razenWing, on 20 August 2018 - 11:06 AM, said:
Maybe it's too harsh of a punishment to go from 80 to 0 armor as soon as a button is pressed, so perhaps a curved decrease like someone else suggested.
Any armor reduction at all will kill the weapon dead, period. Nobody will want to use a weapon that does the enemy's work for them- even if it's only -5pts of armor, that's still a whole free weapon hit you're
giving anyone who sees you before you let your own shot off. As someone else already pointed out, that would effectively limit the viable Gauss builds to ECM 'Mechs, preferably with stealth armor... and even then it would be so niche that it wouldn't be worth considering most of the time. Why would you take Gauss, which strips you of your most important defense, when you could carry an AC10, UAC10, or AC20 and not have to worry about exposing your structure every time you want to fire the weapon? Gauss would be relegated to trolling within one match of the update.
It's a bad idea. It also doesn't make a single lick of sense (Armor being a physical covering not linked to the weapon systems of the 'Mech), but that's a separate issue.
Why would Gauss cause armor to
not be armor when it charges? What possible physical property explains that mechanic?
Now, MW4 had a "gunport" mechanic, where every weapon on a 'Mech could be destroyed
through the armor if it suffered a direct hit on the physical gunport it fired from on the model in-game (IIRC, the incoming hit needed to also be more or less aligned with the firing axis of the gunport, but I could be mis-remembering that).
That would be a
reasonable comprehensible way to make a weapon vulnerable while lining up a shot, and since Gauss is inherently volatile when charged it would of course be
more vulnerable to that kind of counter-fire. However, that mechanic would leave the armor of the 'Mech unaffected.