54 replies to this topic

[MrTBSC]

have to disagree with OP here ... if there wasn´t ghostheat the outcry of ER laserboats and PPCs would reach beyond this galaxy ... .. these weapons would not be easily balanced with just increasing heat generated or reworking the heatmanagement system for being more punishing on boating multiple large weapons ..
there obviously should be a balance between boating a single weapon platform and mixing weapons/weapontypes to be both fairly viable ..
imho GH does help (though again personally i would have prefered something like a jammingpenalty) mitigate the issues of people being able to deliver a 60 PPFLD no ammo build or be able to beamburst 70 dmg over 800 meters ...

i do agree though that the game is lacking on upfront information when it comes to heat management and how exactly the ghostheat is applied and with how much of a penalty ... it merely states THAT there will be a heatspike ... this in fact is were mechdb 2.0 does a better job on the basic heat information (it could though be better there as well)

Orion_, on 19 February 2023 - 06:35 AM, said:

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.

one thing i definitively dislike about the MW 5 basegame is that there was too little customization when it came to engines armor and structure ... something that mods like another mechlab dealt with no problem however went a bit overboard with imo ..

that said ... i can see a system of hardpoints WITH weaponsizes be favoreable (MW4 was unfortunately supershitty on this, like good luck finding enough mechs were you were able to put heavy large lasers into in that game) despite being limiting in customization freedom especially on a multiplayertitle like MWO ... we are just talking about the ghostheat issue .. ... i mean if you take a stockmech with were and how the weapons are distributed you could argue like why is the mech suddenly capable to run 7 ER large lasers when it was "supposed" to run only 2 or 3 at best .. maybe just be able to change the large lasers to PPCs or Pulse or something that would be within the large energy weapon category ... something like that, while still being able to change engines and armor/structuretypes etc ...

as a bit of a sidenote while battletech also had the issue of not being able to change engines and armortypes i actualy enjoyed the idea of it adding "melee" hardpoints to the system were weapons like MGs, small lasers and flamers had a bit more specific role in infighting instead of being just very likely replaced with medium lasers ...


on the other hand however we also have mechwarrior:living legends ... which i gotta say i personally do not enjoy at all because there is basically NO customization whatsoever and the heatmanagement is WAY. TOO. EFFIN. PUNISHING !!!1!!! ..
i would have gladly be able to exchange the medium pulse lasers and the head small laser of the fafnir 5 for standard or ER variants to then be able to put in more ammo, armor and or cooling into the mech while keeping the intended HGRs (engines and set armor/structuretype as well) ... but instead that game wants me to play pure stock only ...

[LordNothing]

try to think of it as a retrospective rather than a complaint or request for how things should go forward.

i do not think gh accomplished what it set out to do. i can still do high vomit builds. maybe not in the tripple digits, but penalty-free 60 and 70 point alphas are still a thing. and many variants are considered still considered trash tier for being mixed builds.

also not really fair to blame mwll for not having a mechlab, they intended to have one. only reason they never went through with it was mwo and pgi's insistence that they not do a mech lab. living legends did a lot of stuff right. electronic warfare, maneuverable jump jets, combined arms, maps, etc.

the big problem with hardpoint systems is making the external geometry reconcile with the arbitrary weapon config. the latter systems of mw2/3 i dont think tried to modify chassis geometry in any way. you got to respect the lore gemometry and build rules to be accepted by the bt community. mw4 used the hardpoint system to make weapons spew from intended locations, of course at the cost of build versatility. the mwo mechlabs was actually a very good compromise i thought. but mw5 took it in an absurd direction.

id have really liked to see the mwll mechlab. mechs would have pods and pods could contain arbitrary weapons depending on the size of the pods/weapons. then there would be a physical representation of the structure on the mech. the pod being an intermediate geometry interface between the mech and weapon, each with their own model. was a clever idea. mwo tried to do this with static geometry, which is a lot easier to integrate into the mech artwork but comes at the cost of a lot of geometry to maintain, especially with new mechs coming out every month.

[sycocys]

I vastly preferred the vanilla MW5 over MWO system. The mechs were limited to degrees that make sense for the balance and more importantly they required you to play differently. IMO they should have taken it a step further and implemented an energy system alongside the heat.

