107 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

Streak missiles' theoretical DPS is excellent, yes. Their actual DPS is much lower, because most of their damage is wasted on extraneous components. You will generally get between one and none missiles hitting the component you actually wanted to hit with Streaks. Notice that LB/X autocannons only started becoming good when they could reliably focus at least three quarters of their damage on a single component out at their nominal ranges. Streak launchers don't focus damage period, which actually defeats their original tabletop advantage of being very ammo-efficient. You need a literaly f@#$billion tons of Streak ammo to accomplish anything in MWO, because anyone else's 300 damage to kill an enemy is your 1200 damage. All that extraneous, unnecessary damage has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is ludicrously overfat ammo bins.

It sucks, and it makes Streaks feel really bad to play. Like, Streaks are better than ATMs right now (how in God's name is that even possible), but they feel significantly worse to play. They're just not fun, and that's the real damnation of any FPS shooter weapon, ne?

[The6thMessenger]

1453 R, on 02 November 2021 - 03:50 PM, said:

Streak missiles' theoretical DPS is excellent, yes. Their actual DPS is much lower, because most of their damage is wasted on extraneous components.

Eh, those damage is still weakening something, not to mention that they are 100% doing something unless obstructed unlike the spread-based SRMs/LRMs/ATMs.

And to an XLed light like locust or flea without stealth or ecm, an entire volley can wither and eventually snap their torso armor. Compare that to glancing damage by lasers.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 02 November 2021 - 04:09 PM.

[FupDup]

Using Streaks for their DPS isn't a good idea. Their advantage is that they generally don't miss (low damage is better than no damage). When it comes to deeps it's not so good:

SRM2: 2.15
SRM4: 2.87
SRM6: 3.44

SSRM2: 2
SSRM4: 2.46
SSRM6: 3

CSRM2: 2
CSRM4: 2.67
CSRM6: 3.2

CSSRM2: 1.51
CSSRM4: 2
CSSRM6: 2.27

Also consider the extra tonnage spent on Streaks which will either subtract more from your DPS or from some other part of your build (i.e. engine). It's also not considering where that DPS is allocated in terms of the enemy's paper doll.

[Dogstar]

For me the biggest problem with streaks is their lousy lock-on arc, and, to a lesser degree, the lock-on time, especially vs ECM. Damage/DPS/Heat is suitably in-line with other weapons.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to have the arc differ from the one for LRMs - ASH do you have any information on this?

Saying 'take a TAG' to fix those issues is not a good answer because not every missile boat has an energy slot and TAG isn't that effective against multiple ECM.

Edited by Dogstar, 03 November 2021 - 03:18 AM.

[pbiggz]

The6thMessenger, on 02 November 2021 - 04:09 PM, said:

Eh, those damage is still weakening something, not to mention that they are 100% doing something unless obstructed unlike the spread-based SRMs/LRMs/ATMs.

And to an XLed light like locust or flea without stealth or ecm, an entire volley can wither and eventually snap their torso armor. Compare that to glancing damage by lasers.

Well thats just it. Either streaks are oppressive to lights, or not. If you want streaks to be worth firing on larger targets, the damage they do will naturally make them overly oppressive to lights. If you want them to not completely splat lights, they won't do enough damage to be worth taking.

Its why realistically they need a rework.

[The6thMessenger]

pbiggz, on 03 November 2021 - 05:05 AM, said:

Well thats just it. Either streaks are oppressive to lights, or not. If you want streaks to be worth firing on larger targets, the damage they do will naturally make them overly oppressive to lights. If you want them to not completely splat lights, they won't do enough damage to be worth taking.

Its why realistically they need a rework.

Yep, I know right?

One solution I had for them is to just make them stream fired like LRMs. That means you can have a good volley, but it has a window of time to deal full damage.

[Hobbles v]

Streaks are fine. They are good and even great in thier comfort zone. The problem with them is they are a niche weapon that requires certain conditions to be effective. Mainly, short range friendly maps, lack of cover to get lock and a size/armor advantage for the streaker vs the target (to shrug off return fire while getting locks)

Random maps, modes and assorted sizes of mechs in quick play makes finding these conditions very hard.

Streak mechs can be highly useful in Faction play where you know the map ahead of time and can somewhat predict what the enemy will bring, at least in terms of average mech weights. On clan side defending Emerald taiga saving a 55 ton or 60 ton streak boat for the final wave is pretty useful and can dominate the light end of the enemy drop deck.

