mechs in matches seemed to have gone down even further. All I see is laser spam of heavies, assaults mixed in with some missiles.

Back on topic:
Light mechs got nerfed directly and indirectly repeatedly.

The biggest issue was re-scaling. Most 35t mechs rival medium mechs without having the armour, structure, alphas, heat disspation etc

They are so fragile especially considering how much dps is flung around. Plus a part of the laser spam will hit you.

Light mechs need some more quirks. Just take one example...

Huggin
Before multiple nerfs: low alpha, high dps. Needed facetime. A good risk vs reward mech. A tad OP, though, because of the lousy hitreg at that time (which changed later). It played differently than most lights which was refreshing. I would really like to see how the unnerfed Huggin would perform nowadays with his 45% missile quirk. I suppose it wouldn't be OP

After multiple nerfs:Trash tier. Low dps, low alpha, short range, survival rate medium at best mostly because everyone ignores him


This is just one example that all lights are pressed into the same mold: lasers (in some cases MGs) and drive-by shooting because they are fragile. How boring.

Kiiyor, on 20 May 2018 - 05:01 PM, said:

I think it's due to the nature of lights themselves.

They're fairly borderline as far as average performance goes, and generally, it's much harder to perform consistently in a light than the other classes - despite what the frothing at the mouth assault-mech-driving-no-rear-armour crowd will tell you.

This makes the gap between the top lights and the lower performing ones far more noticeable. The PIR and the MLX are in a pretty good place right now, especially as they can boat baby dakka, so it's natural for light pilots to gravitate towards these machines.

The problem is that in the current state of the game no other mech class should lose to a light mech 1 v 1. Park your *** next to a wall and wait till the weenie comes. That said, most heavies still turn like ballerinas making it too easy to kill lights anway.
Why the hate then? The hate stems simply from tunnel-visioning lolalpha slingers who don't realize that someone flanks them or pokes their back.

Khobai, on 21 May 2018 - 08:04 PM, said:

most lights will always be crap at combat.

thats why we need role warfare. adding things like electronic/sensor warfare would give lights the ability to do things other weight classes cant and supplement their lack of combat prowess in other ways.

It would have helped had they linked detection range to the tonnage of the mech plus had added a sligh detecion delay for light mechs.

Edited by Bush Hopper, 22 May 2018 - 04:13 AM.

[Nightbird]

Lights are obviously OP and must be nerfed until the population hits 0 - PG master plan.

[Daurock]

My thoughts are that we pretty much see all the lights boating MGs. This indicates, at least to me, that that particular playstyle is so far ahead of the other light options that it needs looking into. That Probably means a nerf to MG Crits, and a Buff to Small Class lasers. (Both Pulse and Standard) I'd probably go with a Heat and Cycle time buff to the lasers, instead of a pure damage buff, but that's just my opinion there.

At the end of the day though, if we want to see more variety, we need to (A) convince people to get out their pirahna, ideally by ( B ) giving them many light options that are actually good. Simply moving the Piranhas from MGs to lasers isn't going to do that, so we need to also look at why mechs like the Firestarter, locust, javelin, osiris, etc are pretty much non-existent.

Most of those mechs just need a little bit. The firestarter, for example probably just needs a small quirk buff to get it on par with the Wolfhound, which is actually pretty good for a light. A few of them will need some major buffs to get to a usable state. Due to their speed, the Cougar, Panther, and Adder all probably need urbanmech level quirks to actually work. (The urbanmech being on the border between good and bad for a light right now) They simply do not have that, which simply makes them bad mechs. Make them Pocket mediums, por favor.

Edited by Daurock, 22 May 2018 - 08:44 AM.

[mistlynx4life]

Quote

My thoughts are that we pretty much see all the lights boating MGs. This indicates, at least to me, that that particular playstyle is so far ahead of the other light options that it needs looking into. That Probably means a nerf to MG Crits, and a Buff to Small Class lasers.

