29 replies to this topic

[The6thMessenger]

Okay hear me out.

Racs are powerful: Rac 5 deals 1.5 damage/shot and does so 7.275 every second and thus 10.9125 DPS, ramp-up time of 0.75s with a total of 8s, means it has 7.25s of firing duration, to a maximum of 79.115625 reliable damage, before redline, and guess what, you can have two RAC5s.

So why does it need a rework? It comes to the issue of the weapon highly reliant on face-time. Think about it, the meta is all about maximizing outgoing damage and minimizing incoming damage, this is why alpha-centric build shines.

Yeah 10.9125 DPS looks a lot, multiplies by the amount of seconds you can maintain shooting, but you have to realize that, UACs can burst all it's load on you, or a gauss vomit, and immediately disengage, so the damage you do is largely minimized in the first place. That 10.9125 damage takes an entire second, but a UAC10 an burst 20 damage under 0.33s, note that a blazer at 1.25s burn duration (after nerf) deals 18, and would have dealt 14.4 damage (hitscan BTW), and ****** off afterwards.

And when you can go to town to an idiot off position, is that you're likely open to other sources of damage as well, meaning it won't be a good trade. 109.125 damage seems like a lot for 5s of firing from 2x RAC5s. But you have to remember that competent poke and laser vomits could burst 80+ damage and **** off in less than half of the time you do that.

Oh just add lasers or more RACs? RACs are hot as hell, you'd likely be overheating first with a 2x RAC5 before you actually jam with a redline. And at that point, when you're not built at sustain, why not go full blown UACs that would let you burst.

Do we just remove the RACs sustain? Not necessarily, but I think it shouldn't be just built around it. And guess what, we can totally do it in XML.

Spoiler

 
"jamRampUpTime": 7,		  // was 8s
"jamRampDownTime": 5,	// was 10s,  
"JammingChance": 1.0,	// was 0.037 or 3.7%, will now 100% jam on redline
"JammedTime": 5,	// was 10s,  
 
RAC5 "speed": 1600,	// was 1300
RAC2 "speed": 1800,	// was 1500
 
RAC5 "damage": 2, 14.55 DPS	// Was 1.5, 10.9125 DPS
RAC2 "damage": 1.2, 8.73 DPS	// Was 0.9, 6.5475 DPS
 

The point of this change is to make the weapon jam immediately when redlined, while making the jam buildup easier to clear. By removing the redline damage output, it can instead be diverted into something else useful.

As scary as 29.1 DPS from 2x RAC5s are, or 26.19 from 3x RAC2s, to engagements that lasts only seconds, that is far more competitive, and the trade is the weapon becomes balanced now around 6.25s of firing, or the 46 shells before jamming -- that 46 shells is your entire lot, versus 80 of the previous setup that while dealt, 240 total damage, took 10.99s to make happen, you dealt 184 damage instead under 6.25s.

Note that to a 10s encounter, the pre-change RAC5 is able to output 100.940625 Damage assuming that it doesn't jam. But post change, it can only deal 90.9375, while being only able to fire for 6.25s, because of the inevitable 5s jam that acts like a cooldown.

The slow dissipation means it builds up upon quick and repeated engagement, this now ultimately just avoids the weapon being fired for too long, and now it can be balanced around that.

Velocity boost is because, leading is a *****.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 12 September 2023 - 02:17 AM.

[Cyborne Elemental]

I see what you did there.

Its not all that bad of an idea.

I'd rather see them start firing as soon as you hit the trigger, and the spinuptime to its max DPS over that 0.5 or 0.25 second period.

Gauss and HAG have a shot ready to fire, with the Gauss Charge nodes. it makes them just as useful as PPC's or AC's for peek-shots.

2 RAC-5's can be pretty beefy for damage, but the facetime.. ugh.
And you're definitely right that the DPS is not as big as the #'s make RAC's look. Its deceiving.

Its the same reason that XPL DPS is garbage compared to burn or projectile energy weapons.

What looks good on paper does not always translate to what actually works in combat.

[Moldur]

Not a bad idea. RACs have always held the place of punishing players for overexposing, as well as being a force multiplier, but 0x9999 is still zero. They don't stand by themselves against competent burst damage opponents. One could argue that's just the ins-and-outs of different playstyles and builds, which I don't necessarily disagree with. I am sure people have leveraged them well in organized play on some harebrained scheme. At this point in MWO's life, I think it's worth trying ideas like this out just to see if they play better or not.

Currently RACs are fun when they work, but objectively, I have a hard time justifying them in place of more consistent damage output.

Edited by Moldur, 12 September 2023 - 02:03 AM.

[Curccu]

I would also reduce or remove spool time.

