20 replies to this topic

[Saved By The Bell]

I dont like Thunderbolts. Tried some, but still, all my IS mechs are running without them.

I prefer LRM+artemis, which has long range and predictable trajectory.

Or even bad MRM, which can be useful in some cases. Not against lights though.


Just think, Thunderbolt 20 needs 15 ton, its just crazy. Its a gauss rifle!

So 15 ton and meh damage. You dont know, how that slow Thunderbolt would fly, You must see target relatively close. For that meh damage.

Made them lighter or...

Do you remember that Vulture in MW4, which was running in Arena with Arrows? One shot=one red assault (yes, that **** was broken).

Edited by Saved By The Bell, 06 February 2025 - 07:40 AM.

[KahnWongFuChung]

I have found them lacking with 2- 20 thunderbolts on my Bullshark its does heavy damage 20% of the time or minimal damage 80% of the time. so I tried 4 -10 thunderbolts and 60% of the time they do heavy damage and 40% they do not so much better results.

But for the last 3 years to me balance in MWO is horrible on most weapon types to many nerfs to missiles of all types and other weapons with staff and the Cauldron only making machineguns and small lasers ETC more powerful for their obsession to make every light or fast medium into an assault mech to please only themselves and what's left of the Comp and Faction players with meta teams.

[1453 R]

Yeah, making the only weapons most light 'mechs can reliably carry and use playable sure is an unhealthy bias, yep yep.

Sheesh.

Thunderbolts are weird because they're not Thunderbolts. A Thunderbolt-20 is supposed to fire one giant-*** 20-damage missile, not four tiny-*** 5-damage missiles that are MORE vulnerable to AMS. The tonnage would be appropriate for what amounts to a lock-on AC-20 with ~600m range; it is not appropriate for a jank LRM-20. I understand why the decision was made, but it necessitated additional changes to the weapon that were not made. The rollback of its initial velocity also sucked major donkey wang.

This is not to say the weapons are unusable. I've got a few different 'Mechs where Thunderbolts can put in serious work, but they generally require SuperMegaUltraQuirks to do so, and that's no fit state for any weapon to be in. They're akin to ATMs in that what they want most is a mobile, jump-capable chassis to find the shots and angles that let them hammer damage home without needing to find That perfect Engagement where they can just hold down the button while locked onto someone that's ignoring them for whatever reason, but their prohibitive weight makes them too heavy for those sorts of chassis.

Also: Petition to rename them "Thunderstroke" missiles or something of the like, because I've discovered I hate having a 'mech and a weapon system share the same name. it's dumb and bad and makes for confusion that doesn't need to exist. Bleh.

[KahnWongFuChung]

1453 R, on 06 February 2025 - 08:06 AM, said:

Yeah, making the only weapons most light 'mechs can reliably carry and use playable sure is an unhealthy bias, yep yep.

Sheesh.

Thunderbolts are weird because they're not Thunderbolts. A Thunderbolt-20 is supposed to fire one giant-*** 20-damage missile, not four tiny-*** 5-damage missiles that are MORE vulnerable to AMS. The tonnage would be appropriate for what amounts to a lock-on AC-20 with ~600m range; it is not appropriate for a jank LRM-20. I understand why the decision was made, but it necessitated additional changes to the weapon that were not made. The rollback of its initial velocity also sucked major donkey wang.

This is not to say the weapons are unusable. I've got a few different 'Mechs where Thunderbolts can put in serious work, but they generally require SuperMegaUltraQuirks to do so, and that's no fit state for any weapon to be in. They're akin to ATMs in that what they want most is a mobile, jump-capable chassis to find the shots and angles that let them hammer damage home without needing to find That perfect Engagement where they can just hold down the button while locked onto someone that's ignoring them for whatever reason, but their prohibitive weight makes them too heavy for those sorts of chassis.

Also: Petition to rename them "Thunderstroke" missiles or something of the like, because I've discovered I hate having a 'mech and a weapon system share the same name. it's dumb and bad and makes for confusion that doesn't need to exist. Bleh.

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Yes, your right thunderbolts need heavy skill support to even make them viable to be used in gameplay as I tested skilled and non-skilled mechs of the same type and class. As to your light comment you know I'm right these weapons on lights and fast mediums have to be balanced again machineguns have 50% to much crit ability's and the rest of the small lasers and pulse ETC are the same to much DPS it needs to be slashed by 50% as well.

Saved by the Bell (TV Series 1989–1992) - IMDb were you in the cast? or just liked the sitcom?

