You remember that in the beginning, we tripled the firing rate of most weapons to make them interesting and more believable? Well people were dying too fast. No big surprise there.
So we doubled armor.
Wait, we tripled damage and doubled armor? Hmm. We'll get back to that.
"Well, that's fine," we said, "people might die a little fast sometimes but it's OK."
We forgot that we were on the low end of the damage spectrum then. With sucky weapons.
Fast forward to now, the DHS forum explosion. Waaaah, we want 2.0 heatsinks!! "But," say the Devs, "if we give you 2.0 heatsinks you're doing to be vaporized as soon as you step out from behind a building." That's cool. I'm with you, it's important to keep Time To Kill (TTK) high in this game.
"But," say the forumites, "this will gimp my favorite build of" - insert PPC/Large laser Heavy/Assault build here - "or my stock Clan configuration of" - insert canon Clan mech configuration here.
They do have a point - we can't continue to rely on totally nerfed heat reduction values to keep play fair for early Inner Sphere configurations when the Clan configurations universally rely on fully-functional DHS to work.
So how do we solve this problem? Why we let them eat cake! That is, make the transition to 2.0 DHS and move from doubled to tripled armor, of course! As was logical to do in the beginning, so we should do now. As far as I can tell, this will do two things: Increase current TTK to "a-little-too-much" for some builds and to "just-right" for high damage builds enabled by 2.0 DHS. It will also increase TTK for Clan technology to "just-right" or "a-little-too-quick." I really feel this has the potential to be a good thing, and to make things easier for the devs to balance in the long run.
What say you?
EDIT: As Arisaema suggests, this would also entail a 50% increase in ammunition per ton for ammo based weapons in order that damage potential should scale appropriately with armor.
Edited by Daekar, 02 November 2012 - 03:53 PM.