10 replies to this topic

[Nesutizale]

From Lore and TT heat is the worst enemy of a Battlemech.
It could cause trouble in lots of ways like slowing you down, makeing it harder to hit, shutdown and ammo explosions.

In MWO this has been basicly narrowed down to shutting you down when you reach max heat. Something I find to be over simpliefied. So lets see how heat could have a greater impact to the game.

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Slowing down
I think that could be implemented pretty straight forward as with increasing heat you would slow down. You would never stand still, just get a % reduction to a max of maybe 25% when you are close to max heat.

I think that could be a nice risk-reward thing. You have to weight between firing a full alpha, that if you don't kill the enemy or he has friends you are stuck or at least hindered to hide again.
So do you alpha or do you stagger your attack?

As for the reduction, I wouldn't go much higher as 25% as light and medium mechs would realy have some trouble with higher reductions as they don't have the armor and we all know how easy it is to kill a legged light or medium.

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Harder to hit
Here I see two options:
1) The hotter your mech gets the more your fire will hit something in a cone of fire instead of where the crosshair is.
2) It gets harder to bring your crosshair over the target, like you have an input lag. Your mech still moves normaly so you can twist and stuff but your crosshair needs some time to follow that movement. To show that you would have a slightly transparent crosshair in the middle as usual and the full opaque one off center moveing towards your center one.
Should you fire before your crosshiars meet again you would fire at where the opaque crosshair is at that moment.

I think I would prefere option two. Its less of a gamble mechanic. You know where you will shoot at and you can adapt your firing behavior accordingly by waiting to cool down or you take the shot whereever its pointing at the moment.

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Shutdown
Normaly you would have several shutdown warnings until the mech shuts you down no matter what you want.
I think I would translate it in a way that you have 3 points that, when your heat gets higher then that, you get a shutdown warning and a timer starts. The hotter you are the shorter the timer will be and if you don't hit the overwrite in time your mech shuts down.

When you reach max heat there won't be any warning, you shutdown. No overwrite possible.
On the other hand I would take out the self damageing from the overheating.

I think that mechanic would ask for much more skill and care when fighting. Damn I would even go so far and force the overwrite key to be fixed and not allow a rebind so that people realy have to take their hands of their usual position to move their hand and hit the overwrite key.

Overwriteing the shutdown should be easy enough to make it in time for the first overwrites but also take your attention away for a second or two. Makeing it a bit more risky to just charge in guns blasing.

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Ammo explosion
With this I struggle a bit. Never liked how much of a gamble it is in TT because of the high damage potential. Shutting down can be problematic too but you still have the chance that you are maybe far enough away, that your teammates cover you or that the enemy simply dosn't hit. Ammo explosions are a lot of times the end of the game for you.

So its a mechanic that even I would shy away from. Maybe a roundabout solution could be that instead of the ammo exploding just a part of your ammo gets useless.

Another option I could think of is that ammo based weapons take longer to reload the hotter the mech gets. Since ammo weapons are more often less heat intensive that might be a way to also balance thems slightly but yet keep it so that someone skilled can build and pilot a mech in a way that you act accordingly.
Like deciding between going back into cover to cool down or you take the extra facetime to finish off a weakend target to get a kill.
I think that would be a much better tradeoff. Its a more interesting decision that you can influance compared to a dice beeing rolled if you are out of the game or not.

Final thoughts
While this dosn't prevent high alphas it could influance it by people who are doing it haveing to now evaluate the situation more. They will not get away so easy anymore and follow up shots wouldn't be garantueed hit but its still skill based and not random.

Brawlers have to be less about constant fireing but more hit and run.

LRMing...mh. Hard to tell. When you take the slower reloads with more heat then LRMers would do less damage and might have to switch to secondary weapons or take less ammo or LRMs to manage the heat.

Lights and Mediums could very well do hit and run while heavy and assaults can't continuesly fire at them with pinpoint accuracy.

TTK might go up a bit while DOT vs Alpha gets a bit more interesting.

I think those changes could make MWO a more interesting game. Your thoughts?

Edited by Nesutizale, 23 August 2020 - 05:24 AM.

[VonBruinwald]

A 0-50% reduction to agility/mobility scaling from 50% to 150% of max heat as an abstract for penalties to piloting/gunnery would work wonders for balancing high heat builds.

Sadly though if the Clan-XL heatspike nerf has taught us anything it's that punishing people who redline with impunity is a bottomless salt mine.

[Davegt27]

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So lets see how heat could have a greater impact to the game.

interesting topic

why would you want to have heat play a greater impact on the game

1 reason why I ask is back when I played MW2 (way back when)

they had this weapon called the PPC
this was a way cool scifi weapon that I had never even imagined

talking with friends at work (all electronics/computer techs) we concluded PPCs had to be ball lightning (we where wrong)

anyways it turned out the weapon was unusable it was to hot

so this cool original item was made worthless because of the heat

I hardly used PPCs in MW2 and the rest of the Mech Warrior games

so why would you want to shoot your game in the foot with game killing mechanics ??

IMHO

[Nesutizale]

@Dave

Good question.
I tried to explain it a bit for each of the given parts and with the final thoughts. Maybe I have to make it a bit more clear to people who aren't familiar with the books or tabletop. The heat panelties aren't an on/off switch like its now but a gradual process.