In MW4 I played in the golden days of MechWarrior on the MSN gamming zone on many teams and in all the 20+ leagues and used the Vulture it was a fun mech in all its configurations I was hoping the Archer in MWO would be the same but to me the Staff and the Cauldron have made to many mechs non-Viable in MWO gameplay it has not helped with player retention when a new player gets in a not meta mech and dies in under a minute per battle they just uninstall and find a more fun game.

Edited by KahnWongFuChung, 06 February 2025 - 08:22 AM.

[1453 R]

This isn't yet another a "Make Light 'Mechs Useless Again" thread. It's talking about Thunderbolts. Let's try and keep the Cauldron cantankering to a relative minimum.

The problem with Thunderbolts, and with LRMs, STMs, and Streaks as well, is that the lock-on mechanic as exists in MWO is both unable to be meaningfully changed due to lack of engineering capability and also just not well thought out in the first place. The system requires staring the enemy unflinchingly in the face with zero defensive maneuvering, and that makes lock-on missiles suicidal to use in higher-level play where you don't get ignored and people can aim. In order to make the weapons worth using at that level, they would need to be tuned to a level that would make them absolutely overbearing and impossible to deal with in lower-level play, where half a dozen 'Mechs can and will just completely ignore a target and nobody can hit spank-monkey nada anyways.

The Cauldron, reasonably and mostly correctly, balances primarily around high-level (i.e. T1) play, likely because balancing for the slop bucket at the bottom is something of a fool's errand. At that level literally anything goes and the winner is decided less by the capability of the weapons or 'Mechs and more by whichever side manages to make the fewest boneheaded nitwit mistakes. Lock-on missiles, at that level, have much more reliable damage than any other weapon type because bottom-bucket gronks can't hit bupkis regardless, so even 'nerfed' as heavily as they are, they can perform exceptionally well if you find a sufficiently dense brick to chuck missiles at. Make most of those missiles anymuch stronger than the whole thing would collapse at lower levels.

What really needs to happen is the entire lock-on system needs to be scrapped and reworked. Lock needs to be much quicker to obtain, and missiles made quicker and more responsive in flight, but lock also needs to break after missiles are fired and have to be reacquired. Ideally, time to acquire lock would be dependent on how many missiles one had equipped - if you only have ten tubes of LRMs your locks take less than a second to acquire, but if you have eighty tubes of LRMs it can take four or more seconds. Essentially, designs with smaller numbers of tubes can get those missiles out much more quickly and with a lot less face-staring, allowing missiles to be supplements to direct-fire, while canonical designs with egregious missile counts could get quirks to partially offset the otherwise huge delays in lock time if needed.

As it stands, if you're gonna do missiles you have to go all in on them to make the face-staring requirement remotely worth it, and that bites major hindus. It means missile 'mechs will always be annoying jerks that make the game less fun for everyone else, because nobody likes being hounded by hundreds and hundreds of LRMs from three different hundred-tube bloatboats just for slipping up positioning once.

Buuuut...since we can't do any of that, the best we can do is fidget with numbers until the weapons are relatively mediocre all the way down rather than "good in T1 and oppressive ultragods in T5" or "fine in T5 and completely worthless in T1".

[KahnWongFuChung]

1453 R, on 06 February 2025 - 08:44 AM, said:

This isn't yet another a "Make Light 'Mechs Useless Again" thread. It's talking about Thunderbolts. Let's try and keep the Cauldron cantankering to a relative minimum.

The problem with Thunderbolts, and with LRMs, STMs, and Streaks as well, is that the lock-on mechanic as exists in MWO is both unable to be meaningfully changed due to lack of engineering capability and also just not well thought out in the first place. The system requires staring the enemy unflinchingly in the face with zero defensive maneuvering, and that makes lock-on missiles suicidal to use in higher-level play where you don't get ignored and people can aim. In order to make the weapons worth using at that level, they would need to be tuned to a level that would make them absolutely overbearing and impossible to deal with in lower-level play, where half a dozen 'Mechs can and will just completely ignore a target and nobody can hit spank-monkey nada anyways.

The Cauldron, reasonably and mostly correctly, balances primarily around high-level (i.e. T1) play, likely because balancing for the slop bucket at the bottom is something of a fool's errand. At that level literally anything goes and the winner is decided less by the capability of the weapons or 'Mechs and more by whichever side manages to make the fewest boneheaded nitwit mistakes. Lock-on missiles, at that level, have much more reliable damage than any other weapon type because bottom-bucket gronks can't hit bupkis regardless, so even 'nerfed' as heavily as they are, they can perform exceptionally well if you find a sufficiently dense brick to chuck missiles at. Make most of those missiles anymuch stronger than the whole thing would collapse at lower levels.

