73 replies to this topic

[Kaijin]

Grugore, on 05 November 2012 - 04:51 PM, said:

I actually LIKE drops with heavy LRM support.

I do too, particularly when my team is nothing but short to mid-range brawlers. That LRM-heavy opponent adds another dimension to the game. If LRMs are not good, nobody will use them and that dimension will be gone, making MWO a little less exciting and fun.

[Noth]

Kaijin, on 05 November 2012 - 05:02 PM, said:

I do too, particularly when my team is nothing but short to mid-range brawlers. That LRM-heavy opponent adds another dimension to the game. If LRMs are not good, nobody will use them and that dimension will be gone, making MWO a little less exciting and fun.

Again no one is asking for them to not be good. There were people that Got lead matches in kills and damage with LRM boats back when LRMs only did 1.6 damage and had horrid spread. They had to do more than sit back and just fire their missiles though. LRMs were billed as fire support weapons and the people that used them as such were deadly with them. There were people that cried that they couldn't just load up on all LRMs and go on killing sprees and they got buffed to 1.8 damage with smaller spread (which was needed due to the introduction of the AMS. At this point there was relatively little complaints about LRMs being worthless, or LRMs being OP. It was a nice balance. Major complaint was from premades that ran all AMS making LRMs worthless. But that hasn't changed. A team with all AMSes hanging together make LRMs worthless.

They then got buffed to 2.0 and had NARc and TAG added. Things that don't even fix the issue that made LRMs worthless to teams. Not more than a week after massive complaints about LRMs being OP crept upand they have continued and actually grown since going into OB.

Gone were the days where LRMing took some skill. In were the days when any one could just load up on them and fire away and get easy kills.

They can be good with less damage. They can be good with a change to spread for indirect fire. Right now they promote one style of play and dictate the match. It's not healthy for the game.

Edited by Noth, 05 November 2012 - 05:13 PM.

[dal10]

Khobai, on 05 November 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:

I agree with the gameplay being stale. Base Assault is a flawed gamemode since it promotes highly defensive play. Generally whoever commits first loses and that often creates standoff situations. But its situations like that where its important to know the rules of the gamemode. For example, weve won matches like that, just by killing one mech on the other team, then hiding until the timer ran down. The other team had to rush us before the clock ran out and we tore them apart.

The only way to eliminate that problem that is for to introduce new game modes that force both teams to play more aggressively instead of just taking up defensive positions and waiting for whoever makes the first mistake. We need a new gamemode with centralized objectives that are located in defensibly poor areas of the map. That way its a brutal slugfest to take the objectives, which is way more fun than a stalemate.

that would just stalemate more, first team to commit will get torn apart by LRM fire...you would have to take out the lrm boats before you took the objective

[Kaijin]

Noth, on 05 November 2012 - 05:08 PM, said:

Again no one is asking for them to not be good. There were people that Got lead matches in kills and damage with LRM boats back when LRMs only did 1.6 damage and had horrid spread.

I was around when LRMs were nerfed to 'not good'. Nobody used them. I don't want to see a return to that.

I will concede that present damage + TAG is slightly daunting. In fact, I made a suggestion shortly after 2.0 damage came out that there be TAG and/or NARC specific ammunition that does less than 2.0 per missile due to the extra guidance innards it would have. The 2.0 damage ammunition would not have it's tracking modified by TAG or NARC. It was ignored. Or maybe it wasn't. There was mention in one of the Dev posts about wanting to come out with different types of ammunition.

But really, LRMs do not need to be nerfed in any way shape or form, as they stand currenly. I have yet to play with an organized team that could not thoroughly trounce an LRM-heavy team, even without having any LRMs of our own.

Edited by Kaijin, 05 November 2012 - 06:23 PM.

[Frantic Pryde]

I agree. I made a post about this a while back in the Beta forums. Indirect fire is just to easy...and now its to easy and overpowered

[Noth]

Kaijin, on 05 November 2012 - 06:22 PM, said:

But really, LRMs do not need to be nerfed in any way shape or form, as they stand currenly. I have yet to play with an organized team that could not thoroughly trounce an LRM-heavy team, even without having any LRMs of our own.

