49 replies to this topic

[JudauAshta]

foamyesque, on 12 February 2022 - 01:10 AM, said:

I'm going to ignore the rest of the post because it's nonsense, but this I want to address: There's absolutely a point in carrying both AMS and ECM. One of the best anti-missile mechs in the game is the Kit Fox C (or other Kit Foxes using the Kit Fox C arm) specifically because it has both ECM and triple AMS, and they complement each other in protecting yourself and others from missile fire. The ECM also has the added benefit of, even with AMS adding more visual cues, still significantly reducing the amount of direct fire you and people around you receive.

lol true
dat user doesn't realize that mitigating missile damage for your team is gonne let them stay alive longer

btw ams also destroys srm right??

[caravann]

foamyesque, on 12 February 2022 - 01:10 AM, said:

I'm going to ignore the rest of the post because it's nonsense, but this I want to address: There's absolutely a point in carrying both AMS and ECM. One of the best anti-missile mechs in the game is the Kit Fox C (or other Kit Foxes using the Kit Fox C arm) specifically because it has both ECM and triple AMS, and they complement each other in protecting yourself and others from missile fire. The ECM also has the added benefit of, even with AMS adding more visual cues, still significantly reducing the amount of direct fire you and people around you receive.

Some made a joke about it. That why should I cover my mech from missile boats. shouldn't it be the case that I want them to lock the Kitfox to prevent them from shooting at any other mech. The AMS has been reworked many times.

Is it just me or are there nothing but gatekeepers without any suggestions on their own. The case remain that you prevent them to shoot missiles while trying to shoot down their missiles with AMS. You can't do both.

[foamyesque]

JudauAshta, on 12 February 2022 - 01:35 AM, said:

lol true
dat user doesn't realize that mitigating missile damage for your team is gonne let them stay alive longer

btw ams also destroys srm right??

Yes, AMS will fire at any sort of missile, including SRMs (and even NARCs). However with the higher velocity of SRMs and the shorter ranges involved, and the higher health of the individual missiles as well, SRMs can usually get through even the best AMS walls.

caravann, on 12 February 2022 - 01:35 AM, said:

The case remain that you prevent them to shoot missiles while trying to shoot down their missiles with AMS. You can't do both.

The point of AMS isn't to shoot down missiles. The point of AMS is to stop missiles from doing damage. If the ECM stops them from ever being fired in the first place because it's keeping your team invisible to the enemy it's already doing that job, but lots of missile machines have various ways to deal with ECM (or teammates who do). So you can't rely solely on the ECM to protect people if you're serious about things. Having both is way, way more effective than just one or the other; there is very little more frustrating to someone using LRMs than finally achieving a lock through all the ECM on the field these days, and then seeing that entire salvo disintegrate from AMS fire.

Whereas with just the AMS, sure you (might) get a higher match score for shooting down more missiles, but you and your team become far more exposed to direct fire and the enemy has a much better idea of where you are, which makes returning fire more difficult for all your teammates. You are actively worse at your job as a result.

I love being locked on in my Corsair because it has the armour to eat it and the AMS to shred it, and it means it isn't coming at my teammates, but that's a poor second place to covering my teammates with ECM so that the missiles aren't fired at all. I'd absolutely put an ECM module into the 7A if it could mount one.

[JudauAshta]

yay kit fox c will make any lurm boat cry, they ruin your boats

[caravann]

foamyesque, on 12 February 2022 - 01:47 AM, said:

Yes, AMS will fire at any sort of missile, including SRMs (and even NARCs). However with the higher velocity of SRMs and the shorter ranges involved, and the higher health of the individual missiles as well, SRMs can usually get through even the best AMS walls.



The point of AMS isn't to shoot down missiles. The point of AMS is to stop missiles from doing damage. If the ECM stops them from ever being fired in the first place because it's keeping your team invisible to the enemy it's already doing that job, but lots of missile machines have various ways to deal with ECM (or teammates who do). So you can't rely solely on the ECM to protect people if you're serious about things. Having both is way, way more effective than just one or the other; there is very little more frustrating to someone using LRMs than finally achieving a lock through all the ECM on the field these days, and then seeing that entire salvo disintegrate from AMS fire.

Whereas with just the AMS, sure you (might) get a higher match score for shooting down more missiles, but you and your team become far more exposed to direct fire and the enemy has a much better idea of where you are, which makes returning fire more difficult for all your teammates. You are actively worse at your job as a result.

I love being locked on in my Corsair because it has the armour to eat it and the AMS to shred it, and it means it isn't coming at my teammates, but that's a poor second place to covering my teammates with ECM so that the missiles aren't fired at all. I'd absolutely put an ECM module into the 7A if it could mount one.

It is exactly the point with using AMS, to shoot down missiles to prevent them do deal damage. You're trying to eat the cookie while keeping it. The AMS do nothing if it doesn't consume their ammo. The start of the game and the end of the game means nothing if the goal with AMS is to prevent missiles when ECM prevent missile attacks from occuring at all. What happens is that you prevent them to fire LRM which end up with as soon the ECM mech is destroyed the LRM has no counter fire.