[VaelophisNyx]

honestly the jam chance being 100 is a bit much; it's half their gimmick over UACs (which still don't jam 100% of the time)

[Curccu]

VaelophisNyx, on 12 September 2023 - 03:26 PM, said:

honestly the jam chance being 100 is a bit much; it's half their gimmick over UACs (which still don't jam 100% of the time)

Right now it's random, like in UACs and random is bad.With 100% jam at some point you know not to cross that line...easier to play.

[The6thMessenger]

VaelophisNyx, on 12 September 2023 - 03:26 PM, said:

honestly the jam chance being 100 is a bit much; it's half their gimmick over UACs (which still don't jam 100% of the time)

Yeah, but the gimmick is long sustained fire, that which is still provided by the ensured 6.25s firing time. The difference is that, the balance is no longer about redlining the weapon that contributes to it's needlessly long firing time, but has a predictable and fixed damage output.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 13 September 2023 - 02:34 AM.

[LordNothing]

i think long burst weapons should be more the norm than the exception. really the only ppfld weapons should be non-hag gauss rifles, ppcs, and solid slug lbx (which we technically have on the clan side at least). gauss has charge and ppc has extreme heat, the slug lbx should have a lighter version of the recoil mechanic that hgauss uses or perhaps a longer than std cooldown. this is where restrictive mechanics should be used, not on dps weapons which are intrinsically gimped due to their face time requirements. i think the big problem with racs is that they have too many things going against them, and their benefit of dps is really a weakness and balance needs to keep that in mind.

i wouldn't mind refactoring acs to have proper bursts, ultras to have longer bursts (single tap). with the is getting solid slug lbx, and the clan acs getting renamed to solid lbx. is std acs would all become burst weapons, but you could use the solid lbx for ppfld. of course nobody wants this, hell forbid players be denied instant gratification.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 September 2023 - 07:37 PM.

[The6thMessenger]

LordNothing, on 13 September 2023 - 07:34 PM, said:

i think long burst weapons should be more the norm than the exception. really the only ppfld weapons should be non-hag gauss rifles, ppcs, and solid slug lbx (which we technically have on the clan side at least). gauss has charge and ppc has extreme heat, the slug lbx should have a lighter version of the recoil mechanic that hgauss uses or perhaps a longer than std cooldown. this is where restrictive mechanics should be used, not on dps weapons which are intrinsically gimped due to their face time requirements. i think the big problem with racs is that they have too many things going against them, and their benefit of dps is really a weakness and balance needs to keep that in mind.

i wouldn't mind refactoring acs to have proper bursts, ultras to have longer bursts (single tap). with the is getting solid slug lbx, and the clan acs getting renamed to solid lbx. is std acs would all become burst weapons, but you could use the solid lbx for ppfld. of course nobody wants this, hell forbid players be denied instant gratification.

Sounds good, but it doesn't work. The meta is a lot about maximizing outgoing and minimizing incoming, and it will always gravitate to that.

[Widowmaker1981]

The6thMessenger, on 14 September 2023 - 02:23 AM, said:

The meta is a lot about maximizing outgoing and minimizing incoming, and it will always gravitate to that.

This is approximately like saying "The meta in football is a lot about maximizing goals scored while minimizing goals conceded" - No sh!t, really?

[The6thMessenger]

Widowmaker1981, on 14 September 2023 - 04:06 AM, said:

This is approximately like saying "The meta in football is a lot about maximizing goals scored while minimizing goals conceded" - No sh!t, really?

Yeah, really.

This will just largely obsolete the volley-fired high-commitment weapon, unless you ramp up the damage that ends up in power-creep.

[Widowmaker1981]

The6thMessenger, on 14 September 2023 - 04:12 AM, said:

Yeah, really.

This will just largely obsolete the volley-fired high-commitment weapon, unless you ramp up the damage that ends up in power-creep.

I was being sarcastic. Sorry, probably not clear in text. I know.

[LordNothing]

The6thMessenger, on 14 September 2023 - 02:23 AM, said:

Sounds good, but it doesn't work. The meta is a lot about maximizing outgoing and minimizing incoming, and it will always gravitate to that.

yea, thats why you design your weapons such that weapons that conform to the meta best are the ones that are difficult to use or come with the biggest deficiencies.

i dont like the trend where every weapon is made to get its damage to the enemy as instantly as possible. velocities have gone through the roof, volleys reduced, burn time reduced. every baked in deficiency has been whined out of existence. hitscans have always dominated because they have the simplest implementation.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 September 2023 - 06:55 AM.

[The6thMessenger]

LordNothing, on 14 September 2023 - 06:39 AM, said:

yea, thats why you design your weapons such that weapons that conform to the meta best are the ones that are difficult to use or come with the biggest deficiencies.

i dont like the trend where every weapon is made to get its damage to the enemy as instantly as possible. velocities have gone through the roof, volleys reduced, burn time reduced. every baked in deficiency has been whined out of existence. hitscans have always dominated because they have the simplest implementation.

