54 replies to this topic

[LordNothing]

the original premise of ghost heat was to reduce boating while providing a defacto buff to mixed builds. it has done none of these things. instead i see it as a point of confusion for new players, while veterans tend to use their groups in a way that it doesn't effect them at all.

meanwhile mixed builds are still considered trash and hsl quirks are on all the usual boats as a loophole to ghost heat. this does not make a whole lot of sense. while new weapons might allow a bit more help on the mixed build front, by making it easier to range-match your weapons. but still you have the issue of mental load. i don't feel like that is seriously considered in quirkening efforts. seems you would want to reward those players who can handle the more complex loadouts rather than the point and click adventure game thing that most metamechs seem to do.

balance is about spreading damage over space and time when the weapons are exceptionally powerful or can be used in large numbers. this is the basis for heat, velocity, charging and burst mechanics. ghost heat also does this by forcing an arbitrary half second delay in your firing pattern. if you are a new player and dont know this, i can see how you might have a bad time. how many times have you seen a dead stock nova prime explode the first time a new player tests the alpha?

unfortunately we are in a situation and state of balance that changing the gh mechanics would result in a lot of problems and work to refactor all the things, let alone convincing pgi to change it and hope what they come up with isnt worse. if removing it outright you would need to do global heat nerfs to compensate for the absence of unpredictable heat spikes. and replacing it, to what, and what for?

[Meep Meep]

Ghost heat can be balanced better. The mechanic I hate with a passion is the heat spike on torso death.

[SafeScanner]

Counter to for New players would be to Update/create/reference guides that clearly state the nuances of Ghost heat use the mechlab "Trial mech" button and fire away to get a feel ect ect

[ThreeStooges]

If gh was problematic pgi wouldn't have added the over heat damage -20-30% quirk to a lot of mechs.

[LordNothing]

ThreeStooges, on 17 February 2023 - 09:19 PM, said:

If gh was problematic pgi wouldn't have added the over heat damage -20-30% quirk to a lot of mechs.

or any of the loophole quirks for that matter. if you have to break your limiting mechanic, on examples of mechs with the most hardpoints, you might have a problematic mechanic. like for mediums the two is mediums with the most hardpoints both had quirks that let you circumvent ghost heat.

Edited by LordNothing, 18 February 2023 - 12:35 AM.

[Knownswift]

Ghost heat unironically one of the better mechanics PGI introduced.


The side torso heat spike mechanic is pure balls. Should have been deleted when they deleted Chris from balance.

[Tromoskyon Rex]

I think it is a good feature to have. For laser boats it means more exposure time even if just a little bit; For RAC monsters it means you cant just hold RAC5x4 to win; for missile boats it means AMS can hopefully down a few more from the cloud of death. Hell for me personally It makes it so there are a whole 3 mechs I can effectively head hunt with (excluding Heavy Gauss) because of Gauss + PPC ghost heat. It is a pain to deal with but imo it is a pain in a good way that helps prevent Direstarmgeddon.

All that said though I never played the game without it and never would have known it wasn't a day one thing without this post.

[Tarl Cabot]

Knownswift, on 18 February 2023 - 09:16 AM, said:

Ghost heat unironically one of the better mechanics PGI introduced.

The side torso heat spike mechanic is pure balls. Should have been deleted when they deleted Chris from balance.

PGI has demonstrated that the 1st Side Torso lost penalties can be adjusted for each component, and once that was made aware/available, 3 of the 4 engines could have been changed to provide slightly different penalties, including the Instant Death for isXL, while changing the percentage amount for each engine, with the LFE given the lesser effects, cXL middle of the pack while the isXL the highest w/o the instant death, even if it was at 0%.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 18 February 2023 - 09:55 AM.

[LordNothing]

Orion_, on 18 February 2023 - 09:30 AM, said:

I think it is a good feature to have. For laser boats it means more exposure time even if just a little bit; For RAC monsters it means you cant just hold RAC5x4 to win; for missile boats it means AMS can hopefully down a few more from the cloud of death. Hell for me personally It makes it so there are a whole 3 mechs I can effectively head hunt with (excluding Heavy Gauss) because of Gauss + PPC ghost heat. It is a pain to deal with but imo it is a pain in a good way that helps prevent Direstarmgeddon.