Conversely, ending up in the same streak boat on Alpine versus assaults and heavies makes for a useless mech.

[The6thMessenger]

Hobbles v, on 03 November 2021 - 06:13 AM, said:

Streaks are fine. They are good and even great in thier comfort zone. The problem with them is they are a niche weapon that requires certain conditions to be effective. Mainly, short range friendly maps, lack of cover to get lock and a size/armor advantage for the streaker vs the target (to shrug off return fire while getting locks)

Random maps, modes and assorted sizes of mechs in quick play makes finding these conditions very hard.

Streak mechs can be highly useful in Faction play where you know the map ahead of time and can somewhat predict what the enemy will bring, at least in terms of average mech weights. On clan side defending Emerald taiga saving a 55 ton or 60 ton streak boat for the final wave is pretty useful and can dominate the light end of the enemy drop deck.

Conversely, ending up in the same streak boat on Alpine versus assaults and heavies makes for a useless mech.

You could be a homing-missile boat in solaris and-or ECM-covered enemy team. Or a laser boat in hot maps. You could have brought a brawler on something like alpine peaks among hungry snipers, king-crab narced in the middle of old polar-highland among hungry hungry lurm-boats.

Dude, what else is new? That's just map variety working, even random players working.

[1453 R]

Hobbles v, on 03 November 2021 - 06:13 AM, said:

Streaks are fine. They are good and even great in thier comfort zone. The problem with them is they are a niche weapon that requires certain conditions to be effective. Mainly, short range friendly maps, lack of cover to get lock and a size/armor advantage for the streaker vs the target (to shrug off return fire while getting locks)

Random maps, modes and assorted sizes of mechs in quick play makes finding these conditions very hard.

Streak mechs can be highly useful in Faction play where you know the map ahead of time and can somewhat predict what the enemy will bring, at least in terms of average mech weights. On clan side defending Emerald taiga saving a 55 ton or 60 ton streak boat for the final wave is pretty useful and can dominate the light end of the enemy drop deck.

Conversely, ending up in the same streak boat on Alpine versus assaults and heavies makes for a useless mech.

Let's examine this briefly.

"Streaks are fine if:
-the map is very short range
-there is no cover
-the shooter has a significant size/armor/durability advantage over the target"

Hmm...you know what else works really well under those circumstances?
Regular SRMs. And heavy autocannons. And pulse lasers. And also every other brawling, and most generalist midrange, weapon in MWO. If you're bullying something much smaller and flimsier than you in a short-range slugfest with no cover and you don't win that fight? I'm gonna have questions. The only way I see that going poorly is if you're an undercooled ERLL/ERPPC snipemonkey being pitted against a dedicated close-range skirmisher thing like an SRM Commando or Arctic Wolf taking advantage of your piss-poor short range game, and frankly that's just the other guy doing their job correctly.

So yeah. Not buying it.

[Hobbles v]

The6thMessenger, on 03 November 2021 - 06:20 AM, said:

You could be a homing-missile boat in solaris and-or ECM-covered enemy team. Or a laser boat in hot maps. You could have brought a brawler on something like alpine peaks among hungry snipers, king-crab narced in the middle of old polar-highland among hungry hungry lurm-boats.

Dude, what else is new? That's just map variety working, even random players working.

The point is any buffs that would make them more generally useful will utterly break them in thier comfort zone.

A ton of weapons are in the same boat as streaks and are in general bad for quickplay because they are good in thier niche but have Achilles heels that limits thier use.

SRMs and Almost all short ranges weapons for obvious reasons are fairly useless half the time.

Atms and LRMs suffer versus heavy ecm/cover and lack of buffer room.

LBXs arent very good becauseof the spread, but are more useful in faction play where due to multi wave combat, already damaged opponents are more comon.

MRMs are pretty bad in general too but can be more useful early in faction play matches, where tou know there will be a higher concentration of large slow mechs with big hit boxes to eat the mrm spread.

Fixing these weaknesses for all the above would absolutely break these weapons. Meta mech loadouts like anything LPL, gauss, PPC, mid to log range Dakka or large laser based works pretty much everywhere. Meta loadouts get thier teeth kicked in when they get stuck in niche weapons comfort zone.

