121 replies to this topic

[C337Skymaster]

So from the small handful of posts that I've had time to read, it seems like a lot of folks are on the same page: increasing the heat cap was the wrong move to correct for heat inefficiencies in PTS 2.0. The correct move would have been to further increase Heat Sink Dissipation Rates.

I decided to do some math for my own entertainment, and discovered some interesting numbers:
Using a Hex being 30 meters, and using the published 'mech speeds in KPH, I calculated that all PGI 'mech speeds come out to a TT "Turn" of *10* seconds. Half of the TT speeds also came out to *10* seconds, and none of the other half were the same as each other.

Taking that value, and applying it to Heat Sink dissipation: Single Heat Sinks dissipate *0.10* heat per second, and doubles dissipate *0.20* per second.

If we set the heat cap at 40, and changed the skill nodes that increase it (so it's a hard-and-fast cap of 40), but we increase heat sink efficiency (and continue to allow skills that increase that further), then it will be impossible to fire high-damage alphas (and will pretty much negate ghost heat, since a hard-cap of 40 heat is about where most ghost heat triggers, anyway), but if you chain fire, then the heat from your first two weapons will be completely dissipated by the time you've triggered your third weapon.

I think the limits on Gauss Rifles should be that you can only fire one Heavy Gauss at a time, two regular Gauss at a time, and three light Gauss at a time. That's 25 damage, 30 damage, and 24 damage, respectively. You can still chain them, as you can do now if you want. It'll just prevent placing any damage beyond that in the same spot. More than likely, the next shot will hit a different component.

I know that my Adder-Prime and ACH-C (both stock from the store, but fully skilled) seemed to run really hot, and I saw Kanajashi make a 4 PPC Warhawk run super cool. Mostly, though, I didn't notice much difference in most of my 'mechs between live and PTS.

Oh, and the situation where you'd be firing continuously for more than 30 seconds? Fighting for your life at less than 100 meters. (AKA: "Brawling").

EDIT: I did my math wrong. I attributed the "Speeds" to Walking speed instead of running speed. Correcting my error, a TT "turn" is 10 seconds, and heat dissipation is 0.1/s for singles and 0.2/s for doubles (where the PTS 2.1 placed the values).

Edited by C337Skymaster, 16 September 2018 - 12:07 PM.

[Rydiak Randborir]

C337Skymaster, on 26 August 2018 - 06:44 PM, said:

So from the small handful of posts that I've had time to read, it seems like a lot of folks are on the same page: increasing the heat cap was the wrong move to correct for heat inefficiencies in PTS 2.0. The correct move would have been to further increase Heat Sink Dissipation Rates.

I decided to do some math for my own entertainment, and discovered some interesting numbers:
Using a Hex being 30 meters, and using the published 'mech speeds in KPH, I calculated that all PGI 'mech speeds come out to a TT "Turn" of 6 2/3 seconds. Half of the TT speeds also came out to 6 2/3 seconds, and none of the other half were the same as each other.

Taking that value, and applying it to Heat Sink dissipation: Single Heat Sinks dissipate 0.15 heat per second, and doubles dissipate 0.30 per second.

If we set the heat cap at 40, and changed the skill nodes that increase it (so it's a hard-and-fast cap of 40), but we increase heat sink efficiency (and continue to allow skills that increase that further), then it will be impossible to fire high-damage alphas (and will pretty much negate ghost heat, since a hard-cap of 40 heat is about where most ghost heat triggers, anyway), but if you chain fire, then the heat from your first two weapons will be completely dissipated by the time you've triggered your third weapon.

I think the limits on Gauss Rifles should be that you can only fire one Heavy Gauss at a time, two regular Gauss at a time, and three light Gauss at a time. That's 25 damage, 30 damage, and 24 damage, respectively. You can still chain them, as you can do now if you want. It'll just prevent placing any damage beyond that in the same spot. More than likely, the next shot will hit a different component.

I know that my Adder-Prime and ACH-C (both stock from the store, but fully skilled) seemed to run really hot, and I saw Kanajashi make a 4 PPC Warhawk run super cool. Mostly, though, I didn't notice much difference in most of my 'mechs between live and PTS.