All that said though I never played the game without it and never would have known it wasn't a day one thing without this post.

not sure if dps weapons even need ghost heat. they spread their damage out over quite a bit of time with a bit of spatial spread on top of it, with velocity mechanics. and then they have charge and a shared jam bar on top of it. my usual method for countering racs is to just walk behind cover, and trade while they are spinning up their guns. but a 60+ point laser alpha, blink and half your mech is gone, is fine. i mean there is a reason i dont use the former and make heavy use of the latter.

im also not saying there aren't some situations where ghost heat makes sense, ppc boating being the obvious one. but there is usually always a work around. the way it is implemented is very arbitrary. you can still stack absurd alphas, dps is overpunished, diverse loadouts is overpunished. it seems its nerfing the wrong things.

[sycocys]

A bunch of the "boating" issues could be solved with minimum ranges for long range high velocity/hitscan weapons like (er)ppcs and lasers, or an energy system, or if guass is the one specific issue firing one puts all your weapons on cooldown.

Its not canon, neither is ghost heat - and from my understanding if you tried to fire one guass and one ppc simultaneously in cannon the computer system would basically have to completely reboot before it would even attempt to fire the ppc because they are both high energy consumption weapons, - even using a lower power consumption laser system is supposed to have a hard de-sync with a single guass. - So honestly the notion of dual guass firing at the same time at all (much less with any other weapon systems being held active to be fired, or other electronics) doesn't really seem like it fits into the game's canon very well. Firing one with anything else would probably cause a temporary shutdown of your entire targeting system, precious ecm coverage, radar and comms, your JJ/masc would certainly be short of functional power and you'd probably have limited energy available for any sort of movement until the system recovered.

Guy's will argue hard to canon until canon disagrees with their choice of meta loadout and either way will adamantly dismiss any suggestions that would make the system better for game balance if even has a chance to disrupt their meta. Always been that way, will always be that way until the servers shut down.

Edited by sycocys, 18 February 2023 - 02:03 PM.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

so.. first off: I'm not a fan of ghostheat.
but.
It is there for a reason.

you mentioned that it's an idea to counter boating and make mixed builds more viable.

now, imagine where the (granted very limited) build diversity would be without ghost heat.
it's in a bad place right now, it'd be GONE without ghostheat.


I'm not happy with it, but it solves way more problems than it causes.
until someone finds something better, it HAS to stay.

[LordNothing]

sycocys, on 18 February 2023 - 02:03 PM, said:

A bunch of the "boating" issues could be solved with minimum ranges for long range high velocity/hitscan weapons like (er)ppcs and lasers, or an energy system, or if guass is the one specific issue firing one puts all your weapons on cooldown.

Its not canon, neither is ghost heat - and from my understanding if you tried to fire one guass and one ppc simultaneously in cannon the computer system would basically have to completely reboot before it would even attempt to fire the ppc because they are both high energy consumption weapons, - even using a lower power consumption laser system is supposed to have a hard de-sync with a single guass. - So honestly the notion of dual guass firing at the same time at all (much less with any other weapon systems being held active to be fired, or other electronics) doesn't really seem like it fits into the game's canon very well. Firing one with anything else would probably cause a temporary shutdown of your entire targeting system, precious ecm coverage, radar and comms, your JJ/masc would certainly be short of functional power and you'd probably have limited energy available for any sort of movement until the system recovered.

Guy's will argue hard to canon until canon disagrees with their choice of meta loadout and either way will adamantly dismiss any suggestions that would make the system better for game balance if even has a chance to disrupt their meta. Always been that way, will always be that way until the servers shut down.

earlier on, probibly around the time of the energy draw pts, i had an idea to use ghost duration instead for lasers. you could still stack the usual large vomit alpha but it might take a second or more to burn. missiles would get ghost spread, computer could only track so many and would need to start taking shortcuts. guass rifle charge time stacking rather than hard limit of 2, sort of a light power draw. ballistics get recoil (like hgauss) on the big guns and the smaller ones would get ghost spread when spamming. ppcs would get an alternate form of ghost heat that factors the weapon heat against the heat bar. all these effects would be mild up to about 20 damage and then start ramping up aggressively at around 40, so mixed builds would experience them a lot more mildly than a boat would.

Edited by LordNothing, 18 February 2023 - 05:01 PM.

[sycocys]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie, on 18 February 2023 - 02:38 PM, said:

so.. first off: I'm not a fan of ghostheat.
but.
It is there for a reason.

you mentioned that it's an idea to counter boating and make mixed builds more viable.

now, imagine where the (granted very limited) build diversity would be without ghost heat.
it's in a bad place right now, it'd be GONE without ghostheat.