Yeah, but that's how the game is played, and where people will gravitate.

[VeeOt Dragon]

hmm interesting idea but if we age going to make the redline a hard jam 100% then the total run time before jam should be increased by at least a second or two if not more.

honestly i say leave the jam chance where it is but go with the suggestion above of having it start firing imediatly and rate of fire increase over the time of the normal ramp up until it is firing full bore.

i honestly don't mind the random chance for RACs to jam its UACs that bother me. UACs should NEVER jam on the first trigger pull. i have had more than a few games where i am running UACs (i only run them on mechs with jam chance quirks btw) where i pull the trigger once and they instantly jam with no rounds down range. at least if they waited to jam until the double tap then you could get the equivalent on a standard AC off before being locked up for a while. hell what got me to stop using them was i had two matches in a row where nearly ever pull of the trigger my weapons jammed. think the whole match i might have gotten one or two bursts off from the UACs. (mind you this was many years ago so my memory might not be 100% as i do have memory issues to begin with.)

[LordNothing]

hard jam doesnt bother me thats the way it should have been from the get go. spam = jam.

The6thMessenger, on 14 September 2023 - 01:23 PM, said:

Yeah, but that's how the game is played, and where people will gravitate.

which again is precisely why those deficiencies were put there in the first place. this game is in dire need of some meta churn.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 September 2023 - 03:46 PM.

[Moldur]

I think the point trying to made is that even if that is where people gravitate, if we put more limits on the tools to do so, then we get a more interesting game.

People tend to correlate better weapons as better gameplay. The gameplay does not necessarily get better because the weapons get better. Look at Counter-Strike, with a virtually unchanged weapons roster for 20+ years. They haven't introduced a million guns, with each being slightly more of a laser beam than the one before it (or rebalanced their original roster to be like that), yet there is no end to other f2p games that have done exactly that. Where they concede to the players and give them slightly better gear update after update, or tweak the game until they are in a spiral of powercreep.

The perfect weapon in MWO is an instantaneous 1hk with low heat and high range, a weapon of ultimate convenience. The players will try to make it so, but that doesn't mean we should balance weapons toward that. The inconvenience pushed onto the player by trying to use the tools available to them is part of the game.

[Athom83]

There are 2 immediate fixes to RACs:

1. Stat tweaks

The ultimate problem with facetime weapons is that in order to justify them they need to have a much better DPS than frontloaded weapons, to the point where that they remain a danger against frontloaded burst damage, but at the same time they don't have excessive amounts of DPS to where frontloaded weapons are virtually obsolete. The issue is coming up to that fine line between "not enough DPS, not worth" and "too much DPS, everything else obsolete" while also accounting for size and tonnage also considering the speed of the mounting mech.

For MGs if you have 10 DPS in firepower that's really good especially considering that's 5 tons investment, about half as much tonnage as a RAC/5 for the same DPS... also ignoring cMGs which are half again as light and do 4x the DPS in terms of a ton for ton comparison... yikes. That's being unfair to the RAC, for sure, as it also has the advantage of range; about 3.5 to 4x as much as a regular MG, but LMGs also exist and while they are doing 20% less damage than MGs are still firing out to 80% the range of a RAC/5 while still being vastly more damage/ton efficient. So do I think RACs need 4x their current DPS? As funny as that would be, no. They definitely do need an increase in DPS so that they're only viable if you have at least 2 RACs paired with 2 more regular ACs, but 4x is definitely well into the region of excessive to the point of making everything else obsolete.

On paper, a RAC/2 does 2x the DPS as a LPL while only being 1 ton heavier and 1 slot larger. On paper the RAC/2 should be just fine, but in practice when comparing the same 3x weapon builds (as both have 3 weapon GH) the 3x LPL will probably still win out even though the 3x RAC/2s are doing 19 DPS compared to the LPLs doing 9 DPS. This is because the LPLs will fire and instantly be up 33 damage while the 3 RACs need a slight bit to spool up and then spend several seconds to make that damage up, and just as they make the damage up and get slightly ahead the LPLs are firing again doing another 33 damage to the same spot while turning away and spreading out the return fire. After that the RACs won't be in a damage deficit compared to the LPLs anymore... but at that point they're also likely to simply jam and let the LPL build get free damage against it. IMHO at 19 DPS the 3 RAC/2s are still fine if not actually pretty good on overall damage. Hell if we buff RAC/2s the 3x RAC/2 Shadowhawks and Dragons are definitely going to come back out and absolutely murder people.