Oh, and the situation where you'd be firing continuously for more than 30 seconds? Fighting for your life at less than 100 meters. (AKA: "Brawling").

wat

Look, if you lower heatcap and further increase dissipation you push the game further towards DPS dominance, which is what Energy Draw did. Suggesting that the game should turn into essentially chain-fire-only is a great way to lose all of your remaining competitive players and players who like build diversity. Some players like alpha-vomit. Some players like DPS. PTS 2.1 accommodates both while slapping alpha-vomit on the nose. Players that consistently rank in the 20th percentile wanting to outright kill alpha-vomit are NOT a good yardstick for making balance decisions.

Personally I prefer brawling, and even I recognize that killing alpha-vomit completely would not be healthy for the game. Nerfing a meta pillar is fine, as long as that pillar remains standing on its own. Remove it entirely and the whole game's balance collapses.

Edited by Rydiak, 26 August 2018 - 07:13 PM.

[Sable Dove]

Rydiak, on 26 August 2018 - 06:35 PM, said:

Again, the laser vomit archetype would flat out cease to exist in any effective form given the changes you want. The game currently "revolves entirely around alpha strikes" because the massive heatcap allows very hot mechs to double-alpha in a very short amount of time, negating any effective push due to the incoming damage. This is meta-defining. 12 mechs receiving an enemy brawl push are a LOT less effective when an extra 2 to 5 seconds are added onto the time before they can launch their second volley.

PTS 2.1 solves this without changing the single-alpha capability of any mech. You take away the "alpha" from "alpha" and you are left with an archetype that does nothing. Additionally, you devolve the game into a state that Energy Draw was guilty of: which build can output the most DPS because alpha is effectively capped. Just because you want to see the game turn into a chain-fire slug-fest does not mean that many fans of MWO, let alone the Mechwarrior series, would be happy to fundamentally see the game's combat change. Killing alpha mechs outright does not improve build diversity. It pigeon-holes everyone into DPS builds, which is what Energy Draw did. PTS 2.1 solves that problem.

Want a DPS build? Great. Want a poke alpha build? Great. More options for combat, not less.

I mean, most Mechwarrior games aren't almost exclusively alpha-based, as far as I remember; that's mostly a MWO thing. I want smaller alphas because TTK is too low, currently. Even the heaviest mechs don't last longer than 10-15 seconds in a push.

Single-alpha capacity is one of the biggest issues MWO has. It's what holds the game back. The fact that half the mechs in the game can be CT-cored in two or three shots, whether by skill or luck, makes the fact that short term DPS is reduced by a small amount almost irrelevant. It would work in Solaris, but in regular play, the first mechs in a push are dead in the first volley, so no one pushes because leading the charge isn't fun. The fact that your team stands a better chance in the brawl after you soak up the first volley doesn't make it any more fun.

Because it's still not fun to lead the push, no one will push, and everyone will peek and snipe, just like now. You do get more variety than that, at least in QP, simply because most players take sub-optimal builds because being a metagamer is boring; but at higher levels, and especially in faction play, I suspect PTS2.1 would have close to no effect on 12v12 gameplay.

Just because I don't like the idea of 50+ damage pinpoint alphas doesn't mean I think sniping should be un-viable. It should be a support role, rather than being among the best builds for long-range, short range, mid-range, burst DPS and sustained DPS.

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 26 August 2018 - 06:36 PM, said:

Decreasing the cap and increasing dissipation just pushes the game more and more into DPS facerushing. If you wanted tactics or a thinking man's shooter then your goal should not be to make cover a non-essential thing and to not further encourage deathballs in pub queue.

The game has not always centered around alpha-strikes, hell even during the heydey of the HGN-733C that wasn't true (otherwise why bother with UAC5s). DPS has always mattered and even with laser vomit it does (that is the reason Clan laser vomit is currently so dominant over IS laser vomit) so let's drop the stupid pretense that all that has ever mattered in this game is alpha strikes, otherwise the boogieman builds like the 6 PPC Stalker, Dire Star, or Gigadrill Dire would be a LOT more common in the game.

The issue is that with such high burst damge, as I stated above, being the spearhead is generally not fun, so no one does it. You need a heavy or assault to lead the charge to soak up alphas so that the rest of you can get in brawling range, but most assaults now are peek or sniper builds, or LRM boats, so there's no one to lead the push, and if a lighter heavy or medium tries to spearhead, they're dead in maybe 2 alphas.

I think 12v12 was a mistake, personally, just because it reduces TTK significantly. But I suspect they're not going to go back to 8v8, so the next best thing is to reduce alpha strikes. And in doing so, encourage mixed builds. Rather than take as much damage as you can and firing it all at once all the time, build with less heat-efficient weapons for range, then when the fighting gets close, switch to more heat-efficient weapons. You know, the 2xERLL, 6xERML build, but instead of firing all at once every time, fire the ERLLs at long ranges, then switch to the ERMLs at closer ranges.

If you want a "thinking-man's shooter", high alphas are not the way to go, because it just comes down to raw manual dexterity. If the most thinking that's required is when and where to take cover, it hardly requires more thinking than just about any other modern military shooter. Now, having to think about heat efficiency in the build, building to cover different ranges, knowing when to shoot what weapons, when to reposition to take advantage of your ideal range, etc. That has some thinking involved.

Also, the 6xPPC Stalker was fairly common up until ghost heat. PGI literally had to step in and say "no, you're not allowed to use that build" before people stopped using it.

[Rydiak Randborir]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

I mean, most Mechwarrior games aren't almost exclusively alpha-based, as far as I remember; that's mostly a MWO thing. I want smaller alphas because TTK is too low, currently. Even the heaviest mechs don't last longer than 10-15 seconds in a push.

Single-alpha capacity is one of the biggest issues MWO has. It's what holds the game back. The fact that half the mechs in the game can be CT-cored in two or three shots, whether by skill or luck, makes the fact that short term DPS is reduced by a small amount almost irrelevant. It would work in Solaris, but in regular play, the first mechs in a push are dead in the first volley, so no one pushes because leading the charge isn't fun. The fact that your team stands a better chance in the brawl after you soak up the first volley doesn't make it any more fun.

Because it's still not fun to lead the push, no one will push, and everyone will peek and snipe, just like now. You do get more variety than that, at least in QP, simply because most players take sub-optimal builds because being a metagamer is boring; but at higher levels, and especially in faction play, I suspect PTS2.1 would have close to no effect on 12v12 gameplay.

Just because I don't like the idea of 50+ damage pinpoint alphas doesn't mean I think sniping should be un-viable. It should be a support role, rather than being among the best builds for long-range, short range, mid-range, burst DPS and sustained DPS.

Great! Then you should LOVE PTS 2.1!! It adds 2 to 5 seconds to the re-fire time of all high alpha builds! It isn't until AFTER THIRTY SECONDS that PTS 2.1 has ANY improvement to high alpha builds. All this and it doesn't outright kill any existing builds. Now, imagine 12 mechs receiving your brawl push, all forced to wait an additional 2 to 5 seconds before they can fire again. Any longer than that and brawl would NEVER lose, and we'd be back to square-one complaining about that darn "brawl meta".

PTS 2.1 is almost perfect in that it achieves all its goals without ruining anything else about the game.

Edited by Rydiak, 26 August 2018 - 07:32 PM.

[Sable Dove]

Rydiak, on 26 August 2018 - 07:27 PM, said:

Great! Then you should LOVE PTS 2.1!! It add 2 to 5 seconds to the re-fire time of all high alpha builds! It isn't until AFTER THIRTY SECONDS that PTS 2.1 has ANY improvement to high alpha builds. All this and it doesn't outright kill any existing builds.

It is almost perfect.

The problem is the high damage of these alphas, too, which PTS2.1 does basically nothing to address. It matters in 1v1, but not so much when you've got more than one mech shooting at you. Lowering the heat cap and increasing the dissipation also doesn't kill builds unless they lower the cap past 15 so you literally cannot fire some weapons anymore. At most, it makes it so some builds can't fire literally all of their guns in the same instant. That just makes it so that damage isn't all striking one component, which can kill or cripple many mechs in one shot.

The original suggestion would have preserved burst DPS anyways - The original suggestion was literally just to cut heat capacity in half and double dissipation, so burst DPS would be the same in the short term, and sustained DPS would be the same; it would just mean that all that burst DPS would have to be spread over a couple seconds. Instead, for some reason, they decided to make heat cap fixed and not increase it with heat sinks, and increase dissipation, but not in proportion to the lowered cap, which is impossible because not all mechs lost the same percentage of capacity.

Ideally, I'd like them to actually try the original idea for heat cap/dissipation, since it preserves both burst DPS and sustained DPS, and just spreads damage from high alphas over a few seconds, but I doubt it'll happen.

PTS 2.1 is better than the live version, and I'd be happy to see it implemented, but I don't see why we can't do lower heat cap and higher dissipation in the test server next time. Who knows, maybe you'll even like it.

[Flying Blind]

I agree with the OP current PTS version heat cap is too high.

[Rydiak Randborir]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:48 PM, said:

The problem is the high damage of these alphas, too, which PTS2.1 does basically nothing to address. It matters in 1v1, but not
so much when you've got more than one mech shooting at you.

I will disagree with you on the ultimate efficacy of alpha damage, as that is only one part of a much larger equation.

Quote

Lowering the heat cap and increasing the dissipation also doesn't kill builds unless they lower the cap past 15 so you literally cannot fire some weapons anymore. At most, it makes it so some builds can't fire literally all of their guns in the same instant. That just makes it so that damage isn't all striking one component, which can kill or cripple many mechs in one shot.

So you want a chain-fire meta. There it is. There is nothing more to discuss with you as we have fundamentally different views on what is healthy for this game.

Edited by Rydiak, 26 August 2018 - 07:56 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

The issue is that with such high burst damge, as I stated above, being the spearhead is generally not fun, so no one does it.

In solo queue sure, but there are a lot of things you can't do in solo queue that you can do else where. Trying to make brawling viable in 12v12 solo queue just makes group queue even worse because coordinated brawls would be unstoppable and competitive play would be boring facerushes. Making the spearhead fun means that brawling or pushing is stupidly easy.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

but most assaults now are peek or sniper builds, or LRM boats

That's kinda how they are supposed to be . Expecting the slowest mech on the field to be this tank that constantly spearheads pushes and is able make good use of some of the shortest range weapons in the game is dumb. You shouldn't even be leading the charge in the Atlas and it took a lot of quirks to make it even semi viable for brawling.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

so there's no one to lead the push, and if a lighter heavy or medium tries to spearhead, they're dead in maybe 2 alphas.

No one should be leading....that's your first mistake. Charging in one by one is dumb and is a sign of a bad push. Good pushes either split push (timing can be hard here) or you push all together to make it harder to focus fire.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

I think 12v12 was a mistake, personally, just because it reduces TTK significantly.

I don't think 12v12 really impacted TTK much because it is incredibly rare that more than 8 mechs are hitting the same thing, even in comp. That said, I agree it was a bad move because it gave teams more angles they could reliably cover making rogue mechs running around less apt to be useful until the match had pretty much already been won. Plus it made it harder to carry.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

And in doing so, encourage mixed builds.

No......just stahp. Lowering capacity and increasing dissipation doesn't encourage mixed builds because the problem with mixed builds isn't alphas are magically making them bad. What makes mixed builds bad is efficiency compared to specialized builds and that INCLUDES sustained DPS builds like dakka and MRMs which have much more sustained damage than mixed builds. So all you end up doing is shitfing from one end of the spectrum to another. WEVE SEEN THIS BEFORE, ED DID NOT encourage mixed builds but encouraged exactly what I detailed above, DPS facerushing.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

If you want a "thinking-man's shooter", high alphas are not the way to go, because it just comes down to raw manual dexterity. If the most thinking that's required is when and where to take cover, it hardly requires more thinking than just about any other modern military shooter. Now, having to think about heat efficiency in the build, building to cover different ranges, knowing when to shoot what weapons, when to reposition to take advantage of your ideal range, etc. That has some thinking involved.

You realize literally all of those ARE ALREADY THOUGHTS of comp players right? Comp play isn't just "herp derp" sit behind cover and lolpha your enemy to victory or twitch your way to victory. This is why no comp player takes these sort of discussions seriously in the brown sea, because most of the players yearning for that sort of combat haven't even developed enough understanding of the game to realize all of those things already matter...................

It is also ironic that most of those players are also lower tier players, if it was so easy more players would be better, but the starch levels especially these days is increasingly depressing.

Even solo queue people can't get ahold of basic positioning (why do so many players STILL flock to the stupid ramps on Canyon for example).

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

Also, the 6xPPC Stalker was fairly common up until ghost heat. PGI literally had to step in and say "no, you're not allowed to use that build" before people stopped using it.

No, it really wasn't. 4 PPC and 6 LL, the sane builds were MUCH more common than the stupid 6 PPC stalker ever was.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 26 August 2018 - 08:08 PM.

[Mycroft000]

It only took me two matches in my Nova to confirm that 50 heat cap was too high.

[Rydiak Randborir]

Mycroft000, on 26 August 2018 - 08:04 PM, said:

It only took me two matches in my Nova to confirm that 50 heat cap was too high.

Well, I am glad we have your MWO expertise to share.

[Sable Dove]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 26 August 2018 - 08:01 PM, said:

In solo queue sure, but there are a lot of things you can't do in solo queue that you can do else where. Trying to make brawling viable in 12v12 solo queue just makes group queue even worse because coordinated brawls would be unstoppable and competitive play would be boring facerushes. Making the spearhead fun means that brawling or pushing is stupidly easy.


That's kinda how they are supposed to be . Expecting the slowest mech on the field to be this tank that constantly spearheads pushes and is able make good use of some of the shortest range weapons in the game is dumb. You shouldn't even be leading the charge in the Atlas and it took a lot of quirks to make it even semi viable for brawling.


No one should be leading....that's your first mistake. Charging in one by one is dumb and is a sign of a bad push. Good pushes either split push (timing can be hard here) or you push all together to make it harder to focus fire.


I don't think 12v12 really impacted TTK much because it is incredibly rare that more than 8 mechs are hitting the same thing, even in comp. That said, I agree it was a bad move because it gave teams more angles they could reliably cover making rogue mechs running around less apt to be useful until the match had pretty much already been won. Plus it made it harder to carry.


No......just stahp. Lowering capacity and increasing dissipation doesn't encourage mixed builds because the problem with mixed builds isn't alphas are magically making them bad. What makes mixed builds bad is efficiency compared to specialized builds and that INCLUDES sustained DPS builds like dakka and MRMs which have much more sustained damage than mixed builds. So all you end up doing is shitfing from one end of the spectrum to another. WEVE SEEN THIS BEFORE, ED DID NOT encourage mixed builds but encouraged exactly what I detailed above, DPS facerushing.


You realize literally all of those ARE ALREADY THOUGHTS of comp players right? Comp play isn't just "herp derp" sit behind cover and lolpha your enemy to victory or twitch your way to victory. This is why no comp player takes these sort of discussions seriously in the brown sea, because most of the players yearning for that sort of combat haven't even developed enough understanding of the game to realize all of those things already matter...................

It is also ironic that most of those players are also lower tier players, if it was so easy more players would be better, but the starch levels especially these days is increasingly depressing.


No, it really wasn't. 4 PPC and 6 LL, the sane builds were MUCH more common than the stupid 6 PPC stalker ever was.

If your team is coordinated enough to time a simultaneous push, their team should be coordinated enough to focus targets, so whether it's one mech at a time or all of them, it's the same result; the first mech targeted dies in one volley. Braking cover, getting one shot off, then dying still isn't fun. It's slightly more fun when you only have a 1/12 chance of being that target, but still not fun to be the one.

Really, I'm still not sure why you're so dead set against them trying it in the test server. Where they test things.