ECM is used on almost every mech because of this. Not because they wanted to focus on AMS. because if you can avoid guns fired to begin with why not pick that option.

Or else the other suggestion could been added by using AMS as close range defense vs light mechs because the 100tons can't see their own legs. It's not the first time anti-weapons been converted in history.

[Maddermax]

I managed to get 1000 missile kills in a match on Grim Plexus with a triple LAMS kitfox last night, but the heat build up did mean I couldn't fire my medium lasers as fast. Still managed over 500 damage though, which was kind of good considering. That said, I keep thinking I could drop a heat sink and take the LAMS to normal AMS to fit in ammo, as I had it before the LAMS buff... but would I have run dry of ammo on that situation? And how much extra damage would I have done if any?

There might be an exact answer to this, but it isn't extremely obvious that one or the other is better at a glance, so it's at least not horribly unbalanced.

Making each of the AMS options more distinct from one another seems like an idea I could get behind though. Personally, I'd like to see Laser AMS be given a higher range - this would allow much more damage and protection of allies generally, but you would pay for it more in heat on a constant basis, so increase it's range by 20%, decrease damage and heat by 10%. Then for regular AMS, Increase the damage by 25%, but decrease it's ammo count and range by 15% each, make it more personal protection focused. All the numbers are just pulled out of thin air and are completely mutable, but doing something like that to make each option have a distinct role would be nice.

Edited by Maddermax, 12 February 2022 - 03:39 AM.

[foamyesque]

D A T A, on 21 April 2021 - 08:00 AM, said:

Dhs dissipation = 0.22 each per second
Lams heat= 1.0 per second if active

You have 1.5 tons available, what do you do?

A.) 1ams with 3000 ammo
B.) 1 Lams and sh*t on your own heat sinks for no reasons at all.

Of course AMS is still better than LAMS in any scenario.
The lams buff we did was good: we should have pushed further to 0.6 or even 0.5 heat, but unfortunatelly i got outvoted inside the couldron.

In that case you would still prefear ams in quick play, but maybe in faction play you go LAMS

I figured I'd swing back round to this with a couple of points.

Supposing -- without regard for quirks at the moment -- you're engaging a quadLRM80 machine, firing in couplets every half a second so's they don't incur ghost heat. It takes about 1.25s for the missiles to cross from the outside of an AMS envelope into the middle of it in IDF, so that's the amount of time your AMS is engaging the missiles. Sphere LRM20 cooldown is 4.3s, so your AMS is running for about 60% of the time. 0.6 HPS is less than the loading of a single medium laser, and that's for while you're under fire -- any loss of contact and that average heat loading goes down even further.

Secondly, the sinks the LAMS aren't using when under fire mean you can fire your primary battery more often: A ton of AMS ammo can only ever be used for AMS fire, but -- and again particularly on the Clan side where there's a noticeable tonnage advantage to going LAMS -- a heatsink can be used for everything.

And thirdly, if you bring quirks in, a LAMS benefits from heat perks and skill points, but there's no equivalent effect for ballistic ones -- no ammo increase node, for example. So even that 1 HPS figure is a bit of a worst-case scenario -- it assumes literal constant bombardment *and* no heat reduction nodes in the skill tree, which is unlikely.

And of course you've got the heat dissipation skill nodes as well. So particularly on the Clan side all of those add up to make the comparison not quite as lopsided as the initial look would suggest.

On the Sphere side ballistic's still king despite all of that because you can actually make it lighter than a laser AMS setup, at the cost of a bit of endurance, and it's also heat-free and the same amount of Sphere heat is a much bigger issue than Clan heat, but on the Clan side I don't think I'd run ballistic AMS on most mechs.

[Dauntless Blint]

Extending range of LAMS would make it the go to choice for single AMS over ballistic AMS while the inverse for boating standard AMS would be true.

I think people don't like putting strobe lights on their machines that give away their position though anyway.

[Blood Rose]

caravann, on 12 February 2022 - 12:28 AM, said:

ammo bins don't explode by being hit by a cannon. It was a myth created because the allies used petrol engines who was put on fire on ignition from fire and later on attributed by Hollywood.

Actually it does. Ignoring the effects of HE filler, the sheer heat of the round due to the friction of passing through the metal hull and walls of the bin is enough to cook off ammunition stores. See: almost any ammo explosion ever.

[Remover of Obstacles]

https://www.mechspec...ing-club.17002/

Perhaps at different tiers the infinite firing capability of LAMS is already putting it in a good place for quick play matches.

Now how often do you still see cLRM5s being chainfired at higher tiers? Hell, not sure there are any cLRMs that would deal damage through 4x AMS without dipping into multiple launchers and the Ghost Heat range. Sad to see cLRMs outpaced by a single large laser when AMS in on the field, especially considering the brutal lock mechanism, dead zone, ammo dependency, and the skill and equipment taxes.

I think the current LAMS allows for mechs with multiple ams hardpoints to take some of each and low tonnage available mechs to have an option to take it and toggle it off when they start shooting and getting hot.

I could see some more tweaking of the heat value, but I think the bigger issue is how unevenly AMS effects stream fired missiles.