I'm not happy with it, but it solves way more problems than it causes.
until someone finds something better, it HAS to stay.

Sized hardpoints was always a good option, and would have kept away a bunch of the hardpoint bloat if they did it in beta at the same time they limited engine sizes.

[LordNothing]

it was but im not a big fan of the way sized hardpoints was handled in mw5. but there are mods for that.

Edited by LordNothing, 18 February 2023 - 05:23 PM.

[Knownswift]

Sized hardpoints were terrible, number of hard points is the best system we've seen in one of these games to date.

I wish they had paid more attention to the power creep.

[Extra Guac]

You raise some interesting points. Regarding ghost heat, there is basically no information available to new players in-game, other than the warning in the mechlab. There's no way to know about the 1/2 second delay or the actual amounts of ghost heat generated without doing some research.

I read your post about mental loadout. As a counterpoint, I would say they have done a pretty good job of replacing a lot of weapon-specific quirks with strong universal quirks. The Hatamoto is probably the best example of this.

[Tromoskyon Rex]

Knownswift, on 18 February 2023 - 10:08 PM, said:

Sized hardpoints were terrible, number of hard points is the best system we've seen in one of these games to date.

Fully agree on this. Probably the biggest thing I like about MWO over MW5 is the number limit over the size limit. Boat builds can be annoying but the freedom to build makes the game significantly more fun and is a big reason of why I play.

Extra Guac, on 19 February 2023 - 01:48 AM, said:

You raise some interesting points. Regarding ghost heat, there is basically no information available to new players in-game, other than the warning in the mechlab.

More info in game would be great. Maybe even add it to be a part of the tutorial so it isnt just more text info dump to someone wanting to get into a game. When I first started playing last year I thought you had to wait like 3 seconds between shots or something. It wasn't until finding a DATA video when I found out it is more like 1 second if even that long.

[VeeOt Dragon]

i have been calling for revamp of the new player experience for years with nothing being done. honestly they need to add a Mech lab tutorial at the very least. (the way i would do it is as soon as someone buys their first mech let them them get all the components half price for their first build while explaining everything to them as it pops up. (so as soon as that little warning icon pops up for the first time a window will open explaining it, same goes for all those icons.) there is just so much to learn in MWO that new players have a huge uphill battle. add to that the fact that with the current population numbers its not unusual for T1s to be placed with T5s.

as for Ghost heat itself i honestly don't mind it and it rarely ever effects my builds. then again i rarely use anything folks would consider "meta" because i find that **** really boring. i often used mixed builds. hell i have a couple that even use all 4 Hardpoint types (Energy, Ballistic, Missile, and AMS) and they work well. i like having to think a little with a build to make it work and even then tweaking things after a match a bit to get it just right. thats part of the fun of MWO for me.

[marakesh]

Ghost heat is just a bandaid as is most changes to the game that people do not like but is so in many games. I do not like GH because it limits builds i want to make mostly to do with Rac,I mean Rac damage is subpar as is now you add a limit to the number i can take. If they add new weapons i hope for non burst balistics like a UAC20 that only shoots one round at a time not 4 and a rac 2 and 5 that each shot does these damages not a damage per second.

[LordNothing]

VeeOt Dragon, on 19 February 2023 - 08:00 AM, said:

i have been calling for revamp of the new player experience for years with nothing being done. honestly they need to add a Mech lab tutorial at the very least. (the way i would do it is as soon as someone buys their first mech let them them get all the components half price for their first build while explaining everything to them as it pops up. (so as soon as that little warning icon pops up for the first time a window will open explaining it, same goes for all those icons.) there is just so much to learn in MWO that new players have a huge uphill battle. add to that the fact that with the current population numbers its not unusual for T1s to be placed with T5s.

as for Ghost heat itself i honestly don't mind it and it rarely ever effects my builds. then again i rarely use anything folks would consider "meta" because i find that **** really boring. i often used mixed builds. hell i have a couple that even use all 4 Hardpoint types (Energy, Ballistic, Missile, and AMS) and they work well. i like having to think a little with a build to make it work and even then tweaking things after a match a bit to get it just right. thats part of the fun of MWO for me.

i figured it was pretty low hanging fruit to have certain events in the ml trigger a popup that explains the mechanics. take isxl, inform about st death. stuff like that. expand the weapon grouping system to show heat for that group in terms of available heat capacity. even that little dh/dt gauge that mw2 had would help players figure out how much heat they are pumping into their mech.