33 replies to this topic

[Joseph Mallan]

Ghosth, on 03 November 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

No, your not going to convince them Mustrum.

Not this way, not that I can see.

I made a totally heat neutral founders cat, but as you noted, adding more weapons lets you do more damage faster.

This is true, but the Alpha Masters will sacrifice firepower for sustained Cyclic fire. I gladly sacrifice 15-20 points of damage to have a continuous Alpha. Why you ask? Because a sustained rate of fire trumps damage spikes.

[MustrumRidcully]

Joseph Mallan, on 05 November 2012 - 05:14 AM, said:

This is true, but the Alpha Masters will sacrifice firepower for sustained Cyclic fire. I gladly sacrifice 15-20 points of damage to have a continuous Alpha. Why you ask? Because a sustained rate of fire trumps damage spikes.

Unless you kill your target during that damage spike.

The question is - how high is the damage spike you can achieve?

If we look at the Awesome 9M with the upcoming nerfed DHS... The damage spike is 60. That's enough to... I dunno - kill a Commando or other light mech, if all 2 alphas hit Center Torso or Head?

Obviously, a really terrible idea. But that's just telling us that this mech is too hot. No one would have designed such a mech in the table top. Even a mech like the Nova or Super Nova that were really hot would overheat after 3 turns...
But for some reason, we're expected to play the 9M in MW:O?


But if your burst will generate something like 120 to 180 damage over 20 seconds... Then it can be worth it, as you may be able to kill an Atlas... Of course, if you can find a way to sustain 120 to 180 damage over 20 seconds without overheating, you should try that. Oh, look, who brought in the Gauss Rifle?

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 05 November 2012 - 05:20 AM.

[Stone Wall]

MustrumRidcully, on 03 November 2012 - 11:26 AM, said:

But, do you actually want to pilot a heat neutral mech?

The answer is usually - no, you don't. A mech that is heat neutral is spending tonnage on heat sinks not weaponry.

If you were ever forced into a situation where you would need to fire for minutes or hours without pausing - then yes, you would need to be heat neutral.

But realistically, a combat engagement is much shorter than that. The only thing you want to do is - not overheat before the combat is over and your enemy is dead.

Good advice here. I usually play a little safe on the heat side, but I've had wing men who would out damage me while balancing between shutting down and blowing up.

[Joseph Mallan]

Mustrum, in TT our table never used Canon builds. We tweaked all of them to fit our groups style. I would not use a Mech that I know will over heat if I fire it twice! I will fix it though. I only have to stop firing my Atlas when I am switching targets and have to hit the R key. But I learned Heat managment 23 years ago, and I just had to apply that to the MMOs heat model.

I am not looking forward to the +40% sinks. I think it is a terrible idea. BUT I will work with them, and I will adapt and overcome. Cause I'm RECON Biatchs!

[MustrumRidcully]

It still seems that a lot of people seem to believe that heat neutrality is a terrible thing and would constitute a failure of game design if there was ever a possible to have a build that was heat neutral.

I assure you, it isn't a terrible thing. It's even unavoidable. And if it requires 40 Clan Double Heat Sinks and only 1 Small Laser, or 2 Gauss Rifles and 10 standard heat sinks, you can make a heat neutral mech.

The point is - creating a heat neutral mech requires a tradeoff - sacrificing short term damage for long-term sustaining ability.You have only so much tonnage on any given mech - you need to find the right balance between the two, and every ton spend on a heat sink is a ton not spend on dealing more short term damage.

But it gets problematic if the trade-offs are imbalanced. If one weapon can spend 3 ton in heat sinks to become heat neutral to deal 10 more damage in 10 seconds, and another weapon would must spend 10 ton in heat sinks for the same effect, you run into trouble.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 08 November 2012 - 12:25 AM.

[Roadbuster]

I agree that you give up alot of potential burst damage when you try to create a heat neutral mech or weapon configuration.
But once you're overheating or at least in the 80-90% heat range you're useless for quite some time without enough heat sinks.

What I don't understand is the linear cooldown of your mech.
If you take an object and place it in an environment that's cooler or hotter than that object the temperature of object and environment will change till both have the same temperature.
The higher the difference in temperature, the faster they change at first and slow down till they reach the same temperature.
So If you have a very hot object like a heat sink at full load, it should cool down fast at first.
Meaning, if your heat level is at 90% you should cool down exponentially faster than if your heat level is 50%.