The thing that didn't really make sense to me in MW5 was the tiered weapon system, unless you look at it as a "wear and tear" kind of thing but that's not at all how it is presented.

Some mechs aren't as "good" as other, generally that is more than made up for in how much cheaper they are to maintain. This is where if you have a game in this style that having your play be more about completing objectives and meeting certain drop pre-reqs than skirmish with sub-objectives it adds a massive balance layer.
-Even this game with its current set up would be far improved if the lances were split apart and tackling objectives as a primary with skirmish condition as a secondary.

[BLACKR0SE]

it's a matter of trend, not desirable this year. required next year.

Do old machines rust? does it seem to me?
the colors are too pale.

[MrTBSC]

sycocys, on 27 February 2023 - 04:26 AM, said:

I vastly preferred the vanilla MW5 over MWO system. The mechs were limited to degrees that make sense for the balance and more importantly they required you to play differently. IMO they should have taken it a step further and implemented an energy system alongside the heat.

The thing that didn't really make sense to me in MW5 was the tiered weapon system, unless you look at it as a "wear and tear" kind of thing but that's not at all how it is presented.

Some mechs aren't as "good" as other, generally that is more than made up for in how much cheaper they are to maintain. This is where if you have a game in this style that having your play be more about completing objectives and meeting certain drop pre-reqs than skirmish with sub-objectives it adds a massive balance layer.
-Even this game with its current set up would be far improved if the lances were split apart and tackling objectives as a primary with skirmish condition as a secondary.

every Mechwarrior game from 1 to 5 is nothing but a powercreepgame, you start out with a medium mech to get up to 4 assaults or heavies to gather the best and most efficient equipment you possibly could get ...
of course MW5 will have tiered weapons like including a "gold" or "legendary" variant of a ppc or autocannon ...

battletech in that aspect was a bit more interesting were it included the same weapons but from different manufactures with different quirks

Edited by MrTBSC, 27 February 2023 - 07:49 AM.

[sycocys]

MrTBSC, on 27 February 2023 - 07:43 AM, said:

every Mechwarrior game from 1 to 5 is nothing but a powercreepgame, you start out with a medium mech to get up to 4 assaults or heavies to gather the best and most efficient equipment you possibly could get ...
of course MW5 will have tiered weapons like including a "gold" or "legendary" variant of a ppc or autocannon ...

battletech in that aspect was a bit more interesting were it included the same weapons but from different manufactures with different quirks

I never really liked playing anything on the heavier side of the heavy range in any of the games myself, but what they did with MW5 and could really further expand on if they could just wrap their brains around shifting from mechpacks and into mode expansions, is they created modes and mission parameters/zone that worked well (if not flat out better) for the different drop weight limitations. -ie running 4 mediums worked out better than running 3 moderate weight assaults and the lightest mech you could find.
Don't disagree that that has been the overall formula for the games though, even the story path for MW5 seemed to have that trajectory pretty strongly, which was kind of a bummer being that the game slowed way down into much of it being a walking simulator the further along you got. Late story was actually the only part of the game I didn't quite enjoy because I just don't enjoy running assault mechs.

-- The weapons would have made a massive amount more sense if they were shifted stats from different manufacturers rather than the tier based system. To me I guess it just doesn't make sense in the context they delivered it, and especially when you only do it for the weapons and not the electronic gear or heat sinks or even ammo which should be much more economical to upgrade.

Even the "skills" upgrades was a massive step in a better direction there. Unlock them once and they utilize a limited slot system based on the overall capability of the machine.

I do get that people enjoy the added freedom, but there's a lot to be said about how much that takes away from balance (especially in pvp), and to a large degree also eliminates the need for the game to be built around match based content like objectives that would also layer in further balancing. Its something that if they had shifted/stuck to early on, this game could have been pretty deep in the gameplay area for a pvp/arena type game.