Instead of breaking weapons, i would rather have a quickplay drop deck. Queue with a selection of 4 mechs and you can choose which one to bring during the map selection voting. That way you can bring specialized mechs that are fun i thier niche withiut havi g to worry so much about getting your splat cyclops stuck on Apline Peaks Skirmish.

[Hobbles v]

1453 R, on 03 November 2021 - 06:32 AM, said:

Let's examine this briefly.

"Streaks are fine if:
-the map is very short range
-there is no cover
-the shooter has a significant size/armor/durability advantage over the target"

Hmm...you know what else works really well under those circumstances?
Regular SRMs. And heavy autocannons. And pulse lasers. And also every other brawling, and most generalist midrange, weapon in MWO. If you're bullying something much smaller and flimsier than you in a short-range slugfest with no cover and you don't win that fight? I'm gonna have questions. The only way I see that going poorly is if you're an undercooled ERLL/ERPPC snipemonkey being pitted against a dedicated close-range skirmisher thing like an SRM Commando or Arctic Wolf taking advantage of your piss-poor short range game, and frankly that's just the other guy doing their job correctly.

So yeah. Not buying it.

Fine buff all those weapons to have 600m effective range, pinpoint, instant lock on and low heat. Make everything bland and the same.

Streaks are good at what they do. Its just what they do isnt compatable with the randomness of quickplay. Knowing the map before choosing a mech would seriously increase the viability of most of the niche weapons.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

streaks are a can of worms, best avoided, in QP.


that being said, they were excellent for scouting with beginners (thx again, P., for axing that mode..), and they're a great situational tool in a proper teamplay-based mode, like FW (example: you want/need somebody for anti-light-duty, but need your 'better shots' doing other stuff).
again: way too situational for QP, and way too situational to balance properly for QP, imHo.

[pbiggz]

Hobbles v, on 03 November 2021 - 07:07 AM, said:

Fine buff all those weapons to have 600m effective range, pinpoint, instant lock on and low heat. Make everything bland and the same.

Streaks are good at what they do. Its just what they do isnt compatable with the randomness of quickplay. Knowing the map before choosing a mech would seriously increase the viability of most of the niche weapons.

As I said before,

pbiggz, on 03 November 2021 - 05:05 AM, said:

Well thats just it. Either streaks are oppressive to lights, or not. If you want streaks to be worth firing on larger targets, the damage they do will naturally make them overly oppressive to lights. If you want them to not completely splat lights, they won't do enough damage to be worth taking.

Its why realistically they need a rework.

Note when I say rework, I don't simply mean, "buff". A rework here means like, a *functional* change to how streaks work.

As they exist its very hard to buff them without making them oppressive to certain mechs, and very hard to nerf them without making them trivial.

Right now frankly we're on the side of trivial. Its probably the less harmful state for them to be in. I trust the judgement of the Cauldron here tbh but understand they are working within pretty significant constraints and they cannot really solve the problem without a rework, so don't expect them to.


In terms of actual reworks, maybe raise the fire rate significantly higher, so they fire almost like "missile machine guns" with a pulse at regular intervals, but make them only fire and track if you target, and track the target with your reticle (almost like it has built in tag). If you lose tracking the missiles already en route just continue on their current vector. If you regain tracking missiles in flight will attempt to reorient. They will not fire if you don't have the target tracked.

That's one idea. It'd take engineering work and will never happen.

Edited by pbiggz, 03 November 2021 - 08:10 AM.

[1453 R]

As Biggz said. I don't want Streaks buffed to ridiculous degrees, I don't want them nerfed to oblivion (again). I don't want them taking over for other weapons. In an ideal world, how Streaks work on a fundamental, mechanical, behavioral level would change.

Frankly? If I had to prototype new Streak behavior right now, I'd try the Armored Core method. There's a box on your screen, around your reticle. If your R-keyed target is in that box? The launcher fires, at whatever trajectory the game predicts the missiles will hit. The target can try and jank the warheads, they can roll damage around, whatever - but Streaks just fire. IF you you have a target, anyways. No lock-on, none of that ****. Click, woosh. If your R-designared target is not in the box, the warheads don't fire.

Clean. Simple. Proven, if by a different game franchise. Allows Streak users to snapfire and roll damage like proper brawlers. Control the launcher's tendency to score hits much more often by increasing cycle time, and/or by introducing a ripple fire effect. Could also control it, in part, by increasing or reducing the size of the Streak targeting box, or make it quirkable: "15% imcreased Streak SRM targeting area" or the like.

