31 replies to this topic

[martian]

LordNothing, on 03 December 2021 - 02:50 PM, said:

cold guns should never jam. a weapon that often jams on the first (or even second) shot is no weapon any sane military would use.

Many inhabitants of the BattleTech universe are anything but sane.

[Sawk]

point MADE, you have to TEST, before you play like i do : )
SAWK

[LordNothing]

i dont think rng works the same way in testing grounds as it does in a live match. completely different source of entropy. the servers roll the dice and it makes you wonder how often the seed is changed.

martian, on 04 December 2021 - 08:25 AM, said:

Many inhabitants of the BattleTech universe are anything but sane.

same is true here in reality land, but they still use reliable guns.

Edited by LordNothing, 04 December 2021 - 05:24 PM.

[VeeOt Dragon]

Bamboozle Gold, on 03 December 2021 - 01:34 AM, said:

If I'm not mistaken you can never jam if you never double tap. You can think of the weapon as having two cooldowns. One is for your primary fire and the second is for the double tap. If you're in the cool down of either and you try to fire you have a chance to jam. So if you've double tapped, you can wait extra half a second to clear the second cool down to fire once without a chance of jamming.

go test it in the testing ground, i have had it happen regularly. it happens so often that i just don't use em.

[martian]

LordNothing, on 04 December 2021 - 05:21 PM, said:

same is true here in reality land, but they still use reliable guns.

Do you know the story about the British and their brand new SA-80s?

Other than that, MechWarrior Online Ultracannons are actually friendlier than BattleTech Ultracannons. In MWO they unjam themselves after a while - in BatleTech, they stay jammed until the end of the game.

[Dauntless Blint]

I feel like they used to work like this: First fire = never jam, fire at 75% of cooldown =25% chance to jam, fire at 50% of cooldown =50% chance to jam, fire at 25% of cooldown =75% chance to jam.

So just the inversion of the cooldown% became the jam chance% and no jam = yes restarts the global cooldown for all cycles.
Maybe even a double tap was almost free for the most part.

Maybe Navid's idea is that it fails to fire but doesn't include a jam duration but resets the cooldown timer?

Maybe standard ac's need slight range and heat buff and UAC's need more reliability.

AC's in general aren't as heat negligible as they used to be because of the longer firing times to effect damage which feels inferior to laser vomit pokes lately. For instance having the benefit of poke cover and running just as cool as ballistics after heat sinks with crit-padding without the additional drawbacks of finite ammo that explodes when crit.

So what is the benefit of ballistics exactly especially 10's and 5's as 2's and 20's seem fine I guess.
Am I off the mark on (U)AC10's and 5's?

[Dauntless Blint]

LordNothing, on 03 December 2021 - 02:14 PM, said:

i always figured jam chance should be a function of the current cooldown state so that the longer you hold out, the lower your jam chance is. of course there is still a dice roll in there and everything should be more deterministic. but i think i like your way better. on one hand it becomes a skill to get the most out of your second tap, on the other hand, people will just macro it so it always gives you a perfect firing cycle. perhaps a good balance is 90% skill and 10% luck, just enough to monkey wrench to make macros difficult. its sort of the situation for multi-gauss macros, that keep your guns cycling until you want to fire, such that at least some of your gauss rifles have an instant shoot capability. it works but turns out to be really impractical, as well as very annoying.

another idea is to use a clip, with a damage potential 2x the weapon rating. where you can fire until the clip is empty, or until you let go, whichever happens first. when you let go you get a cool down that is proportional to the number of rounds you fired, plus a penalty that is proportional to the percentage of the clip discharged. it might take 2 seconds to load 2 rounds and 5 seconds to load 4. this gets interesting for burst sizes from 4-8 rounds. and the skill tree nodes can become -1 burst size, so you can go from 4-8 to 2-6, and the clan weapons get +1 for being lighter.

Giving UAC's a fixed mag dump would be nice to test. Slightly increased rate of fire slightly increased cooldown?
It would also work well for a Cemetery Rifle and HAG using existing models. (A 4 volley burst LBX10 but heavier) & (A 3 round burst Lite Gauss Rifle but heavier)

You could even go the opposite way where heat causes a cookoff and dumps the mag involuntarily? maybe not.