[TheCaptainJZ]

There was once a test for an "energy draw" system in place of ghost heat that would serve the same function but be communicated to the player better but I think they discarded the idea as just adding another system that the player has to watch. It's best to stick with heat but it'd be nice to have a more intuitive system. Something like firing a single weapon does base heat and firing 2 or more always does base heat of each weapon + some formulaic penalty amount (linear, logarithmetic, or exponential?) that is computed from the heat of all the weapons' base values (added together or averaged?) and/or the number of weapons fired. So no matter what, you always incur "ghost heat". If only firing two weapons, it's not much, but larger if those weapons have higher base heat, so firing two PPCs will generate more penalty heat than firing 2 small lasers. Ghost heat is really just a crutch system to try and mitigate players from firing, mainly, several energy weapons at once, or energy weapons paired with an AC or Gauss. You can tweak cooldown, velocity and some other variables but that doesn't stop alpha firing. Ghost heat doesn't either but it can force a mech to shutdown or take internal damage. Part of the problem with balance today is that mechs are better optimized with the changes to the skill tree. Essentially, they all got buffed and since energy weapons generate the most heat and more skill nodes are centered around running cooler, they benefited the most from the changes.

But regardless of whether anything changes, PGI should implement these changes:
1. In the mechlab, add a heat simulator/calculator.
2. In the game, change the label of the heat meter to actual heat numbers, not %. Also let it track above 100% to 120% or so, with a clear line what 100% for your mech is (again in the actual heat value, not %). It may need to be larger and moved somewhere else on the screen (thinking MW3 with this one).

[sycocys]

When did they have an energy draw test? The only thing I recall them ever trying was the lock target for damage/range thing which was super awkward but interesting.

[LordNothing]

TheCaptainJZ, on 28 February 2023 - 12:45 PM, said:

There was once a test for an "energy draw" system in place of ghost heat that would serve the same function but be communicated to the player better but I think they discarded the idea as just adding another system that the player has to watch. It's best to stick with heat but it'd be nice to have a more intuitive system. Something like firing a single weapon does base heat and firing 2 or more always does base heat of each weapon + some formulaic penalty amount (linear, logarithmetic, or exponential?) that is computed from the heat of all the weapons' base values (added together or averaged?) and/or the number of weapons fired. So no matter what, you always incur "ghost heat". If only firing two weapons, it's not much, but larger if those weapons have higher base heat, so firing two PPCs will generate more penalty heat than firing 2 small lasers. Ghost heat is really just a crutch system to try and mitigate players from firing, mainly, several energy weapons at once, or energy weapons paired with an AC or Gauss. You can tweak cooldown, velocity and some other variables but that doesn't stop alpha firing. Ghost heat doesn't either but it can force a mech to shutdown or take internal damage. Part of the problem with balance today is that mechs are better optimized with the changes to the skill tree. Essentially, they all got buffed and since energy weapons generate the most heat and more skill nodes are centered around running cooler, they benefited the most from the changes.

But regardless of whether anything changes, PGI should implement these changes:
1. In the mechlab, add a heat simulator/calculator.
2. In the game, change the label of the heat meter to actual heat numbers, not %. Also let it track above 100% to 120% or so, with a clear line what 100% for your mech is (again in the actual heat value, not %). It may need to be larger and moved somewhere else on the screen (thinking MW3 with this one).

energy draw was a good idea, up until pgi tried to implement it. i think i participated in the pts session and it was a mess. i think they were looking too hard for one system to rule them all when a lot of simple systems would have been a lot better. even the current heat system suffers from too much complexity.

i thought things like ghost spread, ghost duration, ghost cooldown, recoil, and charge stacking would have been easier to implement and provide more depth. boated weapons would have all kinds of diminishing returns without needing to bbq any noobs. then on a mixed build the diminishing returns would be minimalized and you could get more effective alphas.

this would exist along side heat of course as that's still a major mechanic in bt derived games. weapons would run a little hotter but without penalties and the heat bar might factor the other effects so that the diminishing returns are even greater when running hot. its better to modulate the efficacy of the weapons than to melt core and kill your mech.

[Tarogato]

Anybody who thinks ghost heat should be removed from the game is a person who has never thought about how people build mechs in the absence of ghost heat.

Cauldron is already playing with the idea of unlinking GaussPPC alphas on select few mechs and the pushback is immense. People don't want instagib alphas in this game - it goes contrary to the entire premise of giant slow armoured war machines as a first-person shooter, ie very slow time-to-kill.