This is why they need changed. An organized group can trounce them extremely easy, but a PUG just get battered by them. It makes them worthless in one area and OP in another. Games that have these thing change those things since it is a sign of poor design.

[Khobai]

Quote

that would just stalemate more, first team to commit will get torn apart by LRM fire...you would have to take out the lrm boats before you took the objective

The whole point of having the area around the objective not have any hills would be so snipers can adequately counter LRM boats. The issue snipers have right now is they cant utilize the full extent of their range due to the abundance of cover on most maps. Which means most of the time when snipers are able to fire at LRM boats theyre well within range of getting hit by LRMs in return. What we need are more maps that have open areas where you can take advantage of the full range of your sniping weapons. Otherwise LRMs are always going to be the dominant long range weapon.

Quote

But really, LRMs do not need to be nerfed in any way shape or form

Nerfed no. But they should changed slightly. Personally I would lower the damage on LRMs but increase their rate of ascent so they clear terrain better. LRMs are meant to be indirect fire weapons but theyre actually very bad at indirect fire at the moment.

Edited by Khobai, 06 November 2012 - 03:21 AM.

[Valron]

A quick and easy fix that would leave lrm pilots and their victims happy would be to reverse the firing angles. So you launch at the angle that the lrms usually use to descend on their targets, and vice versa.

[DrxAbstract]

The problem with Indirect Fire weapons is you're out of range for hugs.

[Lefty Lucy]

Valron, on 06 November 2012 - 03:56 AM, said:

A quick and easy fix that would leave lrm pilots and their victims happy would be to reverse the firing angles. So you launch at the angle that the lrms usually use to descend on their targets, and vice versa.

I think that would fundamentally invalidate indirect fire entirely. You can already use cover to mitigate it to varying degrees. This would make it *too* easy to hide from LRMs.

[Valron]

Think of it this way, this would let lrms use cover for themselves to fire on mechs in the open while at the same time giving those you are targetting a bit better chance of avoiding damage on maps like caustic where there is basically no cover for miles

[Kaijin]

Noth, on 06 November 2012 - 03:07 AM, said:

This is why they need changed. An organized group can trounce them extremely easy, but a PUG just get battered by them. It makes them worthless in one area and OP in another. Games that have these thing change those things since it is a sign of poor design.

PUGs don't get battered by other PUGs using LRMs unless the PUG team using the LRMs knows not to fire them inside of 180m and the PUG team recieving the LRM fire doesn't know well enough to stay out of the rain. Matchmaking is the solution - not nerfing.

[AC]

LRM's are fine if you get rid of the indirect fire mode for every spotter. If a mech was required to bring a TAG or a narc to designate an indirect fire target, then we would have way less missile spam. It would also be viable to take out the TAG or narc mech, but right now you take out a spotter and another shows up. Allowing every mech to spot super accurate indirect fire is not fun and definitely not challenging for the LRM/spotter mechs.

[MustrumRidcully]

Noth, on 05 November 2012 - 02:18 PM, said:

There was an idea about this in one of the LRM threads. It was to give LRM essentially 2 fire modes. Indirect and direct. Indirect fire would work like now, just with a much larger spread, thus increasing the area of effect but dropping the potential damage to any one target. Direct fire would require line of sight and have the current spread. TAG and NARC would tighten the spread of both indirect and direct fire modes.

This would even add more use to the LRMs as in indirect fire mode you could potentiall spread the damage out on a bunch of mech softening up multiple targets.

I also like the idea of having direct fire and indirect fire behave differently.

When you fire your LRMs directly, you should get a tight spread -the LRM is now a "kill" weapon just like a PPC (but with less suck) or Gauss Rifle (but with more suck?). But if you fire indirectly, the weapon becomes a support weapon that softens up targets and allows area denial.

I would prefer if this was an automatism, and the player wouldn't have to switch between any firing modes - but if it's necessary to implement it correctly, I could deal with it.