82 replies to this topic

[Vyx]

Judah Malganis, on 25 October 2018 - 11:30 PM, said:

Because it's not small arms. It's more akin to 20-30mm rounds. They do AC2 level damage in tabletop.

Then the argument for the Piranha being ridiculously overpowered is self-evident. Boating 12 AC2s, even if limited to "short" range, is just stupid. Who thought this mech was a good idea?

[dr3dnought]

Vyx, on 26 October 2018 - 12:00 AM, said:

Then the argument for the Piranha being ridiculously overpowered is self-evident. Boating 12 AC2s, even if limited to "short" range, is just stupid. Who thought this mech was a good idea?

MGs don't do AC2 level damage in MWO.

[Koniving]

An easy solution is to not have just 2 rear armor.

Side note Piranhas are not much of an issue. If you can handle two crosshairs they sort of become that little pest that you catch with your chopsticks. If you know what you are doing...done. if not you will need some practice.

Honestly I'm more concerned when people strike the legs. Can't tell if behind in front or on side. That wastes my time hunting for the source ..time that can get me killed. So go on and strike the back. It tells me where you are and what you probably are. That tells me how to handle you so I can put on my 8 bit glasses when I walk away and you - as in the pirates - are left beached, helpless...and dead.

(post is in response to the original post and not directly referring to anyone specific).

[Koniving]

Vyx, on 25 October 2018 - 11:00 PM, said:

What if: MGs didn't do damage to mech armor at all, only structure?

I've never understood how small arms fire does any damage to a tank.

This would be an mg.

And that was a tank til it went boom.
Edit: Replaced video with a better one, skip to 30 seconds.


Keep in mind, this would be closer to a machine gun array of 6 BT MGs...

So why not put 12 of MGs on a machine intended to mow down combat vehicles and aircraft? It comes out to the effective power of 2 of these Gau 8 Avengers.
Since mechs and tanks use the same armor and as such...it's effective against mechs too.

As for why... It's dirt cheap and very effective in small engagements.
Far as the mechanical itself..
. It has virtually no ammo for a prolonged engagement.
It relies (in mwo) on people being dumb enough to have paper thin armor to minmax and abuse the game's very broken hitbox mechanics. If anything the Piranha in mwo is teaching people "if you wanna play the poke at long range and herpaderp I'm a damage sponge with 90-130+ armor on the front and like 1 on the back"....that here's a reality check.

Is it so hard to put 10 armor on the rear? Ten armor plus one decent sized heavy mech's CT health is enough to almost completely deplete a Piranha. You can deplete it AND survive if we do this thing called "react" to it.

Edited by Koniving, 26 October 2018 - 09:07 AM.

[Shifty McSwift]

Avlaen, on 24 October 2018 - 10:52 AM, said:

POSSIBLE "PIRANHA" SOLOUTION WITHOUT A DIRECT NERF?

Allow back armour to be increased without losing front armour, Like in Table top/battle tech/earlier mech warriors.

This way i can Drop weapons or heat sinks to actually have some back protection, Even with the existence of piranhas having a lot of back armour is just a terrible idea, because it leaves your front, the armour you use up every game massively lacking.

Avlaen, on 24 October 2018 - 10:52 AM, said:

"PIRANHA" SOLOUTION

What is that a solution to exactly? This is a joke right?

Edited by Shifty McSwift, 26 October 2018 - 03:01 AM.

[Tesunie]

Horseman, on 25 October 2018 - 10:11 PM, said:

I never said I agree with the notion, just that I've seen some fools expect it in MWO before "because HBS game did it".

That's two out of twenty one, by my count.
Mechwarrior 1 through 4, MW2 GBL, MW2 Mercs, MW3 Pirate's Moon, MW4 Mercs, MW4 Black Knight, MWO make ten games in the Mechwarrior series.
MechAssault adds another three. (13 total)
Crescent Hawks' Inception, Crescent Hawks' Revenge and HBS BT make three more. (16 total)
NetMech and MPBT Solaris add two more (18 total)
Mechwarrior Tactics (defunct) and Tactical Command are another two (20)
Then you have the SNES action game.