[martian]

Dauntless Blint, on 05 December 2021 - 04:42 AM, said:

So what is the benefit of ballistics exactly especially 10's and 5's as 2's and 20's seem fine I guess.
Am I off the mark on (U)AC10's and 5's?

UAC-10/LBX-10s work for me. They are solid weapons that combine acceptable damage with acceptable range and thanks their low heat they are useful even when my 'Mech is overheating.

Plus, their fire is less visible than similar volume of laser fire. Those cannons draw less enemies to my position.

Dauntless Blint, on 05 December 2021 - 05:05 AM, said:

Giving UAC's a fixed mag dump would be nice to test.

Ammunition magazine dump?

What do you think that you are playing? MechWarrior 2?

[Sawk]

OK lets talk ABOUT my TEST.
i run a timber wolf with 2 UAC 5s and a UAC 2 and 2 med lazers, on the frozen map, its the easy map, to 4 close mechs light to assault, and i test both chain fire and group fire, --- can over heat the mech, can you kill are 4 mechs with 2 jams, the answer is YES.
I do understand many of you will NOT test-- you will blame------ numbers like math and physics do work give it a try

SAWK YES it ok to be smart

[LordNothing]

Dauntless Blint, on 05 December 2021 - 05:05 AM, said:

Giving UAC's a fixed mag dump would be nice to test. Slightly increased rate of fire slightly increased cooldown?
It would also work well for a Cemetery Rifle and HAG using existing models. (A 4 volley burst LBX10 but heavier) & (A 3 round burst Lite Gauss Rifle but heavier)

You could even go the opposite way where heat causes a cookoff and dumps the mag involuntarily? maybe not.

i figure it would fire the clip about as fast as burst fire autos can discharge. maybe a little slower, but not much.

[Krovakon]

I think before we can rework the jam mechanic we need to figure out what purpose are Ultra autocannons supposed to fill compared to their non-ultra cousins. Personally I think the ultra versions outperform their standard cousins in almost every instance except in the cases of the standard IS AC20 due to it being guaranteed massive pinpoint and when you're running a 90+ tonner which can afford to fit multiple standard large ballistics into the mech. In the case of the IS Ultra AC5 you're literally doubling your DPS for 1 extra ton, some extra heat, a small jam chance, and an extra internal slot. You're getting 16 tons worth of AC5 DPS and only paying 9 tons. You'll essentially never take a regular AC5 over it unless you're capable of fitting 5 or more AC5's onto the mech or if you're obscenely tonnage limited where you can't afford to pay that extra 1 ton on the weapon (which is really only applicable to early lights).

I think the ideal solution here is to make it so that regular autocannons are supposed to be used on larger mechs that can boat them and that Ultra autocannons should be used on smaller mechs that don't have the tonnage or hardpoints to boat ballistics. In my opinion the best way to do this would be to remove the jam chance and adjust the heat generated. Whether this is massively increasing the heat per shot cost of ultras to make it a massive sustained DPS loss compared to standard autocannons or to adjust the ghost heat limit for ultras to significantly reduce the amount that can be fired at the same time.

I can say with 100% certainty though that the RNG associated with them needs to go. You can go an entire match without a single jam and just obliterate whatever you're engaging or you can spend more time jammed than being able to shoot. Even just making them work like RAC's would work where each double tap increases a bar and if that bar is at max and you double tap you have a chance to jam would be a massive improvement over what we have now. You could easily convert UAC Jam chance quirks into UAC Jam Ramp down speed and get the same effect that you currently do now, except it's reliable.

[Sawk]

WOW there is just 1 thing, they already, made most adjustments like that, but the random number is still used, there is 1 small thing i found, the LBX line will shoot faster, in the skill tree.
BUT you have to test, the random number has more to do with down range damage, and componets being taken, it is more then likely the good number is worth 10% more damage and secondary action, a fair number is ZERO, a poor number nothing work right, unless your a GOD.
OK that is the TOP 5 % do not care-- its about damage down range, ohh merry XMAS

SAWK CLANNER