I wanted to reply here to a suggestion I made earlier on twitter:
Jman5:
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With regards to your balance thread, have you guys considered changing heatsinks so they don't scale linearly? This way you don't break balance for smaller builds, but put soft limits on the excessive ones with 20+ double heatsinks.
Chris Lowrey:
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The current system already does this to a degree with the internal / external heatsink system. Having it curve exponentially would present its own issues in communicating how that effectiveness degrades as you equip more heat sinks in the 'Mechlab.
I don't think communicating it would be any more difficult than how the game already communicates the fact that internal and external heatsinks provide different bonuses. The mechlab Heat Management value + documentation in the patch notes. Although, I think for the most part people understand how hot their mech is by experience more than anything else.
You could always add a graph to visually display its effect in the mechlab. Or some drop down list of all your heatsinks and their values.
Chris:
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An additional consideration would also be how do critical hits in-game effect this curve? Are you locked into a certain effectiveness value per heat sink critical hit? or would the Impact scale with each component destruction?
I would just work them in reverse. If you lose heatsink #29 it wont make as big a difference than if you lose heatsinks #11.
Chris:
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And another question I would throw out there: Is it the heat sinks that are the issue? Or the Weapons that excessive heatsinks enable? If you have an SRM boat that trys to maximize on his heatsinks, should he be punished by the same system meant to target another weapon system?
The problem again and again are the builds these excessive heatsink enable, but if you go around nerfing individual weapons you will be impacting all the other builds that may not be a problem. 1 laser isn't an issue. lots of lasers fired together are.
I think tackling it at the heatsink level is a good way to come at the problem of excessive damage instead of playing wack-a-mole constantly. I also think that this is less of a problem for other builds because they're simply not as tonnage efficient as laserboats. But regardless if you're building a missile boat with 80 damage and 25 heatsinks or whatever, I don't see why they shouldn't be reigned in as well.
Chris:
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This isn't to say that changes to the heat systems are off limits. I'm more then willing to look into changes to it if we feel it would move things in a direction we would want. Which is why we where fine providing the Single heatsink buff this coming patch.
Its just something that we have to tread very carefully with since nearly every system in the game is tied to the heat system.
You can tune how the heatsinks scale as conservatively as you want to not unduly impact non-problem builds. You could make it so heatsinks work just fine up to 20, then start to taper off in effectiveness beyond that. You could make it 25 just to target a couple of builds. You could make it so only dissipation rate tapers off or even add a cap to the rate. The skies the limit here, but I do think the one common element that ties a lot of high-alpha builds together is that they usually have lots and lots of heatsinks.
Anything you do will have an impact on non-target builds. If you nerf guass you'll be nerfing some guy who runs around with a guass in his Cougar and nothing else. He's hardly breaking the game, but you could wind up ruining his build in the process of trying to fix the problematic ones. I think one of the nice things about this approach is that the scope of mechs effected is much more narrow. You're not going to break a Cougar with this change because a Cougar isn't going to equip 20 heatsinks.
Edited by Jman5, 14 June 2018 - 09:28 AM.
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ENOVA, on 14 June 2018 - 05:10 AM, said:
