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i spent about 4 hours straight going through every mech i could think of trying out current builds on to see how these changes effected them and i got some interesting results. I'm not one to use the min/max meta builds much. I focus on making mechs with mixed weapons built around the idea of sustained fire rather than alpha poke. Also almost every single one of my builds actually ended up performing much better than before with a few outliers performing worse. I'm already used to staggering weapon fire and now it benefits me in the most glorious way.
As a NOTE i did all my testing on Frozen City to get the max potential cooling.
-Energy-
After getting an initial feel for the limits of the new heat scale i moved from my favorite mechs to try and get the max potential firepower in one alpha to see if this would properly address the high alpha problem. I came up with the most potential energy damage output i could think of which is a supernova with 2 large pulse and 6 medium pulse with 30 double heat sinks.
https://mwo.smurfy-n...30988ea54a8405f
This does a 66 point alpha and brings you to 48.5 heat which is doable only if you take the full operations tree and firepower heat reduction nodes. That allowed my heat cap to be 50 instead of 40. It did allow this mech to maintain high alpha damage as it would cool off insanely fast but i wouldn't consider it very practical. I also found with just standard mechs that 6 clan ER Medium lasers seemed to be the maximum viable before your heat alarm would go off. One of the most interesting mechs i tried was an 8 medium pulse laser Marauder IIC with 29 double heat sinks. Alpha striking was incredibly hot but if you put them all on chainfire you could almost negate any heat buildup in any significant way.
I don't usually use heavy large lasers because of the burn time and heat but i threw together a 2 heavy large 4 er medium hell bringer to see how it would perform. With full operations tree and all the heat gen nodes in firepower you could still alpha strike with that build but it was not optimal at all. staggering the heavy larges lasers and then firing the 4 er medium after provided much better sustainability during battles.
Ones of the funnest mechs i tried was the Awesome 9M. With the quirks it has for reduced PPC heat i could constantly fire ERPPCS on chainfire without issue. I.... felt.... AWESOME.
I think that if PGI went ahead with these changes it might also be possible to remove ghost heat limits. I mean if you can't fire more than 6 er mediums without shutting down anyway, do you really need to have ghost heat on more than 6 anyway? I also saw someone mention that the heat on UAC10s for clan and IS seemed ridiculously high for some reason and i have to agree. They just seemed to punch up the heat by a lot.
-Gauss + Energy-
Now i did try out the Blood Asp, Madcat MKII - Deathstrike, and direwolf with mixed weapons to see about the max mixed potential because 2 gauss + 6 er mediums is still 72 damage. And you could still get that alpha off with no problem, but firing a second alpha immediately off cooldown made you overheat and shutdown. You would have to wait a few seconds before being able to alpha again. This would mean that the peak/poke gameplay would not disappear but in the heat of the moment if you got rushed by a brawler with better sustained DPS you would have issues keeping up in the fight. Sooo i'm not sure if it would still be a problem in the grand scheme of things. You would still have the alpha potential in maybe the offset of a fight or the last desperate attempt to finish someone off by an enemy but in a full blown engagement stagger firing would be much more reasonable.
-Maneuverability changes-
These were much needed and i approved of all of them. Some mechs still need a little more. I've seen it mentioned in other threads about the firestarter still feeling like a heavy mech and i agree it's a bit sluggish. The improvement on assault mechs was very noticeable but really PGI? Can the direwolf and kodiak reallllly not torso twist 90 degrees?
-Summary-
I very much enjoyed everything about this PTS session. It made gameplay very refreshing. And i know this might be a controversial thing to say but since we're in a testing environment anyway i would say to PGI to go a little bit further and make the heatcap a hard 35 instead of 40 or even 38 if 35 is too low. That way with the operations tree you would only be able to get to 45-48 hard cap instead of 50. I mean if PGI realllllllllly wants to combat the high energy alpha that would limit it right there. Example, without any heat node adjustments 6 clan ER Medium lasers are 44.1 heat. With operations tree and heat reduction nodes this would still be possible to fire but you would have to commit to the operations tree at minimum to be able to fire that alpha without shutting down. But i wouldn't complain if they left it at 40 and went live with those numbers.
Edited by Sable, 19 August 2018 - 01:47 PM.