I just had no argument about BT the game, because I didn't own it so I didn't know. All I was mentioning there.

As for that tally... I think that proves the point even farther. Though, I was trying to go with just the core games (because all additions share the same game mechanics and because I didn't own the add-ons/they didn't work on my computer at the time). That's a lot of games that all share the same armor mechanics set in the BT universe. Hum... it's almost like that's a mechanic of the BT universe at large?

PS: Did you include Mech Commander 1 and 2? Can't recall how they did armor values in those games... Maybe I should pick them up again? They were fun games.

Koniving, on 26 October 2018 - 12:22 AM, said:

Is it so hard to put 10 armor on the rear? Ten armor plus one decent sized heavy mech's CT health is enough to almost completely deplete a Piranha. You can deplete it AND survive if we do this thing called "react" to it.

My problem was only slightly being attacked by a Piranha from the back (I've seen one drop an assault before with just "Blat-blat-blat-dead", it was probably close to only 1 second of shooting, which is a bit of a problem), but their (and the Locust's, and Commando, etc) ability to face hug and not be able to be shot at all. I once had a Commando face hug my Panther, and my torso mounted MRM launcher couldn't hit him... A PANTHER! A fellow light couldn't bend down low enough to hit another light that got into it's face...

A lot of the issues I had before hand with Piranhas have slowed down since they got their agility adjusted. Still have many times I shoot one visually on my screen, and they don't want to take the damage, but that's a whole other issue entirely.

[Foxfire kadrpg]

across the board, 50 degree or more pitch on all mechs would kill the piranha "problem"

[Tesunie]

Foxfire kadrpg, on 26 October 2018 - 09:03 AM, said:

across the board, 50 degree or more pitch on all mechs would kill the piranha "problem"

That could also open up more problems for balancing as well, possibly making torso mounted weapons "too powerful". But a bit more pitch wouldn't be bad either, or a slight scaling up, or all mechs getting a slight scaling down...? I do feel some mechs are too restricted by torso pitch and yaw/twist. The Battlemaster 1G comes to mind... with it's poor twist abilities compared to other Battlemasters...

[FupDup]

Tesunie, on 26 October 2018 - 09:05 AM, said:

That could also open up more problems for balancing as well, possibly making torso mounted weapons "too powerful". But a bit more pitch wouldn't be bad either, or a slight scaling up, or all mechs getting a slight scaling down...? I do feel some mechs are too restricted by torso pitch and yaw/twist. The Battlemaster 1G comes to mind... with it's poor twist abilities compared to other Battlemasters...

The torso pitch skill in the mobility tree should be programmed to give +2 degrees per node rather than +2%. Then it would allow people to alleviate this issue in a way that has a trade-off (of having fewer SP to spend elsewhere). Most of the mobility tree in general really ought to be fixed values instead of percentages.

[Koniving]

Tesunie, on 26 October 2018 - 08:22 AM, said:

My problem was only slightly being attacked by a Piranha from the back (I've seen one drop an assault before with just "Blat-blat-blat-dead", it was probably close to only 1 second of shooting, which is a bit of a problem), but their (and the Locust's, and Commando, etc) ability to face hug and not be able to be shot at all. I once had a Commando face hug my Panther, and my torso mounted MRM launcher couldn't hit him... A PANTHER! A fellow light couldn't bend down low enough to hit another light that got into it's face...

A lot of the issues I had before hand with Piranhas have slowed down since they got their agility adjusted. Still have many times I shoot one visually on my screen, and they don't want to take the damage, but that's a whole other issue entirely.

Most assaults, including some of mine, have 2 armor on the rear. They want all that armor on the front as they intend to lead charges or snipe from afar. No one expects to have mechs coming up their back side.