When you remove ghost heat from the game, every mech that can't boat 12+ lasers or 6+ missiles becomes useless. Every weapon that can't be boated in massive numbers becomes useless. Every weapon that ALREADY can be alpha'd in massive numbers... becomes useless. Because without ghost heat, a new entirely different powercreep would occur. One that would make the game absolutely imbalanced and a worse experience for everybody.

[feeWAIVER]

sycocys, on 28 February 2023 - 02:06 PM, said:

When did they have an energy draw test? The only thing I recall them ever trying was the lock target for damage/range thing which was super awkward but interesting.

Like 2018ish. They apparently hit a roadblock and scrapped it.

So we gonna get new weapons or what?

[LordNothing]

Tarogato, on 01 March 2023 - 09:56 PM, said:

Anybody who thinks ghost heat should be removed from the game is a person who has never thought about how people build mechs in the absence of ghost heat.

Cauldron is already playing with the idea of unlinking GaussPPC alphas on select few mechs and the pushback is immense. People don't want instagib alphas in this game - it goes contrary to the entire premise of giant slow armoured war machines as a first-person shooter, ie very slow time-to-kill.

When you remove ghost heat from the game, every mech that can't boat 12+ lasers or 6+ missiles becomes useless. Every weapon that can't be boated in massive numbers becomes useless. Every weapon that ALREADY can be alpha'd in massive numbers... becomes useless. Because without ghost heat, a new entirely different powercreep would occur. One that would make the game absolutely imbalanced and a worse experience for everybody.

it is true that the current state of balance, which took years to obtain, was built around ghost heat and simply removing it is a complete nonstarter, you would simply need to repeat those years of work. frankly im not sure this game has that much life left in it. so ripping it out would be very bad for the game.

but its still a convoluted mess, and there were other ways to introduce the diminishing returns required to keep ttk low. ones that dont need arbitrary grouping tables and strategically placed loopholes. things that keep the learning curve steeper than it ought to be.

[Hunka Junk]

MrTBSC, on 26 February 2023 - 06:06 PM, said:

have to disagree with OP here ... if there wasn´t ghostheat the outcry of ER laserboats and PPCs would reach beyond this galaxy

I agree. OP is inadvertently making an argument for more ghost heat by claiming that ghost heat didn't stop the energy boaters.

[LordNothing]

Hunka Junk, on 01 March 2023 - 11:52 PM, said:

I agree. OP is inadvertently making an argument for more ghost heat by claiming that ghost heat didn't stop the energy boaters.

or helped mixed builds.
or buff the unused variants.
or nerf certain meta laser combinations that can rip your torso off in one shot with nay a penalty.

i admit things like ppc boats and erll boats would be awful without ghost heat and that there is no easy fix. but its not the panacea its made out to be.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

I just happen to lurk again and I see my favorite topic come up.

There is a lot to take in here, but the tl;dr ghost heat serves a purpose even if it doesn't promote everyone's definition of "mixed" builds (this being a very nebulous term through mechwarrior's history).

There is a lot to take in here so bear with me as there are a few reasons ghost heat shows its limitation:

• Weapons that escape heat need an entirely different system to prevent them from being exploited (Gauss charge I'm looking at you). Heat is effectively a resource no different than energy, mana, etc, etc in any other game in that it is meant to make you think about tradeoffs. I make builds typically with an average of 50% heat efficiency to allow me to make use of positioning downtime for cooldowns, while it may not have the intended effect some wish it did, it does make it so that some builds aren't always firing constant alphas in heated exchanges. The one thing that DOES distinguish it is that when you are overloaded on this resource, you can make a trade-off to take damage and go over it. Which is unique even if again, not what everyone wants but again, it makes clear trade-offs because the game really comes down to numbers, do more accurate damage to the enemy than they do to you (over-simplification but still, this is the whole point of focused fire, positioning, rolling damage, etc). Having something that circumvents that obviously requires special handling and here we are, with a set of weapons that have a special system just for them because they escape heat. Sorry but that really shouldn't happen. You could argue that maybe supplemental weapons could be introduced that have such limitations but that needs to be a concept developed from the ground up, not tossed in like it is (this sort of how rifles feel in MW5).
  
