71 replies to this topic

[LordNothing]

linear ramp would be better than exponential ramp in this case. there are other curves.

[ScrapIron Prime]

MechaGnome, on 14 December 2021 - 10:21 PM, said:

It still isn't enough.

I think it is. I made a kill at 50m with PPCs in the bottom of a canyon last night. Surprised the fellow, I’m sure!

[PocketYoda]

ScrapIron Prime, on 15 December 2021 - 04:20 AM, said:

I think it is. I made a kill at 50m with PPCs in the bottom of a canyon last night. Surprised the fellow, I’m sure!

You got lucky he was 50m not 10m and he must have been really damaged.

[LordNothing]

i re-bought the jr7-k because it has an lppc +1 hsr quirk. so you can do a full alpha and only fill up a third of the heat bar.

[ambosen]

Oddly enough, the biggest change I've noticed with my PPC usage on mechs since the changes is that I straight up don't bother with really using or equipping snub nose or Heavy PPC's anymore. I mostly only used regulars and Lights when I didn't have the tonnage or space for IS ER-PPC's. Getting rid of the no damage range bracket effect might've inadvertently made me stop using two entire PPC weapons.

Oh, and speaking from experience, on a light or medium mech that can equip 2-4 light PPC's, chainfire can often be quite useful for blinding a heavier mech, taking slight advantage of the lower heat and faster cooldown, ect. Also, newer or less experienced players in particular treat any hit by a PPC as something to try to immediately duck into cover on, even if you're only doing scratch damage at the range, sometimes even if they see you're missing, Plus there's the obvious temporary ECM cancelation benefit.

And equipping six light PPC's on a thunderbolt orr 5 on a hunchback may not be practical but damn it can be fun.

[ScrapIron Prime]

MechaGnome, on 15 December 2021 - 06:57 PM, said:

You got lucky he was 50m not 10m and he must have been really damaged.

I'd been working on him for a while, yeah. Using my Grand Dragon build above. I'm finding a mech of that speed with a few hill climb nodes does well on Hellebore Outpost.

Edited by ScrapIron Prime, 16 December 2021 - 09:26 AM.

[ScrapIron Prime]

And speaking of regular PPC’s does anyone have a link to the actual damage trail of values under 90m? I mean I know the graph, but what do the raw numbers indicate? 10 damage at 90m, X damage at 70m, Y damage at 50m, etc.

Edited by ScrapIron Prime, 18 December 2021 - 10:45 AM.

[Meep Meep]

SlightlyMobileTurret, on 18 December 2021 - 06:59 AM, said:

A) Don't chainfire.

Why? When I reach my heat bar limit I have to chain fire if I want to keep applying damage on a badly damaged mech to finish it off before it successfully retreats.

Go to 17:27 for an example.

[Sjorpha]

Meep Meep, on 18 December 2021 - 01:20 PM, said:

Why? When I reach my heat bar limit I have to chain fire if I want to keep applying damage on a badly damaged mech to finish it off before it successfully retreats.

Being heatcapped combined with an enemy being red enough to die to less than your alpha is indeed the one situation where chainfire or partial alpha is better.

Keep in mind though that if you need for example 3 LPPC hits to kill that mech this is no longer the case, it is better to cool down enough to fire those 3 at the same time than it is to chainfire them. This means it is only when you need less than 12 damage to finish the mech that you should chainfire... not very often.

Also if you need 2 hits it's better to fire two LPPCs together than one at a time, so it's not like the options are either chainfire or alpha. What you want is to fire enough weapons to score the kill with as few hits as possible without wasting heat. I think that LPPCs very rarely motivate partial alphas or chainfire in this way because the damage of 3-4 LPPCs is so low anyways, it's much more often motivated to split up those huge laser boat alphas against cored mechs than with LPPCs.

You aren't really gaining anything by "keeping firing", as long as your heat never reaches 0% you are still maxing out your sustained DPS.