Once the armor's gone, that is when MGs become dangerous.
0.10 damage per bullet / 1 damage/second per MG, at 12 damage/second can of course do quite a number pretty fast...
Then you add crit-seeking at 47% chance of doing some sort of crit per bullet at 10 bullets per second per MG, that's 120 rolls per second at 12 damage of which 56.4 bullets are likely to get 1 to 3 crits... Rounding to 56 bullets...

56 at 1 crit minimum brings the damage of just the 56 bullets to 6.44 damage of just that 56 (instead of just 5.6)... plus the rest makes for 12.8 damage/second... Or it could be as somewhat higher.

Against 1 or 2 armor, you're mince meat as the typical mech has about 3 seconds to react or its dead. Sometimes 4.

Against 12 armor, you get 5 to 6 seconds.

Against 20 armor... you easily gain about 9 seconds to react before you're dead to a constant barrage of ignoring them.

That's why my mechs with wide rear torsos get about 20 rear armor.

Also the torso hitboxes are kinda small. But on light mechs the leg hitboxes are exaggerated in size (thicker than the legs actually are). As such go for the leg. Since a Piranha is bound to have a Clan XL engine anyway, you kinda can't get around the fact that there's no quicker way to kill them than by the leg anyway.

Foxfire kadrpg, on 26 October 2018 - 09:03 AM, said:

across the board, 50 degree or more pitch on all mechs would kill the piranha "problem"

"Arms."

Press left CTRL with armlock off (add shift if Armlock is on), aim mouse down, most mechs can now aim about 70 degrees lower without issue. Some only 30 degrees, but every little bit counts.

Please watch from 4:30 in full screen, after the Hunchback dies a Locust runs across the screen, off the screen and under my view. Watch the "o" crosshair as I net the kill long after he leaves my sight, as I track him with the "ARMS."

Specifically I took advantage of convergence, rather than aim directly at him I aimed so that my left arm laser would intersect his path. I didn't think it would kill him...but it did and obviously that is awesome.

Edited by Koniving, 26 October 2018 - 09:32 AM.

[Lykaon]

Koniving, on 26 October 2018 - 12:22 AM, said:

It relies (in mwo) on people being dumb enough to have paper thin armor to minmax and abuse the game's very broken hitbox mechanics. If anything the Piranha in mwo is teaching people "if you wanna play the poke at long range and herpaderp I'm a damage sponge with 90-130+ armor on the front and like 1 on the back"....that here's a reality check.

Is it so hard to put 10 armor on the rear? Ten armor plus one decent sized heavy mech's CT health is enough to almost completely deplete a Piranha. You can deplete it AND survive if we do this thing called "react" to it.

So 10 armor is enough?

my PIR-1 is armed with 12 clan MGs 3 tons ammo 2 ER micro lasers and a heavy small laser. The rest of the loadout is endo steel and ferro fibrious 10 DHS and a 180XL engine. It has max armor minus 4 from the head (head armor 14/18).

It's MechDB stats are the following.

Heat Efficiency: 148% (basically it's heat neutral and incapable of overheating under normal combat situations)
DPS (AVG/MAX) 14.85 / 14.85 (so within one second the damage output is bearly shy of 15 damage)

3 tons of ammo is 6000 rounds or 500 shots for the guns. More than enough to core out an assault mech from the FRONT! so let's not even think about 10 armor in the rear because in less than one second that ten armor is depleted in one second's time the internals have taken nearly 5 damage and if it's a side torso (where I will aim most of the time) you may have triggered as many as 15 crit damage checks with 12 of those crit damage checks inflicted by MGs with crit hit bonuses.

So let's go with the ten rear armor. And let's also do the smart thing and aim at a side torso to disable the engine and probably half the weapon payload of the assault mech.

I need ONE second on target to breach the armor and already have a solid chance of disabling something in that torso with a crit. Now I need to bug out and hide...The assault mech now has a choice, either turn it's depleted back armor towards me again and proceed as planned or drop everything to keep a 20 ton mech from destroying them in the next few seconds.