• There is significant overlap particularly in the short range laser department which requires a bunch of weapons to be grouped together. This is part of what makes ghost heat confusing as you basically need third party resources to keep track of what combinations end up triggering ghost heat and what is allowed. Particularly because while pulse are meant to be more "DPS" oriented, their upfront damage typically makes them alright at using to circumvent ghost heat or to give a slight boost to your damage output. Meaning while yes they have slightly faster recycle time, in practice you aren't using pulse lasers like dakka, not like you might've in MW4 Mercs. Combined with the heavy lasers, the Clan side especially has just an abundance of weapons all competing for the same role with minor differences not enough to carve out niches for most of them. If weapons had more unique roles to avoid this exact sort of overlap, you wouldn't see near as much need to group weapons together like we currently do.
  
• Dire Stars and Giga Drills, joke mechs like this have existed in most mechwarriors. One trick ponies that aren't really effective at anything other than trolling people in PUG matches. I think this can really be narrowed down to one reason: energy weapons are super light with the tradeoff that it is more space efficient to run ballistics over boating energy weapons, at least that seems to be the theory from TT, however that doesn't really pan out in quite a few cases (namely Clan tech). This is also the reason why light mechs end up running mostly energy weapons and maybe missiles on a select few is because they need to burst to limit exposure, and the tonnage to pay the tax to even mount enough ballistics to do equivalent damage as energy builds just isn't there (MGs being the exception of course). The large disparity between cost to mount a weapon and the heat burden ends up creating a lopsided dynamic that stacks the deck largely in energy weapons. Because they are so light weight, it becomes easy to just stack a bunch, and because of the unique feature with heat I mentioned earlier about allowing overages of your capacity, you allow for troll builds with no real system to stop them, just methods to punish those who use them.

Ghost heat alone can't fix this, but let's be honest, it would take pretty much a redesign to fix the issues and that isn't even broaching the topic of what I think some consider mixed builds (jack-of-all-trades). I think there could be a way to accomplish it but I don't honestly know if it is worth it and it is pretty simple, undo the doubled armor/internals, and halve heat dissipation/capacity, make it quicker to see diminishing returns of specializing. Again though, I don't know if that would actually make the game better because this would put assaults in a really weird place, basically being forced to run mixed builds because they have the tonnage and specialization has costs (that's also assuming the weird imbalance between energy weapons and ballistics tonnage wise was corrected).

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 02 March 2023 - 08:03 PM.

[pbiggz]

reduced hardpoint bloat and sized hardpoints would have made ghost heat much less necessary, but we're talking about foundational aspects of MWO now. These things aren't likely to change.

[Blood Rose]

LordNothing, on 17 February 2023 - 06:34 PM, said:

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?

TL;DR MWO used to have timed convergence for weapons. MWO dropped timed convergence in favour of instant convergence, something that makes no sense logically and breaks the lore massively, because a certain subset of players HAD TO HAVE MUH ELITE COD 360 INSTAHIT.
This led to massive damage pinpoint alphas that rendered mechs dead in a hit. PGI has been frantically trying to find an answer to this ever since, from doubling armour to quirks. Ghost Heat was one of these ideas. It doesnt really work.

[Tarteso]

Ghost heat never has make sense. Before, a Stalker, for example, could fire 4 erppcs simultaneously BUT had to wait like 30 secs to cool down completely and be able to repeat that without getting heat damage. More or less the same for laser builds. After its implementation, TTK was not significantly affected either. So, total failure IMO.
Instead, high alpha builds (for any kind of boated weapons) could have been balanced by adjusting "simple" heat and/or reload times, if needed.
And BTW, for the gauss charge more of the same nonsense, a stupid mechanic instead of simply adjusting reload times to limit their viability at shorter ranges vs. ACs.

Now we have a game hobbled with stupid mechanics and endless re-re-re-re-re-requirking passes

[An6ryMan69]

Heat is bad.

More heat is more bad.

War machines that shut down from firing are stupid-bad.

Gauss and machine-guns create no heat, so they are not bad...so we squish them until they ARE bad.

Then we talk about how things are bad....

[Heavy Money]

An6ryMan69, on 14 March 2023 - 08:38 PM, said:

Heat is bad.

More heat is more bad.

War machines that shut down from firing are stupid-bad.

Gauss and machine-guns create no heat, so they are not bad...so we squish them until they ARE bad.

Then we talk about how things are bad....

And the whole time we're actually all playing Clan Laservom