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The Energy Draw system was a step forward, but also had its own hamfisted issues.
One possible alternative I wish to suggest is based on a mechanic that is already in the game: Flamers.
Flamers have a scaling heat multiplier based on how heavily they are used, with a logarithmic climb. This also takes into account how many flamers you are using.
My suggestion is to remove ghost heat and apply this existing mechanical system in a unified manner, to what previously were the ghost heat groups instead. You could even straight remove the jamming mechanic from UAC/RAC and apply the system to them as well.
The idea is that each weapon ghost heat grouping, Say Gauss/ppc, pulse lasers, medium/large lasers, etc, currently have their own ghost heat group.
If instead, they had a climbing heat multiplier based on how heavily you were using them without break, this would have a similar function to ghost heat that we have right now but would allow for far more granularity in builds.
It would also allow builds with more weapon diversity to compete with alpha builds, because having a small variety of different weapon groups would mean that you have more options to work with while other groups are on cool-down.
One downside to this is that some fringe one shot wonder joke builds would also be possible. Example: you could fire a 6x erppc stalker with this system, or quad UAC/20, or whatever the heck else memes you want to pull off. However, you'd have a lot of downtime between shots, and you wouldn't be able to fit much else significant in the load-out, so this sort of build would only be valuable on the field if supported and backed up by other players. Ultimately this may not be a thing that needs to be nerfed.
Another downside is that the weapon grouping bars will become far more significant to pay attention to, but currently they are locked away in the bottom right in a near-useless location. Some sort of semi-opaque bars or other indicators would be nice to have somewhat in relation to but not obscuring the center of the screen.
Finally, one neat thing that could be done with this to tie it directly into game mechanics and tactics, is to cause the related dynamic geometry on the mech to visually glow with heat and smoke based on how high its heat scaling bar was.
IE: if your UAC group was firing straight, eventually your uac on your mech would start heating up and glowing and smoking.
This wouldn't be very useful at range, but for people closing for brawl or within short range, this could be a pretty effective tactical indicator of how your opponent is doing and could allow for split section decisions.
Finally, this system would break the current cool shot meta in half over its steely knees. No amount of cool shots you throw at your dying gun barrels will fix them shooting some really hot bois.
Edited by Tibbnak, 12 December 2018 - 09:44 AM.