What really needs to happen is the entire lock-on system needs to be scrapped and reworked. Lock needs to be much quicker to obtain, and missiles made quicker and more responsive in flight, but lock also needs to break after missiles are fired and have to be reacquired. Ideally, time to acquire lock would be dependent on how many missiles one had equipped - if you only have ten tubes of LRMs your locks take less than a second to acquire, but if you have eighty tubes of LRMs it can take four or more seconds. Essentially, designs with smaller numbers of tubes can get those missiles out much more quickly and with a lot less face-staring, allowing missiles to be supplements to direct-fire, while canonical designs with egregious missile counts could get quirks to partially offset the otherwise huge delays in lock time if needed.

As it stands, if you're gonna do missiles you have to go all in on them to make the face-staring requirement remotely worth it, and that bites major hindus. It means missile 'mechs will always be annoying jerks that make the game less fun for everyone else, because nobody likes being hounded by hundreds and hundreds of LRMs from three different hundred-tube bloatboats just for slipping up positioning once.

Buuuut...since we can't do any of that, the best we can do is fidget with numbers until the weapons are relatively mediocre all the way down rather than "good in T1 and oppressive ultragods in T5" or "fine in T5 and completely worthless in T1".

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Look I'm not a anti light mech or medium player in fact I played mostly mediums and some lights in MWO for years along with all the other mechs in MWO but there not balanced right for tier 5-4 the thing is you cannot balance for just higher tiers and expect to retain new players this has been the downfall of MWO's and its low player base.

Back to thunderbolts at one time in MWO we had the system your talking about with fast lock-on's and a low target retention after a volley of missiles and lost target retention after each shot but all that went away in year 4 after lurmaggedon 1. it's too bad this happened but the game needs to be rebalanced for player retention not just T1-T3 players.

Sigh the thing is your right in so many ways but we did once have the capabilities for missals to be a viable part of MWO gameplay once with out to much face time, so your playtime was longer per battle even at higher tiers.

Part of the problem is no mech defensive ability's on mechs anymore with power creep on weapons also comes fewer defensive abilities to avoid direct fire in MW4 this was not the case a mech could reverse as fast as it could accelerate which means if you were smart you could basically dodge incoming direct fire and avoid massive missile volleys by backing into cover faster.

I have said enough, and it means nothing now PGI is really no longer in control of MWO and ENAD is taking over.

Edited by KahnWongFuChung, 06 February 2025 - 09:19 AM.

[Dauntless Blint]

It would be good to try the game with everything tabletop. It just sucks now. It's painfully ******** playing my favorite machine these days. Every nerf raising the bar to entry and skill gap. Paid money again for another variant of it and it sucks. I have 15 of them and they're all garbage. Nothing can lift it from it's geometry and lack of firepower, heat management and lack of speed and torso traverse.

I read a steam review yesterday it said: You'll quickly remember why you left. It's true.

[1453 R]

"Everything tabletop" would mean all weapons have a fixed ten-second cooldown regardless of damage or heat, most weapons would be utterly meaningless, a single heavy weapon hit would go internal on heavy the 'mechs in the game, and also your reticle would take up a third of your screen because hit chances in the original game were dice-based and generally abysmal. It is not remotely the Great One-Stop Solve that tabletop purists think it is. Hell, when one of the original creators of the tabletop game reduxed his own rules in the late teens with HBS' BattleTech, he adjusted all his own numbers something fierce and did not stick remotely close to the forty year old tabletop numbers.

Stop with the "tabletop numbers fix everything!" nonsense. Unless you want to also remove the "we pilot our own 'Mechs" bit of MechWarrior as well.

[KahnWongFuChung]

Dauntless Blint, on 06 February 2025 - 09:15 AM, said:

It would be good to try the game with everything tabletop. It just sucks now. It's painfully ******** playing my favorite machine these days. Every nerf raising the bar to entry and skill gap. Paid money again for another variant of it and it sucks. I have 15 of them and they're all garbage. Nothing can lift it from it's geometry and lack of firepower, heat management and lack of speed and torso traverse.

I read a steam review yesterday it said: You'll quickly remember why you left. It's true.

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I feel the same way Blint my old Gen1 mechs are so hard to make viable in gameplay anymore and I liked playing them the most but the power-creep in MWO is so bad my Zues takes 1 direct fire volley now and its crippled and unable to compete in matches so basicly almost usless.

[KahnWongFuChung]

1453 R, on 06 February 2025 - 09:26 AM, said:

"Everything tabletop" would mean all weapons have a fixed ten-second cooldown regardless of damage or heat, most weapons would be utterly meaningless, a single heavy weapon hit would go internal on heavy the 'mechs in the game, and also your reticle would take up a third of your screen because hit chances in the original game were dice-based and generally abysmal. It is not remotely the Great One-Stop Solve that tabletop purists think it is. Hell, when one of the original creators of the tabletop game reduxed his own rules in the late teens with HBS' BattleTech, he adjusted all his own numbers something fierce and did not stick remotely close to the forty year old tabletop numbers.