Ultimately, they'll balance based on the opinions of the whales, since they're the ones bringing in the cash; whether those are comp players or not, I don't know. I suspect there are more in comp and FP than in QP, though. I'd honestly rather they not balance based on comp play, because most comp players (in general, not specifically in MWO) that I've run into are very win-at-all-costs-including-fun types.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 08:19 PM, said:

If your team is coordinated enough to time a simultaneous push, their team should be coordinated enough to focus targets, so whether it's one mech at a time or all of them, it's the same result; the first mech targeted dies in one volley. Braking cover, getting one shot off, then dying still isn't fun. It's slightly more fun when you only have a 1/12 chance of being that target, but still not fun to be the one.

Again, you sound like someone who has never played either role in a higher level play style. The ability to focus a target amonst the entire team in a push scenario takes a different skill than what it takes to push cohesively. One takes mental processing time (gotta sift through all the visual noise to figure out the desired target) while the other is just a matter of timing. This is why positioning partially matters in receiving a push because you want to be able to hit the same target and see them at relatively similar times (you don't even have to call targets when an enemy pushes in one by one).

That said, I don't think I've really ever seen a competent push have a mech just get mauled instantly for zero damage outside something crazy (like an ammo explosion or a headshot) in comp play. So it sounds less like a balance problem and more like a player problem (in that the player was placed a little above his skill level).

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 08:19 PM, said:

Really, I'm still not sure why you're so dead set against them trying it in the test server. Where they test things.

I also don't like wasting time on something that is obviously a waste of time. We've had ED and PTS1.0 bear out the understanding the rest of seem to have about why lowering the heat capacity beyond 45-50 would be bad for the game. Even if you don't want high alphas, something new will murder those who jump out of cover in an ill-advised maneuver and it will be dakka (and technically it already is dakka, people just don't seem to have caught on), MRMs, and/or ATMs.

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 08:19 PM, said:

I'd honestly rather they not balance based on comp play, because most comp players (in general, not specifically in MWO) that I've run into are very win-at-all-costs-including-fun types.

This statement makes zero sense. Balance has to be around that because if you aren't trying to win, how can you even understand what choices are actually good? If you want them to balance fun, that's a separate issue because it isn't necessarily balance that is the problem. Balance at a high level of play and making the lower tiers fun are NOT mutually exclusive.



I think people are jumping to the wrong thing when it comes to alphas. If the alpha isn't causing instagibs in higher level play and alphas aren't all that matters, then the question that needs to be asked is why players seems to be making choices that put themselves into these positions and what can be done to curtail that behavior or alleviate the punishment in lower tiers. To me, alphas aren't the problem if they aren't causing that much of a problem in comp play, the problem is endemic of something else. Whether it is matchmaking, tutorials, or even team size, idk, but it seems to me that it may not be balance's fault that bad play is punished this harshly.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 26 August 2018 - 08:57 PM.

[Sable Dove]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 26 August 2018 - 08:57 PM, said:

I think people are jumping to the wrong thing when it comes to alphas. If the alpha isn't causing instagibs in higher level play and alphas aren't all that matters, then the question that needs to be asked is why players seems to be making choices that put themselves into these positions and what can be done to curtail that behavior or alleviate the punishment in lower tiers. To me, alphas aren't the problem if they aren't causing that much of a problem in comp play, the problem is endemic of something else. Whether it is matchmaking, tutorials, or even team size, idk, but it seems to me that it may not be balance's fault that bad play is punished this harshly.

Balance is going to be different for competitive play and casual play, and I don't think balancing to competitive-tier players is going to be good for the game, and doing that generally drives casual players away, and games tend to die after that. The idea that you balance for the top, and everything else falls in line is false, especially when most competitive players only have fun when they win, so they don't really care if the game is fun to play. Ideally, the game itself should be fun to play, win or lose.

The fact of the matter is that high alpha strikes are detrimental to the fun; getting a side torso blown off by an enemy 800m away two seconds after stepping out of cover is not fun. Peeking around cover for 10 minutes is not fun. Hyper-alpha builds can be inefficient, and it doesn't matter, because getting crippled by one for daring to expose yourself for more than one second is still not fun.

This is what I mean by not balancing based on competitive players; competitive players often only care if they win. They could die 30 seconds into a match, and as long as they win, it's good. And if balancing for casual players spoils the balance for competitive players, then I'm not too worried, because I'd rather have a game that's fun to play than a game that's perfectly balanced.