Second part is to introduce more risk-reward gameplay as well to give a reason not to boat weapons. The heatscale promotes a more mixed loadout more. For example it makes more sense to have groups of weapons for different ranges or to have firinggroups that allow you to cool off a little.

That way it would allow for more tactics to be played. Still it allows you to alpha or boat to your hearts contend but you have to take a risk for doing so.

Sure it would require some adaption to a new playstyle but then you seam to have to adapt anyway. To pick up your example of PPCs. I use them in quite a number of builds, they can be played effectivly BUT its very different from playing a laser vomit or SRM build, etc.
Also as a tip...hit registration with PPCs seams to be a bit off. Better fire one after the other. Lately I had pretty good matches with a medium mech with 2 PPC and two Streak SRM 4. You don't brawl with it, you don't constantly fire but you do the cherry picking. Go around, look for a target of oportunity or you go hunt lights. PS: Light stealth mechs will hate you. PPC deactivates their cloak and then the streaks can look on

@Von Bruinwald
I wouldn't restrict the mobility to much. Lights and mediums would be seriously hindered and become unplayable I think. Maybe one has to make a restriction based on the weighclass.
As for mining salt. YES...I aspect that to happen because its a change. Still I think that it would help the game to become more intersting to have a good heat system intead of our On/Off switch.

I mean do you realy have any kind of incentive to not ride the red line? Any at all? I don't see a reason not to do it and that makes for a very bad risk-reward mechanic if you ask me.

[VonBruinwald]

Nesutizale, on 23 August 2020 - 11:01 AM, said:

I wouldn't restrict the mobility too much. Lights and mediums would be seriously hindered and become unplayable I think. Maybe one has to make a restriction based on the weightclass.

The penalty I proposed was still -25% mobility at 100% heat as per your suggestion, only it scaled higher if you went into override territory. Tweaking it to tonnage may be an option but I don't think that it's a necessary one.

Nesutizale, on 23 August 2020 - 11:01 AM, said:

I mean do you realy have any kind of incentive to not ride the red line? Any at all? I don't see a reason not to do it and that makes for a very bad risk-reward mechanic if you ask me.

The only real risk with redlining is if someone pops your ST torso while doing so (and you're running LFE/cXL) as it could push you to suicide. But it does nothing for XL/STD engines.

[Nesutizale]

VonBruinwald, on 23 August 2020 - 12:02 PM, said:

The penalty I proposed was still -25% mobility at 100% heat as per your suggestion, only it scaled higher if you went into override territory. Tweaking it to tonnage may be an option but I don't think that it's a necessary one.

Ah okay, that wasn't clear to me.

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The only real risk with redlining is if someone pops your ST torso while doing so (and you're running LFE/cXL) as it could push you to suicide. But it does nothing for XL/STD engines.

Yah, kinda true. I think the extra heat is okay, your reactor got damaged but the internal damage. No, don't think that is a good thing. Better take it out and add the ideas I suggested...or just shut down for a while.

[Davegt27]

OP after rereading your posts

I must agree a more robust and versatile heat system would make the game more fun

maybe a green --yellow--red--override system

each would have a risk/reward aspect

[Ekson Valdez]

This thread has been moved to Feature Suggestions

[Nesutizale]

Davegt27, on 25 August 2020 - 06:03 PM, said:

OP after rereading your posts
I must agree a more robust and versatile heat system would make the game more fun
maybe a green --yellow--red--override system
each would have a risk/reward aspect

Colorcodeing it would definitly help visualy. As for the drawbacks, I think it would be best to have them gradualy.
So when you heat up slowly you would also loose speed slowly while when you hit the alpha button and your heat spikes from one moment to the other you also get all the negativ effects that moment.

I think that would create a nice balance between different playstyles. You build your mech to fight longer or you go for a risky road and take into account that you will be a nearly standing target for a while.

Maybe it could even give more character to clan and IS mechs. While IS mechs have a higher heat tolleranze and keep on fighting, clan mechs would be more short burst fighters.

Edited by Nesutizale, 25 August 2020 - 11:40 PM.

[Valdarion Silarius]

I would only welcome a system like this if ghost heat and most weapon heat penalties were removed from the game. Also, add a global buff to all heat sinks across the board. This sounds fine in theory but in practice, it would be an overall disaster and would be viewed as nerfs to an already buggy heat system. How would mechs with ghost heat quirks be compensated with such drastic changes? Should certain mech have some of these purposed heat penalties removed as quirks in the game?

I think some of these ideas would be great in a brand new mechwarrior title, but not in mechwarrior online unless extensive testing was done in PTS and was approved by the community as a whole.

[Nesutizale]

Ghost heat was introduced to reduce boating and reduce effectivness of certain combinations. So its more of a balance thing.
If ghost heat could be removed with the introduction of an advanced heat system is something that would need to be tested...as would be the entire system. That I take as a given. Nothing should be introduced without heavy testing.

Would this be quite a change? I think so but this game needs to change a lot to become more interesting again.
Its not shooty and fast enough to be your 08/15 shooter that you can just pick up on the go but its also not simulation enough to satisfy those peoples craving. Instead we are in a weird mix of beeing to complex for one group but not complex enough for the other.

Since there are enough twichy shooters I think MWO has to go into the simulation department. Going along with that a heat system that offers more risk-reward gameplay then an on/off state is what is needed.
Its basicly going back to the root of the advertisment of a "thinking mans shooter."