Okay - I've said this before and I'll just re-cap here:

The Light MG Boats are not OP. What happened is we had a wide variety of Lights but only a handful that people were using a year ago to do any real damage. Anybody not playing those had to really git gud to perform at even a mediocre level or get laughed out of the match. Suddenly we get the MLX-G and then the PIR and those Light pilots now have something that can do some serious damage. Yes, there are rookies getting some success with those MG builds - but they aren't the ones consistently getting the crazy damage. The ones getting the crazy damage are getting it because they are veteran Light pilots who finally have another option with which to be a Light pilot doing Light pilot things and it happens to be a Light that is extremely capable of dealing damage as well. The MLX-G and the PIRs are super weak. Just shoot them. Bring arm-mounted weapons. Travel with a buddy. Call them out to your team when you first see them. Keep your Alpha Lance nearby and tell them to screen.

So it's not that they're OP as much as they start to upset the Meta a little. Heavier pilots knew the counters to the other 'mechs pretty well (your Pirate Banes and Wolfhounds and Cheetahs, mostly using laser weapons) but here comes these two tiny 'mechs doing something entirely different. Defeating them means adopting and adapting strategies that might make folks a little uncomfortable because it means thinking differently than before. That's all. Sadly, it doesn't do much for the dozens of other Lights that still don't see much play - but I think that's changing. I hope so, anyway. Ravens are hecka fun, lol.

::glances at sigblock nervously::

[Prototelis]

Yeah, I played a **** ton in a Pirate's Bane. It's really the only reason I'm good in the PIR is because its more or less the same play style without ecm.

Rolling anything over 400 in Mr. PeanutButter is a got damn challenge. But the thing is just anemic outside of being really cheeky and trolling. It's also super easy to lead shots on, where as the PIR is more or less a piece of paper from the side.

Of course I play the PIR a lot, its one of the most powerful light mechs in the game. It's the PB3.0.

I don't see them in SoloQ as often. They're somewhat of a fixture in GQ if you want to roll assaults in your big groups.

You'll see a lot of them when they go for Cbills. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't complain after they get wrecked. Those dudes are going to be the first to saddle up on cbill day, and the first to complain that its made out of glass.

Then it will go back to OG 6 spl ACH frequency.

Edit: As for why you don't see more diversity on clan side for lights I'd put my money on locked equipment on omnis, srm spread is silly, and small class lasers are kind of dead. Like why do micros even have a ghost heat limit for all that weakness and heat?

Edited by Prototelis, 22 May 2018 - 10:11 AM.

[MechaBattler]

I think the MG boats are performing too good for their weight. Why bring heavier when you can do more with less and free up tonnage for your drop deck? Maybe the Flea will do the same for the IS with it's MG build. We'll see.

[mistlynx4life]

Prototelis, on 22 May 2018 - 10:07 AM, said:

You'll see a lot of them when they go for Cbills. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't complain after they get wrecked. Those dudes are going to be the first to saddle up on cbill day, and the first to complain that its made out of glass.

That's a lovely thought, lol.

[Prototelis]

MechaBattler, on 22 May 2018 - 10:11 AM, said:

I think the MG boats are performing too good for their weight. Why bring heavier when you can do more with less and free up tonnage for your drop deck? Maybe the Flea will do the same for the IS with it's MG build. We'll see.

I hope it gets some quirkage to make up for less machine guns.

I counter that MG boat performance is about average, and the rest of the lights in the game suck so bad by comparison you can't tell.

[R5D4]

Prototelis, on 22 May 2018 - 10:14 AM, said:

I hope it gets some quirkage to make up for less machine guns.

I counter that MG boat performance is about average, and the rest of the lights in the game suck so bad by comparison you can't tell.

MG are imo one of the few weapons left that are worth taking on a light everything else has had it's heat increased or damage decreased to the point they just aren't worth taking unless you can take a butt tonne of them on a heavy or assault.

The way I see it PGI is in a game of tug of war -- give too much to make the weapons OK on lights and they'll be TOO powerful on heavies and assaults that will boat the crap out of them. Give too little and you only alienate the (small) remaining group of light pilots. Given the dwindling number of light pilots already which would you pick?

Edited by R5D4, 22 May 2018 - 01:18 PM.

[FupDup]

R5D4, on 22 May 2018 - 01:17 PM, said:

The way I see it PGI is in a game of tug of war -- give too much to make the weapons OK on lights and they'll be TOO powerful on heavies and assaults that will boat the crap out of them. Give too little and you only alienate the (small) remaining group of light pilots. Given the dwindling number of light pilots already which would you pick?

There is the third option of quirks that let us manually give certain mechs better performance without having a ripple effect out to other units.