21 replies to this topic

[caravann]

pbiggz, on 12 February 2025 - 12:35 PM, said:

Tabletop has essentially no solutions for balance aside from "the spirit" of whatever weapon or equipment you're trying to balance. Numbers and mechanics wise its worse than useless; tabletop values actively make the game worse.

This is one of many reasons a spiritual successor to mechwarrior should probably be set in a new IP; so we can free ourselves from the expectation of the game somehow playing the same as tabletop, and so that the devs are free to make the balance and mechanical changes needed to actually make the game fun without spoiling grognard#73's favourite stock mech and causing a flame war. You guys are your own worst enemies. You always have been.

Tabletop pretty much relied on selling better and stronger weapons.
ER laser is better than medium laser and there's no reason for medium laser if there are ER weapons.

Tabletop may be too realistic how a battle end up onesided and it's hard to stop the deathspiral.
It all depend on numbers. Some people don't like having a game where them provide the victory effort and want to join the winning team and then we have weeks of old people complain in the game.

They complain that the game is hard. But in a 12 vs 12 they only contribute = 4%

To be in the game at all you would at least kill 2-3 mechs in every game. If you only kill 1 mech in a battle you may as well never be in the game at all since a dummy who stand and do nothing would contribute as much as a distraction as these spectators are just having a freeride.

Quickplay was never the main attraction. The game was meant for faction play but you don't have any friends and why people end up playing in Quickplay where they're shooting at bots. These bots are having a easy time to defeat them since the easy tactic is to use numbers to shoot at a single target one at a time.

These losers you playing the game with will kill you if you enter the game with a locust.

Since a locust was a tradeoff of having tonnages where it will not matter how many alpha strikes you making your number game will suck as it doesn't work. You wasted time shooting at a locust since that single locust was tanking the entire team on its own.

And that is when you realize the thing about this game. Yes you can make the other team confused that they're unable to say what's going on by simply driving around the map. They're focused on killing the first thing they see in the map that they're willing to follow you around the map and create and clockwise rotation.

By the time I have made the clockwise rotation they're fatigued fighting the uphill battle that your locust will kill their assault.

[VeeOt Dragon]

honestly i don't find T-bolts all that bad. they are not good but not exactly bad. they do FEEL better than standard LRMs (i don't bother with Artemis anymore, not after they nerfed the **** out of it, just not worth the tonnage and space investment). the trouble with both is the abysmal projectile speed. hell i can throw a wooffle ball faster than a standard non-skill/quirk LRM round. i think all they need to do to bring them and t-bolts into a more usable state is to just give a buff to projectile speed. oh i am not asking for pre-mega nerf rates (the big LRM changes they made back in the day when they added the variable firing arcs. everything that assisted lock on weapons got nerfed into the ground) but say start with a 10% increase and see how it goes. make a few small increases till things feel right again. sadly i don't think anything will be done to improve Lock-on weapons while most of the cauldron are still in charge of such things as the vast majority of them have a hatred of what they call "no skill weapons" (news flash, to be effective with lock-on weapons takes far more skill than just pointing your crosshair at something and clicking a button even taking lead into account, but thats a long old argument that is better done in a different thread.). hell i am surprised we even got t-bolts in the first place. i stopped watching MWO youtubers a Long time ago because so many T1 youtubers wine like little babies if a locking weapon round so much as grazes them, again getting side tracked.

in the long run TBs have the same drawbacks as all locking weapons in that they need to at the very least have heavy velocity quirks to be effective. for LRMs i find that you almost need a total of a 40%+ velocity boost for them to be usable. T-Bolts can get away with less since they are shorter range. hell with current velocities a fast light mech can out run LRMs at any real range. both weapon systems seem to work best at around 500m or less. (so yeah they effectively took the Long Range out of LRM). i have a couple of mechs that run T-Bolts rather well. my go to is the Hero Nightstar (been a bit since i logged into the game but i think i am running 2 TB-15s, 2 TB-5s, and 4 MLs)

yeah i would have much rather seen the "one big missile" type for the t-bolts than the 5-damage per missile but they had limitations. my guess it was likely they didn't want to have to make new models for every mech that can field them so that it would look right. given the lack of personnel at PGI its understandable. there are a **** tone of mechs in MWO and even if you just restrict it to mechs that have missile hardpoints thats still a LOT of work to make it look right. with the 5 damage per they can use the model for other missile weapons. (TB-5 = NARC, TB-10 = SRM-2, TB-15 = not sure but i think they use the SRM-4, and TB-20 = SRM-4). its pretty much what they have done with all the new batch of weapons. they just use existing models for the weapons instead of making new ones. yeah some should have had new models like the TBs and the HAGs but the rest are just fine using existing stuff.

Edited by VeeOt Dragon, Today, 02:54 PM.