Edited by Sjorpha, 19 December 2021 - 02:45 AM.

[Dauntless Blint]

My feels

Lite PPC's could have global HSL= 4 or 6. They still too hot most of the time, I at least struggle to justify them against medium lasers. I think if they took a single crit slot and were HSL 4 I'd put them in more builds and could justify their heat.
(Try to use end up removing)

Snubb PPC could have global HSL= 4 Or Big splash damage buff like: 3 / 8.75 / 3 from 1.5 / 8.5 / 1.5
(Sometimes couple with LBX10 or rarely AC20)

PPC It would be nice if you could pair them with Lite, Snubb and Heavy PPC's with separate HSL limits as an experiment excluding ERPPC joining HSL = 4.
(Try to use end up using HPPC, one ton less than 3x in exchange for slower fire rate)

IS ERPPC could have it's base cool down buffed for light snipers to use more effectively, reasoning the negative heat to damage ratio to keep it in check. Probably silly idea at first sight I admit.
(Personally too hot never use over any other PPC)

Heavy PCC could have it's effective range skootched up a pinch, Minimum range falloff added or a point of extra damage
(Generally content with HPPC)

It seems to me that they are all basically the same thing and that the only difference in choice is the number of hardpoints on your machine forcing your decision.

Edited by Dauntless Blint, 19 December 2021 - 06:36 PM.

[Moldur]

I feel IS PPCs are heavily propped up by quirks. There's mechs where you can use them, and mechs where you really shouldn't.

It's a bit hard to umbrella all of it and make a determination of the base stats, as a lot of the ppc builds we have are based off the quirks of the chassis. Things like travel time, PPFLD, and ECM disable are other factors that can't be nicely quantified.

I think light PPCs work alright on specific light and medium chassis. They are a compromise of firepower, PPFLD, ammo, cooling, damage, and ECM knockout. You don't need ammo, they run fairly cool, they are PPFLD which lends to poptarting and quick peeks on fast chassis, and they're PPCs which lends a slight psychological factor and provides the ecm knockout. On the other hand, it's not an awful lot of damage, even boating 4. You have to constantly be working angles and spamming shots to get your damage on the board, but I think the cooling is a bit more forgiving in that regard vs mediums carrying regular PPCs (again, at least on the chassis that support boating light PPC.) Also consider missed shots and cooldown. We're not perfect and having that heat/cooldown leniency with 4 relatively low heat Light PPCs can be nice.

As far as the entire PPC family, I think Heavy PPC and ER-PPC parity could take a look. I feel like they compete with each other a bit too much in regard to heat, cooldown, and damage dropoff. I've hemmed and hawed over which is the better take. Will I get utility from the range of ER-PPC? At what point is damage parity with HPPC drop-off? Will the cooldown be worth it? Am I getting shots off as fast as I can? I can pack more heatsinks with ER-PPC, does that make it worth it? We could find all these numbers, but I think some stat differences to more clearly delineate where you want one over the other would help.

Edited by Moldur, 20 December 2021 - 02:02 PM.

[Scout Derek]

Meep Meep, on 13 December 2021 - 06:14 PM, said:

So thats my take what about you gents?

It's in a good place as a supplemental weapon, and it's also good on some chassis as a primary one (in quantities more than 2).

Meep Meep, on 18 December 2021 - 01:20 PM, said:

Why? When I reach my heat bar limit I have to chain fire if I want to keep applying damage on a badly damaged mech to finish it off before it successfully retreats.

Go to 17:27 for an example.

Bad practice, realistically speaking from the example you've decided to share as a case.

Usually the best way to make use of chainfire is either if you wanna irritate someone (such as a Rifleman IIC with 6AC2s), or if you're attempting to finish off an opponent whose on their last legs health wise.

[Spheroid]

The continuous buffing of LPPC leaves NO room for any future implementation of LAC-5. Also if LAC-5s are buffed to be competitive with LPPC then AC-10s will have zero reason to exist. Future weapon balancing is greatly imperiled by the path the illuminati are taking.