Probably a bad idea, but it's a better one than current lock-to-fire missile implementation.

[Moldur]

They're hardly a light deterrent anymore. Even in their relative heyday, that's basically all they were good at.

[pbiggz]

Moldur, on 03 November 2021 - 08:59 AM, said:

They're hardly a light deterrent anymore. Even in their relative heyday, that's basically all they were good at.

Yeah they're a weapon that in their prime were notorious for pulping light mechs in low tier play, but there wasn't anything they could do that you couldn't do better just by aiming regular SRMs, so they're a noob trap.

[Curccu]

Moldur, on 03 November 2021 - 08:59 AM, said:

They're hardly a light deterrent anymore. Even in their relative heyday, that's basically all they were good at.

pbiggz, on 03 November 2021 - 09:05 AM, said:

Yeah they're a weapon that in their prime were notorious for pulping light mechs in low tier play, but there wasn't anything they could do that you couldn't do better just by aiming regular SRMs, so they're a noob trap.

Well try to hit skilled light player in locust with SRMs bit challenging.
and you got 0% and 4% lights played, I suggest try playing those and see how little that tier5 noob trap hurts.
There was very good reason why streaks were banned in MRBC drop1 (4 lights & 4 meds).

[pbiggz]

Curccu, on 03 November 2021 - 12:45 PM, said:

Well try to hit skilled light player in locust with SRMs bit challenging.

As it should be.

Curccu, on 03 November 2021 - 12:45 PM, said:

and you got 0% and 4% lights played, I suggest try playing those and see how little that tier5 noob trap hurts.
There was very good reason why streaks were banned in MRBC drop1 (4 lights & 4 meds).

I don't play lights because i'm exactly the kind of player that would get killed by streaks. I'm frankly not much good at them. My gunnery isn't the best under normal circumstances, going fast just makes me miss too many shots. So it's like i said. It's oppressive in low level play, but *mostly* trivial in higher level play. If you want to give streaks broader appeal to all players, it makes them intolerable to low tier players. If you try to balance them to not be overly oppressive at low levels, then they become trivialized everywhere else.

Its not a problem that can be solved without an engineer.

[OP8]

Most of all this I don't care, Streaks do *mostly what I expect of them, *most of the time. The only thing I'm gonna ***** about, and I've bitched about this before, is the invisible landmine glitch. If you fire a volley of streaks but the enemy dies before impact, the missiles stop in the air, are invisible, and explode causing friendly fire damage to any mech that walks too close to the corpse. The invisible missiles will hover over the corpse for a weirdly long time, and if a light mech goes running passed them after the mech dies, the friendly takes the damage. Any time I play a mech with streaks, I can't explain to my teamates fast enough to not run near dead mechs after I shoot them, and I always get team damage caused by invisible streaks, hovering over dead targets that didn't detonate when their target ceased to exist.

[Blood Rose]

1453 R, on 03 November 2021 - 08:19 AM, said:

As Biggz said. I don't want Streaks buffed to ridiculous degrees, I don't want them nerfed to oblivion (again). I don't want them taking over for other weapons. In an ideal world, how Streaks work on a fundamental, mechanical, behavioral level would change.

Frankly? If I had to prototype new Streak behavior right now, I'd try the Armored Core method. There's a box on your screen, around your reticle. If your R-keyed target is in that box? The launcher fires, at whatever trajectory the game predicts the missiles will hit. The target can try and jank the warheads, they can roll damage around, whatever - but Streaks just fire. IF you you have a target, anyways. No lock-on, none of that ****. Click, woosh. If your R-designared target is not in the box, the warheads don't fire.

Clean. Simple. Proven, if by a different game franchise. Allows Streak users to snapfire and roll damage like proper brawlers. Control the launcher's tendency to score hits much more often by increasing cycle time, and/or by introducing a ripple fire effect. Could also control it, in part, by increasing or reducing the size of the Streak targeting box, or make it quirkable: "15% imcreased Streak SRM targeting area" or the like.

Probably a bad idea, but it's a better one than current lock-to-fire missile implementation.

Amusingly, lorewise this is how SRM's should behave, the SRM's we have ingame are dumbfire missiles which do exist in-lore, but they do 50% more damage. Streaks should be this but so long as you keep the reticule on-target the missiles will fly towards it.