Paul Inouye, on 07 August 2018 - 10:18 AM, said:
Future PTS'
• Looking into doing another PTS centered around baseline heat thresholds and dissipation rates based on community proposals.
Just finished listening to the podcast. It's good to hear that the topic of capacity/dissipation is being looked at. I'll just paste my post about it here and would be interested in hearing your guys thought.
How adjusting Heatsinks can improve the game’s balance without screwing the little guys
Everyone knows the problem with adjusting weapon balance is that you often wind up having all sorts of off-target effects. A medium pulse laser nerf hits the Ice Ferret just as hard as the Madcat MKII, or Hellbringer.
So what is it about the Madcat MKII (or Hellbringer) that makes it so much more potent than the Ice Ferret? The answer is that with all that extra space and tonnage you can not only equip more lasers, but you can stuff it with an absurd amount of Double Heat Sinks. This gives those Medium pulse lasers tremendous heat capacity and dissipation.
With that in mind the answer of how to address these super large, super hot, alphastrikes seems pretty straight forward:
Do not make heatsink scale linearly forever.
This is actually building on an already existing system we have now where internal engine heatsinks work better than the external ones. What I propose is to take this a step further and reduce the effectiveness of external heatsinks when boated in sufficient quantity. Someone who adds 15 external heatsinks should have better heat capacity and dissipation than someone who only added 5, but it shouldn’t be 3 times more effective.
So how would that look?
There are several ways we can do it and I just want to emphasize that the numbers are placeholders only to illustrate the concept.
1.
Stepped approach This approach would decrease the effectiveness of heatsinks at certain steps. So for example you have the first 5 external double heatsinks work as they do now. However heatsinks 16-20 are a step down in effectiveness. Then Heatsinks 21-25 are a step down from that, and so on. IMO this is a very user-friendly approach.
2.
Gradual decline: This approach would see heatsinks have a gradual decline in effectiveness after you reach a threshold. So maybe your first 5 external DHS work fine, but then after that, each one becomes less and less effective.
3.
Hard Cap: A third possibility is a hard cap. This is where you have heatsinks work as is until a certain point and then any more do nothing. There are two ways to do this.
- Full cap: Both Dissipation and Capacity stop improving.
- Partial Cap: Only one of these values gets capped.
So for example you could cap dissipation rate to 3.5 so only your first 10 external DHS improve it. Beyond that, you’re only increasing capacity.
It’s worth pointing out that both the Stepped and Gradual decline approaches could also be targeted at Dissipation or capacity only.
What this does is allow us to target the high alpha/high heat builds without screwing up the smaller builds that aren’t really a big problem.
As for the actual numbers to use, you can be as conservative or aggressive as you like.
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FAQ:
Q: How would we explain this to players in the mechlab?
A: Well first of all, I would point out that the current “heat management” number we see in the mechlab is not doing an adequate job. I’ve been playing this game for a long time and I barely understand it myself. To be blunt it’s
an unintuitive mess. Overly complicated and and full of flaws.
So my answer is that first I would fix this problem. Split it up into three values instead of the one nonsense value we have now. Heat per second, Dissipation Rate, and Capacity. Then I would clean it up so Rocket Launchers and LAMS are not factored in, UAC’s double tap is, and make sure pilot skills/quirks are.
Next you can do the same thing you do with Heat penalty. Put a little icon pop up at the top of the mechlab explaining you have hit a threshold. Either way they can always refer back to their 3 heat values displayed to see how it’s changing.
Q: What do we do when a heatsink is destroyed?
A: You can just have it work its way backwards. So the first heatsink destroyed is heatsink 25, next is heatsink 24 etc… Internal DHS work on their own separate values just as they do now.
Q: Won’t this harm some builds that aren’t a problem?
A: Any change you make will have an impact on off-target builds. However adjusting heatsinks only when equipped in large quantities will have a much more precise effect than a blanket nerf to say the ER Medium laser. Again, you can set it as aggressively or conservatively as you want. If you only want to hit guys running 20+ heatsinks you can do that. If you want to go down to 15 you can also do that.
Also high alpha laser vomit is not the only problem out there. It’s high damage period. I don’t see any problem making a LRM 80 run a little hotter too.
Q: But this wont fix every balance problem!
A: You're right, but that isn't the intention. This is a targeted balance change for high heat, high damage builds with lots and lots of heatsinks. It also just so happens that this is where many of the balance problems exist.
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One more thing that I think is worth mentioning is that this might open the door to relaxing some of the existing weapon boating heat penalties we have in place. Some of those builds are really only viable when they can stack it with 20+ double heatsinks. Just something to think about if this ever goes through.
Edited by Jman5, 07 August 2018 - 05:24 PM.
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