tl;dr: reduce cap to 40, use ~0.2 dissipation but also reduce cooldown of weapons by about 50% or push skills to higher% to give low-hardpoint builds an automatic cooldown benefit (and save yourself the hassle to give every mech with lower hardpoint count some cd quirks).
Some scenarios to compare:
Well, imagine a
30 cap and a dissipation of 0.2 to 0.24 but also
longer weapon cooldowns (let's just say doubled for example).
in such a scenario you would have a much better reason to have lots of weapons, even if you could not alpha more than a handful.
why/how?
waiting for 8-10 seconds for a weapon would be longer than waiting 5-6 seconds for your heat (depending on heatsinks).
so if you got yourself 2 or 3 builds worth of weapons (e.g. 3 sets of lasers, or 3 different range brackets, or 3 different weapon types) you could use all of them, just not really all together in the same volley.
-> and i think this is moving more into the right direction than anything we have live or have with 50 cap.
e.g.
boating 2x HLL and 6x ERML now and being able to fire all of it together even on PTS, this would need to split up in such an environment with 30 cap.
But if your weapons have a 10s cooldown, you would want to have SOME weapons to use while waiting for your main gun anyway, right?
The
downside of having such huge cooldowns are the builds that only have few weapons, as they would then wait for ages for cooldown without any alternative.
->
So let's scrap the idea of the long cooldown and
check the opposite by lowering the
cap of 30 AND reduce the cooldown of all weapons (let's say by half)?
What this would do?
first of all, you would not be able to fire all your weapons due to the low cap, but you would be able to fire a few weapons much faster.
low hardpoint builds with a lot of DHS would be able to "spam" few weapons (e.g. the Locust with a single laser is a good example).
But at the same time it would reduce any build that have a lot of hardpoints to either skip some hp or use a bunch of smaller colder weapons (e.g. use a Nova with micro lasers instead of meds/smalls).
Still not good?
So let's try something in between.
let's keep a medium cap of 40-45 with decent dissipation (0.2 for clans, 0.22 for is and 0.15 for SHS) BUT also reduce the cooldowns of all weapons without reducing their heat values.
This would give low hp builds automatic cooldown advantage while the boats can decide if they want to fire an alpha that brings them to 90% or if they want to split their shots and maybe use the cooldown of few main weapons in some more hectic (brawler) fights and keep the big volleys for emergency or when there is enough time to cool off.
but wait? isn't that what we have on live?
somewhat for boats using alphas to ride the red line, but more beneficial for non-boats and mediums with low hardpoint due to faster cd for single weapons vs heat generated/dissipated.
Remaining problems?
Yes the high dissipation will provide some builds a lot more dps than others for similar investment.
e.g. MC2 with 2x UAC10 and 2x UAC5 on current PTS2.1 is running so good, even a average pugger like me is spamming kills with this.
while a KCrab with 4x UAC5 is already overheating after few seconds...
So in the end, there is some remaining balancing needed for heat generated for similar builds on IS vs IS and IS vs Clan and even Clan vs Clan that will require more balancing of all weapon types again in any new environment.
Edited by Reno Blade, 26 August 2018 - 11:18 AM.
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