However we still need to buff RACs to the point where using 1 or 2 RAC/2s or just 1 RAC/5 alongside other weapons is actually viable, and not have RACs only being viable when boating them. Any increase in DPS also needs to be balanced by a slightly bigger increase in Heat generation. This is sort of my proposal (please laugh at how delusional I am) along with some comparisons;

	Damage	Heat	Cooldown	Shots/s	DPS	HPS
RAC/2 (current)	0.9	0.27	0.137	7.28	6.55	2
RAC/2 (new)	1	0.5	0.111	9	9	4.5
RAC/5 (current)	1.5	0.45	0.137	7.28	10.91	3.25
RAC/5 (new)	2.5	0.9	0.23	5.5	13.75	4.95
AC/2 (comparison)	2	0.5	0.72	1.4	2.78	0.69
RAC/2 (TT comparison)	2	0.5 (1*)	0.119	8.4	16.8	4.2 (8.4*)
RAC/5 (TT comparison)	5	1.1 (1*)	0.233	4.3	21.5	4.73 (4.3*)

*TT heat value

Overall RACs definitely need to be tuned up in DPS, but at the same time I think they need a much larger investment in terms of ammo and heat sinks in order to keep them running. This is primarily to keep the AC and Ultra 2s and 5s viable as cold running DPS as otherwise there's no point in running them over massive RAC brrrrt. Funnily my ROF for the RAC/2 being so close to the TT conversion was purely accidental, I was purely thinking of getting it to somewhere between 8 and 9 DPS before just settling on the higher end of the value while just rounding off the damage to 1 and then added the TT ones later. After that I thought about slowing down the RAC/5 a bit to match closer to the TT comparison then up damage to say 3, but I figured people would like the brrrt at 330 rpm instead of 258 rpm.

Speaking of rounds; IMHO RACs actually do need a slight ammo nerf even in their current versions. The RAC/5 for example currently has 50% more damage potential in 1 ton of ammo compared to the AC/5 (262.5 in the RAC vs 175 for the AC/5, which funnily 175 is the total rounds of RAC/5 ammo in a ton). Currently the RAC/5 takes 24 seconds to empty 1 ton of ammo compared to say 38.5 seconds for the AC/5 (or 19.5 for the Ultra 5 assuming no jams), IMHO that should be shorter as RACs are supposed to be hungry beasts. With my above stats lets say give them 80 or 85 shells per ton, still gives it a bit more damage per ton efficiency over the AC/5 but will empty in about 15 seconds. Similar to the RAC/2, the AC/2 has 174 damage per ton in ammo so even if we give my above RAC/2 200 shells to give it more ammo efficiency it will still eat through that in 22 seconds compared to the whopping 68 seconds it takes an AC/2 to eat 1 ton of ammo. The damage per ton efficiency of RAC/2 ammo currently is actually disgusting, it's well above even the MGs.

2. Rework

Basically just turn them into HAGs. Hell the HAG-30 as implemented in game is exactly what the RAC/5 is 'supposed' to be 'according to TT'. I don't actually like balancing according to TT because 90% of the time it's a stupid argument and misses how Turn based values transform in a FPS title... but honestly what they made HAGs into would IMHO feel quite nice for the RACs. Give them their AC damage values back (instead of writing them off as the 'different kinds' of weapon size to tickle the lore), make both of their streams 6 shots, have the whole stream fire out in 0.4 seconds (which is half the time it currently takes both to fire 6 shots normally), then give the RAC/2 the cooldown of the AC/10 and the RAC/5 the cooldown of the AC/20 and you're good to go. Balance them by giving them some spread, so the Ultra 20 isn't just invalidated by the RAC/5, and adjust heat to flavor.

This way we can effectively make RACs viable while completely ignoring the problem with how to solve the facetime issue because they are no longer facetime weapons. IMHO I'd prefer the previous method over this one, so RACs retain a unique flavor, but this would be an easy fix given what they've added since RACs.

Edited by Athom83, 25 September 2023 - 12:01 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

LordNothing, on 14 September 2023 - 06:39 AM, said:

i dont like the trend where every weapon is made to get its damage to the enemy as instantly as possible. velocities have gone through the roof

The reason for that is consistency. The slower the velocity, the lower the range it can be effectively used due to the hardness of landing shots with any consistency. People can say "well then you just need to learn how to use it" but there is two issues with that:

• Slow projectiles have opportunity cost much in the way that Gauss does with its charge, the harder it is to aim, the slower your reaction, the more you can miss shots on targets within small windows. Unlike Gauss though, you can't pre-charge before going to aim at least in pokes.
  
• There will always be weapons that are easier to aim (lasers) and the effectiveness of them is relative to other weapons. As other weapons get harder to use, lasers become better. This was the case in beta after DHS but before HSR. LL boats had the heat efficiency without as much of the lag to compensate for.

[LordNothing]

ease of use should count against a weapon in the balance formula. its not something you should normalize.

Edited by LordNothing, 25 September 2023 - 02:09 PM.