RJF Volkodav, on 14 December 2018 - 12:58 AM, said:
Lets take a horse in a vacuum. Read the rules first please and play tabletop. Noone plays with "20 units of unsunk heat" this mek is normally almost dead already because it doesnt moves. I'm laughing about guys discussing tabletop which they never even tried.
MWO heat mechanics is different to tabletop so you are wrong when trying to adapt MWO situation to tabletop. Noone building up heat without any serious need in tabletop and MWO heat scale bar is totally different than what you see on a picture above. In fact MWO heat bar is a heat cap of heatsinks only and not having any builup heat bar which we have in tabletop (do you see any moving speed influence or shutdowns while you are not getting 100% filled bar?). So adapting MWO heatbar to tabletop assume that you heat buildup for every moment is 0. This having a 0 buildup and firing weapons which are not building up heat over the heatsinks limit gives you maximum buildup of 15-20 in tabletop. Or in that case lets switch to tabletop model and give us a heatsink cap + heat bar with penalties and then you will see a true "alpha warriors" able to fire twice more weapons than today.
Like lets take a HBR with 25DHS (50CAP) + heatbar (30CAP) and we'll see what happens.
I have. In fact I play more Megamek than mwo and anyone can have 20 unsunk heat. Its quite simple fire more than you can sink.
Reach 20 heat that couldn't be sunk due to firing them again and again without managing your heat. This is even easier to do in 2.5 second time slices. Its easy to do in regular tabletop too unless you cheese build your way out of it but even then mwo cheese builds in Solaris Vii's time slices still overheat horribly.
Since we are converting to real time its that much more valid. You have 66% heat, lose the side torso and now you shut down in both mwo and BT. From what I seen mwo is actually more lenient as you have to be even higher on the heat bar for it to actually affect you.
So which rules would you like?
Solaris VII?
Despite the 4 times simplicity to get 1/4th the time slice, if you undo it all and just divide by 4 you have basic tabletop rules (plus the ability to shoot up between 2 and 5 times in a 10 second time slice).
(Edit to clarify here, you either divide all the heat by 4 getting you basic tabletop rules [and times 4 on the time scale] and from there you can divide everything by 4 [including cooling power] to get Solaris VII rules again. Solaris VII tries to get around dividing heatsinks by 4 when dividing the time scale by 4 in order to supply a simple "just everything static times 4 and here's a reference sheet" since your heatsink count can vary but the heat of weapons are static. Long and short take basic tabletop rules and divide by 4 to get 2.5 second time slices. Take basic tabletop rules and divide by 10 to get second by second real time. From there you can have fun and play those out mathmatically to see what real time would do to a mech and you'd see exactly why the heat scale of Battletech is done with percentage chances of shutdown and ammo explosions... its quite simple, at each point its easier and easier to hit the special numbers 28 and 30 respectively at any given second depending on how your pilot fires. From there, the rest represents luck that your pilot spaces his shots out...or the lack of luck and tendency to alpha strike when he shouldn't.)
Or the basic rules of you establish your movement, select your targets to fire, add up your heat and then subtract for 10 seconds (or break it down by the second, where you can see the punishments at different units of heat make sense in the grand scheme because if you take, for example, an Awesome 8Q or a Masakari Prime, you can split the exact second you fire each ER PPC, and see that at 15 unsunk, etc. heat, the chance of hitting 30 heat at once [100% heat] brings you into potential shutdown territory even though you'd cool it all off before the turn is over. The harder the dice roll, the harder it is to mathmatically avoid touching 30 heat when counting up heat and cooling heat by the second. For ammo, the magic number that gets harder to avoid is 93% heat aka 28 at any given time.)
I even gave you a by-the-rules example of how you could get the results of a side torso loss Clan XL shutdown taken specifically from a Megamek match between me and Raven in which my Masakari (Warhawk) was shut down by a side torso loss in a digital facsimile of tabletop. As you can imagine it being a shutdown, and the calculated heat before committing to the action, I expected I would have had only 10 heat left unsunk (aka left over) after firing that hefty volley of fire as opposed to the surprising results (I didn't expect to lose my side torso). So instead, I wind up shut down and dead by engine loss on the next turn because I lost that side torso, getting that +10 heat in the same turn as everything else as the heat phase is calculated after the weapons damage and melee damage phases.
I can provide you with a screen cap of the rule book from everything as far back as the Original BattleDroids up to a beta version of Alpha Strike. I can't provide you with Alpha Strike itself because after reading the beta it became clear that it was dumbed down quite a bit with the realism sapped in much the same of the way "Clix" was. Which is good for bringing in new people. But then we'd have what MechAssault is to Mechwarrior 3.
Have you seen the latest Solaris VII? Its more of a trading card game with mechs having a heat limit of 1 to 5.
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To humor your argument, however without getting into cheese central because MWO's current max practical heat threshold is less than 60, which is currently less than MW4, but still almost 20 more than MW3 + Pirate's Moon and almost 30 more than MW3 which is the exact representation of tabletop heat in a Mechwarrior game minus the penalties. It is quite punishing however it was still cheesed.
