To keep the game interesting and not just have all weapons similar, the weapons need to be harder to master like the cUAC20, MRM40 with a long burst to make skill matter more than building alpha one-click mechs.
- Step1: Longer bursts/duration for the stronger weapons to bring strong weapons "down" to the weaker weapons (BOTH SIDES).
- Step2: Ghost Heat (Heat Scale) grouping of Large+Med lasers together to bring total alpha down without nerfing weapons and spread the weapon fire (BOTH SIDES)
- Step3: More Heat for all Gauss (+2-3) to make them less perfect for Laser+Gauss, to bring Laser+AC closer
And then you have already a much better baseline.
- Step4: Reduce quirks where needed
- Step5: Replace GH with Energy Draw that uses a 5-10s heat-over-time rather than instant spike.
To have a consistent design, here are the core rules:
Overall Balance of Clans compared to IS:
Advantages
+ More Range
+ More DMG (slightly)
+ Less Slots (smaller sizes) (unchangeable)
+ Less Weight (lower tonnage) (unchangeable)
Downsides
- More Heat
- More Cooldown (longer)
- More Duration (longer)
- Less Ammo / ton (~120dmg/ton vs ~180/ton)
Claners are better Mechwarriors, so their skill will compensate for more difficult weapon handling (longer duration and higher heat)
Cooldown + Duration and heat balance out the Range and DMG advantage overall
Ammo balances out the Size and Tonnage advantage of ammo-based weapon
Ghost Heat Changes:
On Top of that, there should be smaller changes to GH until we get something better:
- Med+Large Lasers share the same GH group
- Large lasers max increased to 3
- Medium lasers max increased to 6
- PPC/ERPPC/SNPPC max increased to 3
- LPPC max increased to 5
- SRM6 max reduced to 3
Details below also take into consideration that a too strong nerf to Laser/Gauss could get the PPC/AC meta back too high as the PPFLD was/is usually easy to hit with.
Quoting from another post:
Reno Blade, on 10 June 2018 - 01:34 AM, said:
Then PPCs (and some ACs) got velocity nerfs and they are much harder to play with, without a lot of practice and concentration.
So imho these are in a good spot in regards to difficulty.
cUAC20 with a 5 bullet burst are difficult to use to get all 5 shots on target and even more so on the same location.
Imho, this is great.
ACs are easier to use with single bullets, beside the damn slow velocity.
I would prefere if the difficulty comes from the burst (spreading damage) and the velocity is increased.
But having std ACs also using burst would make them very similar, so the question remain how IS/Clan could be different, or how the uACs could be changed.
Just saying Clan have 1 more bullet than IS, or longer time between bullets is what we currently have.
Some option floating around was to have 100% jam chance, but the jam-duration is the same as the cooldown (e.g. 4s cd and 4s jam).
That way you would have 2x cooldown with double tap, or normal cd without and have the same DPS than normal ACs (besides the longer burst duration maybe).
I think the 20s could use some cd, heat and velocity buffs, but need burst to compensate.
It would be easier to hit with and use in a build (e.g. brawling) but need more skill to get all damage on the target, similar to the MRMs.
So overall, longer bursts and longer beam duration is the key change we need before we can think of any "buff".
Pulse lasers on the other hand need a different role by just halfing (or even lower) the cooldown.
And the detailed proposal changes including buffs and nerfs much more close to a baseline balance than the suggested community panel:
Reno Blade, on 09 June 2018 - 08:24 AM, said:
The whole table can also be found directly on Google docs for better access:
https://docs.google....UXElpK4lnCQd_M/
Overall Balance of Clans compared to IS:
Advantages
+ More Range
+ More DMG
+ Less Slots (smaller sizes) (unchangeable)
+ Less Weight (lower tonnage) (unchangeable)
Downsides
- More Heat
- More Cooldown (longer)
- More Duration (longer)
- Less Ammo / ton (~120dmg/ton vs ~180/ton)
Claners are better Mechwarriors, so their skill will compensate for more difficult weapon handling (longer duration and higher heat)
Cooldown + Duration and heat balance out the Range and DMG advantage overall
Ammo balances out the Size and Tonnage advantage of ammo-based weapon
Overall Weapon concepts:
Ghost Heat Changes:
On Top of that, there should be smaller changes to GH until we get something better:
- Med+Large Lasers share the same GH group
- Large lasers max increased to 3
- Medium lasers max increased to 6
- PPC/ERPPC/SNPPC max increased to 3
- LPPC max increased to 5
- SRM6 max reduced to 3
This is directly aimed to reduce laser vomit while at the same time increasing the build options (especially for combination of larges)
Images of the Weapon groups with background colors from low(red) to high (green) to compare weapon stats
Changes have different font color:
Buffs = Blue font
Nerfs = Red font
https://docs.google....UXElpK4lnCQd_M/
Energy:
Ballistics:
Missiles (IS):
Missiles (Clan):
Edited by Reno Blade, 29 June 2018 - 01:15 PM.