If they turn their depleted armor towards me again I win...If they instead delay and defensively manuver to defend themselves from me I also win because I have prevented an assault mech from effectively utilizing it's payload. That assault mech is now back to a wall and jittery looking for where I may pop up next (and they never deploy a UAV but I did so I know where they are and where they are facing)

You simply can not afford to treat a PIR like any other light mech because no other light mech has the capacity to do what the Piranha does do.

The most effective defense from Piranha attack is keep you assaults mid formation and screen your rear and flanks with fast medium mechs armed with streaks and/or loads of pulse lasers.

Essentially the existence of the PIR has cause your entire team to move at the speed of the slowest mechs and your skirmishing assets are deployed to your rear and flank to screen your backs from PIRs instead of delaying your enemy's movements. Or...your entire deployment and positioning strategy has been altered because there may be a particular 20 ton mech on the enemy team.

The PIR has a hugely disproportionate impact on the meta. You team can not afford to ignore a Piranha like you can a Locust or Flea or pretty much nearly any other light mech. Any other light and you can dispatch a solo skirmisher to deal with it but a PIR? with a nigh unto 60 alpha strike or a nearly 15 DPS? I wouldn't chance it.



I also have a PIR-2 that has an alpha strike of 56.5 but that's not on the topic of the MG equiped PIR-1 that seems to be the focus here.

Edited by Lykaon, 26 October 2018 - 10:36 AM.

[Koniving]

Quote

HBS Battletech did it [allow more than max armor front and back]

Technically...

Lets look at it.
I have a Firestarter FS9-H in HBS Battletech.
I maxed armor front and back on the CT.
Front armor maxes to 110.
Rear armor maxes to 55.
To get Tabletop equivalent, divide all armor and damage by 5.

The result, a maximum of 33 with both front and back maxed out.
MWO's 2x max of CT armor for a 35 ton mech without quirks or skills, 44.

HBS BT allows 1.5x armor, but still has the finite MAX ARMOR between front and rear... with a hard cap to max armor to a section.

In other words if you take the same Firestarter and the same principle from HBS Battletech to MWO...

Your Max Front Armor permitted is 29.33 PERIOD. Regardless of rear armor allocated, and the max armor, a separate max, is 14.67 PERIOD. The total is then 44. Nothing's going beyond "max armor" just because you maxed out both ends.

Any 100 ton mech with this identical ratio given would be allowed to only put 82.6777 max front armor Period and 41.3333 rear max rear armor Period. (Fixed math; had figured it out for what BT would give me for the Atlas and forgot to put it back to MWO's x2 without quirks/skilltree).

Now.... This isn't giving you higher than max armor on both sides, its forcing an arbitrary second maximum to each side to prevent min/maxing and exploitation.

After all, no matter how much armor is left over, that Firestarter in MWO would never be allowed to have more than 29.33 front armor.
Even if the rear was zero, that remaining 14.67... it's only allowed on the back, period. No changezies, either you use it or you don't as the max of 44 is only in total... In HBS BT's case the max is 33 between the two, or in their x five damage/armor world, 110 and 55.

Meanwhile in tabletop, the max between front and rear is only 22... But the fact is whether its 1x (TT), 1.5x(HBS BT) or 2x (MWO)... Your max armor is your max armor. HBS BT just has a second enforced max, that 2/3rds can only be applied to the front and only 1/3rd can be applied to rear, and its hardlocked that way without modding it.

Now we could have MWO give us this forced handicap to teach people "herpaderp you gotta put some armor on the back yo."
Or we could grow up and just put some damn armor on the back without a forced anti-min/max distribution limit. Honestly I'd be for applying HBS BT's forced 2/3rds front max 1/3rd rear max. We wouldn't need so much of an "alpha arms race" to get kills.

Edited by Koniving, 27 October 2018 - 01:07 AM.

[Koniving]

Lykaon, on 26 October 2018 - 10:35 AM, said:

So ten armor is enough?

When you factor in structure, it helps. You must also factor the competence of reacting.