I think they should try changing the system so you cool down 3 times faster from 100%-80% and 2 times faster from 80%-50% and at the current speed from 50% to normal temp.
You still would have to watch your heat level to prevent you from overheating, but you could maintain a bit of damage in longer fights.

[Tuhalu]

Yeah. There is more than one strategy for building a mech.

You can run heat neutral, low heat (10 volleys in a row before overheating) or high heat (anything less than 5 volleys in a row before overheating).

You can build for alpha striking (everything, all the time), range brackets (a set of weapons for short and a set of weapons for long ranges) or redundant systems (you can run out of ammo and still use all the heat you got and/or you can lose a side and still fire the same amount of weapons per turn).

That makes for 9 very reasonable possible builds. Everything from heat neutral alpha strikers to high heat redundant weapon systems. They all have their own niche on the battlefield. So long as the damage they produce is balanced against the total tonnage they require to run "heat neutral".

Because heat neutral alpha striking is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM of weapons you should put on your mech. High Heat redundant weapons is the absolute maximum you CAN put on your mech (hardpoint limits).

[Terror Teddy]

Ghosth, on 03 November 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

But PGI seems to want no part of anything like that. Is the dev team lead a huge K2 Dual Gauss fan or what?

Dunno, but to put things into an odd perspective:
On a 10 second interval to keep up with heatsinks we get the following:

Gauss
Heat:10
DPS: 37,5
Range: 660

AC/20
Heat:70 [+600% more heat than the Gauss]
DPS: 50 [33,3% more than the Gauss]
Range: 270 [41% Less than the Gauss]

If we would 'Upgrade' the AC/20 to a gauss we would get the following
+7% Weight
-30% Volume (Criticals)
-600% Heat
+246,5% Range
-25% Damage
Cost (Cbills): +/- 0 [Cost from Sarna Net]

Where is the balance on that weapon, really.

[MustrumRidcully]

It still seems to me as if this lesson wasn't learned yet...

[Kmieciu]

The funny thing is that we`re seeing Gauss cats with additional lasers for "burst" damage :-)

[Vapor Trail]

Before open beta (when I did run a GaussKitty) I used two medium lasers for backup. I also used them to take heads off at ~400m or so. Single Gauss salvo to the head, follow up with the mediums to kill the mech. Was difficult to pull off, but not impossible.

[Gaan Cathal]

There's also EU players with our high pings, a gauss still works at range, especially when the target is moving more or less right at you, but using any kind of low-ROF ballistic in CQC bar the 10-X is a joke for us (not that I run a gausscat, personally, but I hear things man...)

[Corbon Zackery]

All I know is after the patch I had to swap out 4 small pulse lasers for 4 small lasers and add 2 more heat sinks. So I have to run 5 tons of heatsinks just to fire 4 small lasers and 2 streak missle launchers. I am still overheating after 5 or 6 shots.

So this heatsink nerf is not going to work at all.

TT 4 small pulse do 8 heat
2 Streaks 2 at 4 heat

12 heat plus 2 heat for running is 14 heat. So with 13 heatsinks I should be soaking up most of the generated heat. but since single heatsinks are .5 I'm only getting 6.5 so I overheat 3 or 4 shots.


This is with the simplest laser weapons in the game.

Edited by Corbon Zackery, 09 November 2012 - 05:30 AM.

[buckX]

The other fantastic thing about bring dissipation up to match the change in RoF is that SHS could see a useful place again. I've seen it suggested elsewhere that to make DHS not so obviously the right choice, SHS and DHS could both provide +1 heat threshold, making lower dissipation SHS builds with more raw sinks able to shove out more raw damage before shutdown. That would inherently make SHS more attractive to assassin's, since 25SHS would allow about 50% more output before shutdown than 16DHS. If you go for a brawler route, you want more sustained damage, and the DHS look more attractive. I don't think you'd see that same desire with current numbers, because a full heat meter simply takes so very long to bleed off. I understand PGI's worry about making DHS the obvious choice in all circumstances, but their own decisions to make heat to brutal contribute heavily to that very problem.