Stop with the "tabletop numbers fix everything!" nonsense. Unless you want to also remove the "we pilot our own 'Mechs" bit of MechWarrior as well.

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HAHA so true in Mechwarrior4 we had an interesting league it was called NBT-(net battle tech) it was TRO based/tabletop the battles were great in one way they took forever to play being all stock mechs playing down to your last laser but the specs were altered a bit as in mechs had real working armor probably x20 what MWO mechs have so it took forever to penetrate and get a kill real teamwork was needed to win battles.

[Meep Meep]

Thunderbolts just like all lockons are situationally strong. In their specific case ~very~ strong since they tend to ct seek. But I don't see any real changes to balance because the conditions that allow a tbolt spam mech to farm are few and far between. Annoying as hell when you face it in one of those situations and a toothless tiger in the rest.

[LordNothing]

i want to say tbolts are better at kills and lerms are better at damage. atms somewhere in the middle.

[Saved By The Bell]

So, would you give 38 ton for 2*20 thunder + 6 ammo + comp + bap?

[LordNothing]

maybe if i just bought a bunch of longbows and some of them had missile quirks, which happened mind you. id also find room for at least one lppc, maybe dropping the comp. less ammo if more backups. not sure if thats how its built exactly but that's my usual approach to most guided missile boats.

Edited by LordNothing, 08 February 2025 - 11:49 AM.

[80sGlamRockSensation David Bowie]

Thunderbolts are certainly better at mid-range direct fire, where they feel more like long range IS Streaks.

LRMs and ATM's outclass them at support damage, and indirect fire.

[caravann]

It's why you don't put a thunderbolt inside a thunderbolt.

Never place a bag of holding inside a bag of holding

[kalashnikity]

LordNothing, on 08 February 2025 - 11:48 AM, said:

maybe if i just bought a bunch of longbows and some of them had missile quirks, which happened mind you. id also find room for at least one lppc, maybe dropping the comp. less ammo if more backups. not sure if thats how its built exactly but that's my usual approach to most guided missile boats.

Carry your own Tag/PPC/NARC or Sad Boys Get Wrecked.

[pbiggz]

Dauntless Blint, on 06 February 2025 - 09:15 AM, said:

It would be good to try the game with everything tabletop. It just sucks now. It's painfully ******** playing my favorite machine these days. Every nerf raising the bar to entry and skill gap. Paid money again for another variant of it and it sucks. I have 15 of them and they're all garbage. Nothing can lift it from it's geometry and lack of firepower, heat management and lack of speed and torso traverse.

I read a steam review yesterday it said: You'll quickly remember why you left. It's true.

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.

[Novakaine]

1453 R, on 06 February 2025 - 08:06 AM, said:

Yeah, making the only weapons most light 'mechs can reliably carry and use playable sure is an unhealthy bias, yep yep.

Sheesh.

Thunderbolts are weird because they're not Thunderbolts. A Thunderbolt-20 is supposed to fire one giant-*** 20-damage missile, not four tiny-*** 5-damage missiles that are MORE vulnerable to AMS. The tonnage would be appropriate for what amounts to a lock-on AC-20 with ~600m range; it is not appropriate for a jank LRM-20. I understand why the decision was made, but it necessitated additional changes to the weapon that were not made. The rollback of its initial velocity also sucked major donkey wang.

This is not to say the weapons are unusable. I've got a few different 'Mechs where Thunderbolts can put in serious work, but they generally require SuperMegaUltraQuirks to do so, and that's no fit state for any weapon to be in. They're akin to ATMs in that what they want most is a mobile, jump-capable chassis to find the shots and angles that let them hammer damage home without needing to find That perfect Engagement where they can just hold down the button while locked onto someone that's ignoring them for whatever reason, but their prohibitive weight makes them too heavy for those sorts of chassis.

Also: Petition to rename them "Thunderstroke" missiles or something of the like, because I've discovered I hate having a 'mech and a weapon system share the same name. it's dumb and bad and makes for confusion that doesn't need to exist. Bleh.

I prefer Thunder-snails myself

[LordNothing]

kalashnikity, on 12 February 2025 - 10:47 AM, said:

Carry your own Tag/PPC/NARC or Sad Boys Get Wrecked.

peeps is my preferred method. the other two are fine for teamwork oriented play. im not going to burden my team to support my weapons, and misanthropes like myself dont have friends. but a couple snubs and a fist full of tbolts works pretty well at wrecking face in the short-mid range bracket.