CrimsonPhantom6sg062, on 19 July 2022 - 11:05 AM, said:
What do you even mean by power creep?
Better agility? That is true.
Better armor? That is true.
Better firepower? Not really: though most builds are better, the most dominant builds have stayed the same.
I have tried ERLL as a light sniper - it was painful during the March 2021 era. I get that it is very strong now, but the Cauldron has been rolling back ERLL buffs for a while now (heat and laser duration increased AFAIK).
I also tried cERPPC as well and it was disgusting in the past. Now I actually have to work for my kills.
I understand your issues regarding TTK and I can't see the whole community's opinion on this issue due to personal internet problems, but I suggest striking a balance where most of the community will be happy.
I think I talked about how to increase TTK, which was similar to what you said, but I can't remember what it was exactly - just search my posts. I didn't include reduction in ROF because I don't want the game to have too many alpha-centric builds - getting deleted in 1 second from a bad peek can get really annoying, from distant memory.
So the agility is technically supposed to be the one advantage 'mechs have over tanks, thus increasing it benefits overall gameplay. Engine Desync was probably the single biggest killer to the playerbase, and a complete reversal of that wouldn't be unwarranted, in my opinion. (I wish there was a way to play the game such that Urbanmechs and Annihilators with stock engines are already lying in wait in defensive positions, on or inside buildings, etc, and simply have to stand their ground against an advancing assault. That was their purpose, and the reason they go so slow. Having to meet in the middle of an open battlefield is putting them at a marked disadvantage, hence the massive interest in engine buffs)
Armor quirks are getting a little crazy. Armor is already doubled from TT stats due to the elimination of some randomness when landing shots from multiple weapons. Builds were based on firing four PPCs and possibly having only one of them hit, or at least hitting 4 different locations. In MWO, if you fire four with the same trigger, if one hits, they all hit, AND hit the same location, so going through-armor with TT values was laughably easy. Forced chain fire would go a long way towards helping with that problem, but I can already hear the backlash.
Firepower is where the real departure lies, however. As I stated: DPS is double or triple what it's supposed to be, based on the same calculations that give us our top movement speeds, so a 'mech moving across open terrain is subjected to double or triple the incoming fire,
in addition to it all pinpointing to the same component if fired at the same time. We've already departed from full-on pinpoint damage upfront in a few cases: Ultra Autocannons, instead of firing one shell that hits one location (per TT mechanics), fire multiple rounds that can scatter across a target, but which add up to an equal amount of total damage. We can take that further, if we want to: Pulse Lasers can deal 1 damage, but fire every second, whereas ERLL could deal 10 damage, but have a full 10 second cooldown, or some variation thereof. It's open to quite a bit of flexibility, but the end result should be to reduce DPS to match with the speed calculations (so if a weapon does 1 DPS on TT, then it does 1 DPS, regardless of what its alpha capability is). We can then cut those pinpoint alphas in half, or even quarter them, but enable those 'mechs to keep on shooting.
On an unrelated note: Targeting Computer laser buffs should be to duration, not to range. Any chance of making that change, Navid? Pulse Lasers represent their high accuracy with short duration, standard and ER lasers with medium duration, and Heavy Lasers with super long duration. Targeting Computers are just supposed to increase hit-chance, thus, laser duration.