Ideally, you should perhaps read the post I made since then (or if it is, further in the post than you quoted) in which I gave a rough idea of how much time you have to survive against 12 MGs alone, based on the armor you apply to the back which exponentially grows with more armor.

Your math and concept factors a mech that doesn't react to you or is blissfully unaware. A target like that deserves to die, like this guy.

Except this guy has NO time to react.
Since the 12 MGs is doing 12 damage per second, there's a LOT of time to react. Even supplemented with the laser weapons (which significantly limits the ammo potential but allows you to play in the long game)... there's still multiple seconds to react in which the first move is to rob you of the rear torso and rear pelvis by both turning and throwing it in reverse. Preferably not full reverse as partial reverse allows you to have 1.5x turning speed where full reverse only allows 1x turning speed.

From there the next step is to be a threat to the Piranha, which will invoke the Piranha to run off or try to get behind the mech again. Between torso twisting and turning this is actually incredibly difficult against someone only using partial reverse.

(edit I know that in the next paragraph I repositioned you from being "the Piranha" to "The victim of the Piranha that refuses to die.")
And what's left to do, if the Piranha has run off, engage while it runs. If it hasn't, you're one keeping it busy and two wasting its ammo, even if you fail to kill it. Though failing to kill it with pulse lasers, LBX/RAC, streaks or MGs of your own would be a really impressive feat -- all of these weapons are quite effective so long as the Piranha is actively engaging you. If they're not, well that's when they're hard to kill.

Edited by Koniving, 26 October 2018 - 11:22 AM.

[Tesunie]

Koniving, on 26 October 2018 - 11:12 AM, said:

When you factor in structure, it helps. You must also factor the competence of reacting.

Ideally, you should perhaps read the post I made since then (or if it is, further in the post than you quoted) in which I gave a rough idea of how much time you have to survive against 12 MGs alone, based on the armor you apply to the back which exponentially grows with more armor.

The problem turned into only accounting for the 12 MGs, and not the three additional energy hard point that variant can take as well. three clan small lasers can cut right through 10 armor, and then the MG are against pure internals... That will have an impact on your math.

[Throe]

[delete by user]

Edited by Throe, 08 November 2018 - 03:35 PM.

[Vxheous]

People are still complaining about piranha-1 with MGs when piranha-2 with spl/ER micro is far more deadly

[FireDog]

One way to nerf this mg boat is to make mgs more fragile. That many mg clustered on a light would be big time melted/blasted barrels.

[Gristle Missile]

Its not so much a Piranha problem so much as a MG boating problem
I was hoping for diminishing returns on MG crits when boated. it does makes it awkward to calculate, but I think ghost heat bandaid is a bad idea for MGs
Negative MG ROF quirks could work but I despise negative quirking
I guess you could nerf the engine lower so they can carry other weapons and be a bit slower, but they are already pretty frail and it messes with lore that people love so much
Its a tough balancing act here

I don't think the Piranha is blatantly OP, but it certainly outperforms most other light mechs and can usually flat out beat them in a 1v1 despite only being 20 tons

Edited by Gristle Missile, 26 October 2018 - 05:30 PM.

[The Lighthouse]

With all of these yet another piranha thread, I can feel the machinegun ghost heat is inevitably coming for us.



Machinegun ghost heat, so laughable and ridiculous that PGI will indeed implement it.



I can taste it.

[TechChris]

Why do we need a "solution" outside of a direct nerf?
PGI already wacked its "mobility", and as expected by anyone who actually plays the game, it did pretty much nothing like most there "balance" ideas.
So next on the chopping block (Given PGIs magical Spreadsheets still says its on the list of whats over performing or what not) would be to take away the few quirks it has, primarily its leg structure, and if they can, adjust its Hill Ascent aspect so its not as greased lightning over broken terrain and capable of scaling all but vertical walls.
When thats still not enough, whack its mobility some more or something?
Just as long they dont nerf the MGs anymore (as much as I despise them and wouldnt miss em if gone) since that would affect multiple mechs not needing to be affected.