LPPC should be returned to a crap auxiliary weapon to be brought when weight considerations prevent their heavier brethren, not some fun meme weapon to be thrown on every light and medium mech in existence.

[Meep Meep]

Scout Derek, on 20 December 2021 - 02:24 PM, said:

or if you're attempting to finish off an opponent whose on their last legs health wise.

Pretty sure that is what I highlighted. A badly damaged mech that was retreating under the alpha salvos but the shooters heat bar was maxed so he went chainfire to finish them off?

[LordNothing]

i think the only time i would chain lppcs like that is if i had an absurd quantity of them. like the 8 on that marauder ii build i posted earlier. i calculated the perfect firing intervals for that build, one for continuous fire, and one that would fire as fast as possible without tripping ghost heat, and another one that allowed ghost heat, but tried to minimize the penalty. i set up a macro for each.

the continuous mode was completely useless, its like i put a sign over my mech that said 'shoot me'. the lppc simply does not out range most of the midrange weaponry in the game. the interval here was around a third of a second. it kind of has an ac5 boat vibe to it, but ac5s tend to group fire because you can. the lppc cycle still overheats after a couple passes.

the middle interval which was somewhere around 0.16 seconds was reminiscent of clan ultra autocannons, as first implemented (with long bursts). if fired at a stationary target, it was glorious. however moving targets almost always were a problem. its incredibly hard to aim through a swarm of ball lightning. so the first half would land and the rest would miss or scatter like an lb auto. with 8 of them it took over half a cooldown interval to unload which makes it very unwieldy like an og cuac-20.

the damn the ghost heat approach made it feel more like a uac10 with the heat of a ppc barrage. which needless to say, you probibly should have just alpha'd. mechs with hsl quirks are more fun. if the mad ii in question had a +1 hsl quirk, id have just split it into 2 firing groups and fired in a 1-2 punch, respecting ghost heat (or not, depending on situation). on a mech with that many energy hardpoints, there are better uses for them.

[w0qj]

All varieties of PPC play differently with greatly increased PPC velocity!

For example:
Warhammer WHM-7S
Weapons Velocity +40% [affects all varieties of PPC & Missiles]
Missile Cooldown -10%
Steak SRM Cooldown: additional -10%

+40% Missile velocity (and more if you max out Firepower Skill Nodes & add Targeting Computer)

WHM-7S is so good that I wish to spend real cash to buy WHM-7S(S); but unfortunately that's not possible right now.

Edited by w0qj, 20 December 2021 - 06:23 PM.

[ScrapIron Prime]

My Warhammer 7S has light peeps and massive MRMs, because my GOD are MRMs nice with velocity boosted that high!

[Dogstar]

SlightlyMobileTurret, on 18 December 2021 - 06:59 AM, said:

A) Don't chainfire.

I've got to totally disagree with this, chainfired light PPCs can disorient and scare the wee out of many pilots. Obviously that's not as effective against the best pilots but they're few and far between and you can always switch chainfire off if you need to.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Dogstar, on 21 December 2021 - 03:44 AM, said:

I've got to totally disagree with this, chainfired light PPCs can disorient and scare the wee out of many pilots. Obviously that's not as effective against the best pilots but they're few and far between and you can always switch chainfire off if you need to.

That's what my lulz Banshee build, Mister Peeps, capitalizes on. 3 high mounted PPC's get their attention, and then 4 chain fire belly gun light PPC's keep them worried. Even a smart pilot realizes that the triple peep is coming again shortly, while the less experienced are just worried about being constantly shot.

[Bamboozle Gold]

I think light PPCs are in a good place, honestly I don't think they need any adjustment at the moment. They aren't oppressive to play against and they aren't OP to play with. Great choice for pairing with ballistics when you don't have tonnage for snubs and the extra heat sinks they need.