[Navid A1]

The only reason I see people who are defending a 40 heat cap give is that 50 heat cap does not prevent big alphas.

Meanwhile, the problem is how often laser vomit mechs can fire that big alpha in a span of near 30 seconds. That is the problem.
I really don't understand how a brawler can manage not to twist a 64 damage 1.4s duration burn over 4 components.
High alpha/High heat is a playstyle. it has its own strong and weak points.
Funny thing is that laser alphas aren't even that high given how long the burn duration is. The extra kick comes from dual gauss PLUS lasers.


Furthermore, in your crusade to annihilate every remaining viable playstyle, you should notice that a 40 heat cap will also steam roll, Light mechs, PPC focused builds, energy based medium mechs, Brawlers, etc.
Its not just about killing a build that you hate.

Edited by Navid A1, 26 August 2018 - 09:25 PM.

[Navid A1]

Mycroft000, on 26 August 2018 - 08:04 PM, said:

It only took me two matches in my Nova to confirm that 50 heat cap was too high.

It took me 30 matches in my Warhawk, Night Gyr, Battlemaster, Wolfhound, Adder, Timberwolf, Summoner, Direwolf and Nova to confirm 50 point heat cap is the perfect point.

Edited by Navid A1, 26 August 2018 - 09:28 PM.

[Navid A1]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

If you want a "thinking-man's shooter", high alphas are not the way to go, because it just comes down to raw manual dexterity. If the most thinking that's required is when and where to take cover, it hardly requires more thinking than just about any other modern military shooter. Now, having to think about heat efficiency in the build, building to cover different ranges, knowing when to shoot what weapons, when to reposition to take advantage of your ideal range, etc. That has some thinking involved.

Do you honestly believe that the Thinking part in the "Thinking man's shooter" is about thinking about firing your weapons, your range and cover?... that basic?

The thinking part is in strategy, timing of team movement, synergy, map control, and reading the enemy's movements.
It is how the game is played in high level competition.

[Sable Dove]

Navid A1, on 26 August 2018 - 09:22 PM, said:

The only reason I see people who are defending a 40 heat cap give is that 50 heat cap does not prevent big alphas.

Meanwhile, the problem is how often laser vomit mechs can fire that big alpha in a span of near 30 seconds. That is the problem.
I really don't understand how a brawler can manage not to twist a 64 damage 1.4s duration burn over 4 components.
High alpha/High heat is a playstyle. it has its own strong and weak points.
Funny thing is that laser alphas aren't even that high given how long the burn duration is. The extra kick comes from dual gauss PLUS lasers.


Furthermore, in your crusade to annihilate every remaining viable playstyle, you should notice that a 40 heat cap will also steam roll, Light mechs, PPC focused builds, energy based medium mechs, Brawlers, etc.
Its not just about killing a build that you hate.

So I've got one person claiming that if you reduce the heat cap more, and it'll just be a brawl-fest, and one person claiming that lowering the heat cap will cripple brawlers.

If only we had some sort of server on which to test this to find out. A server that is for the public to test things like this. A public test server, if you will.


Also, a lot of mechs don't turn fast enough to spread damage well against competent players And some mechs just don't have the hitboxes for it to be overly effective.

[Navid A1]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 09:40 PM, said:

So I've got one person claiming that if you reduce the heat cap more, and it'll just be a brawl-fest, and one person claiming that lowering the heat cap will cripple brawlers.

The two statements are not contradicting.

If you reduce heat cap, you screw every mech and every build.
its just that some builds are screwed more than others

[Sable Dove]

Navid A1, on 26 August 2018 - 10:07 PM, said:

The two statements are not contradicting.

If you reduce heat cap, you screw every mech and every build.
its just that some builds are screwed more than others

Well, if the worst thing to come out of it is that there are more brawls, I'm not seeing the downside.

[Y E O N N E]

Sable Dove, on 26 August 2018 - 10:09 PM, said:

Well, if the worst thing to come out of it is that there are more brawls, I'm not seeing the downside.

IS are way better at brawling than Clans, is the problem. Just like Clans are better at trading than IS.

Now do you see the problem?