Again assuming no movement (in what MWO situation are you NOT moving?), and you have an HBR (what variant or weapons here?) + 25 DHS, you have a real time heat cap of 30, a 10 second heat cap of 30 heat + 50 units of cooling (meaning you still have to fire your weapons at different parts of the enemy's body seemingly at random but this is actually factoring in enemy movement, your movement or lack thereof, enemy attempts to defend by deflection or dodging, etc., ever noticed your weapons aren't hitting one spot in tabletop? There's a reason for that, simulating real time dodging, defense and counter attack in as simple a way as possible).
So in theory you could generate 80 units of heat in 10 seconds, and against the heat scale as long as you don't hit 30 heat at any given SPECIFIC SECOND you don't shut down. You cool 50.. And actually guess what, you've got 30 heat unsunk.. you just shut down. Truth be told breaking it down by the second, you'd never be able to avoid hitting 30 heat at a given second anyway even if you did by some miracle manage to last the full first 9 seconds first.
If you add MaxTech to the mix, you've also melted up to zero heatsinks in this phenomenal cheese build.
But, since you've cheesed it to MWO's astronomical proportions in MWO before the new skill tree where MWO could have a threshold of up to 120+ if you're Clan and 100-ish if you're IS, then yeah you wouldn't have shut down. Note that's factoring cold environments' + 25% threshold.
However, MWO's current system, cheesed to the max, doesn't let you get above (I'd have to double check but I believe the cheesiest thing I got was between 68 and 69 and that's 1 weapon, boating as many heatsinks as possible, maximizing the skill tree's heat containment + environment), your cheesed tabletop example of slapping on excessive amount of heat thresholds because you don't feel like playing fair basically couldn't happen in MWO either.
If you were to use the Extended Heat Scale and get up to 50, yeah you wouldn't shut down. It'd be easy to avoid hitting 50 at any given second, however that's a crutch for those who can't even handle MW2's and M3 + Pirate's Moon expansion of 40 threshold. At least it didn't go the full cheese of MW4.
MWO's current system is 30 base + (2*10) + #[beyond the first 10]*0.5 + (quirks% + skill tree% + environment%) = your current threshold.
The best tabletop comparison is therefore the Extended Heat Bar.
You will notice if you take this extended heat effects table and divide it by 1/3rd, you'll get the original 30 threshold and adjusting the scale to be the same height, identical placement to the original 30 heatscale. This is basically a bandaid for kids that can't handle their heat, as well as used in post dark ages BT. (I don't go beyond dark ages, simply don't care).
If you were to run a 10 DHS Clan mech with a Clan XL, get to greater than 80% heat and then lose your side torso, you'll get identical effects in Tabletop as you will in MWO.
(Edited correction from assumed 70% to tested 80% aka 40 heat out of 50. If you're at 80% heat at the instant you lose the side torso in MWO on Forest Colony with 10 DHS (and not standing in water including the waterfall) you will shut down, the same is true in tabletop mathematically.)
Thus, it is perfectly fair and right to compare the two for this one instance.
(You also now know exactly how low your heat needs to be to avoid shutdown,
keep it under 80% for whatever build you have, factoring of course the lost heatsinks as well, and you won't shut down. There's your free tip.)
Also worth noting, re-reading the latest patch notes, every heatsink lost will reduce your overall max heat, as in both Battletech and 2012 MWO. This is perhaps the greatest news I've ever seen as I've noticed for years that losing heatsinks stopped mattering. This means losing your heatsinks will actually affect you and this is perhaps why you are crying your tears of saltiness. Because losing heatsinks actually matters again. (Now maybe MWO has a shot of actually being an E-sport...not gonna get my hopes up there).
Should MWO run something more of a simulator for the heat system? Absolutely. Does it? no. Should it account for heat pulled into the heatsinks though not yet expelled? It should, but it doesn't because its simply a game. Its source material didn't for simplicity, MWO doesn't because its complicated enough.
However most of the balance issues are actually stemming from PGI's disregard to tabletop as opposed to its adherence to it. Everything from "ECM is overpowered and needs nerfs" to Long Tom Nuclear Missiles (1390 as PGI's set max damage for being in the a 180 meter epicenter? Long Tom's max damage for being in the center of the strike was 30 damage split across the body in units of 5. Even if you doubled that it'd only be 60, and the overall damage of the 270 meter radius was only 520 not freaking 1390 per mech) have all been because PGI strayed from the source material to make up their own stuff. Twin AC/20s needing ghost heat? That's pretty simple, PGI made Rifles and called them Autocannons.
But hey, what can you do but fuss? This game stopped being a simulator long ago and the moment it tries, your tears soar up because your skill is inconvenienced by PGI's first step toward making this a little more realistic.
Truth be told, having lost a third of your engine in the real world...shutting down would be the least of your worries.
Edited by Koniving, 16 December 2018 - 12:26 PM.