Ttly, on 27 March 2025 - 01:12 PM, said:
Friend,
please invest in spacing and paragraphs. These posts are difficult enough to parse as it is, as is proven by the number of people thinking you're actually advocating for the removal of variants rather than complaining about The Evil Cheating Baby-Eating Meta.
Ttly, on 27 March 2025 - 01:12 PM, said:
Yes, and there just seems to be this interest in against buffing certain things regardless of their actual performance more than not. Missile weapons for starters, neither MRMs or LRMs got much last year (latter even taking a velo nerf) while ballistics got a velocity buff, so on. What, is the AWS-8V (PPC velocity MRM quirk) so good that we can't have a repeat of something as distinct as it? Buffing the missile part of the Highlander? Nope.
Oh right, there's also a model bug on the Highlander's RT 3rd energy hardpoint where the additional geometry has bugged pitch black texture, likewise with the Vindicator head mount with flamer, but it's whatever, no dev manpower and stuff blablabla.
Let's use this AWS-8V example to try and explain why giving one, single 'Mech +180% MRM velocity is fine but giving MRMs by default +180% velocity is not.
First of all: at the risk of stating the obvious, the AWS-8V is an Awesome. The AWS chassis is one of the oldest in the game, with a relative paucity of hardpoints and True-To-TableTop™ geometry that does it no favors. AWS variants tend to get powerful offensive quirks because their low-slung weapons and low hardpoint counts hold them back much more harshly in modern MWO than when it was released
over a decade ago.
Second of all: The AWS-8V has three missile hardpoints, all of which are situated in its right torso. This puts an absolute ceiling on how many missiles can be crammed into the 'Mech to take advantage of this "insane" velocity buff. To whit, the 'Mech is only physically capable of bringing 70 tubes, either an MRM40+MRM30 or 2xMRM30+MRM10, and both of those options require a STD engine. The more typical LFE builds only get sixty tubes - still a lot, but compared to other MRM assaults that routinely break the 100-tube count, it's a distinct weakness. This hardpoint layout
also means the 'Mech's firepower is entirely, 100% concentrated in a single body location - and as previously stated, the AWS-8V is an Awesome, with all the Lovehandle Lameness that entails.
Third of all: Ridicu-Quirks such as the AWS-8V's MRM velocity quirk only work with restrained, sane base values of weapons. If, as an example, MRMs had a base 1000m/s velocity, to get to your "WHY USE RIDICUQUIRKS INSTEAD OF BUFFING THE BASE WEAPON?!" thing?
-First of all Mk. II: all the MRM assaults that are simply
much better than the AWS-8V would all continue to be vastly better than Quirk Murm Awesome.
-Second of all Mk. II: the effect of much smaller, more common generic quirks, as well as skill nodes on the tree, becomes much more pronounced. At 500m/s velocity, a commonly-seen generic 10% increased velocity quirk offers MRMs 50m/s. The same quirk, with 1km/s velocity MRMs, is worth double the velocity gain, and the velocity skill nodes similarly provide double the benefit. The higher the base numbers on weapons, the smaller
everybody's buffs have to be to not bork things out of hand.
Buffing the base weapon to the absolute top end of its possible acceptable balance range, nudging it right to the bleeding edge of the breaking point, makes it
dramatically harder to play around with those values for things like the AWS-8V. Ironically? Doing what you want and SuperMegaUltraBuffing missiles would make 'Mechs like the AWS-8V and the Belial Uziel
significantly worse, since they would lose their unique edge.
Am I getting through at all, here?
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