532 replies to this topic

[Xerxys]

Lightfoot, on 19 November 2012 - 07:50 PM, said:

Yep, I said this so often during the closed beta I figured at some point (DHS was the promised time of the FIX) they would fix it. Then DHS comes along and we get another Heat Nerf. PGI, let's play the Battletech game with the BALANCED 3 weapon types. Energy, Ballistics, and Missles, each no better and no worse than the other.

I completely agree. Energy weapons generally do less damage than ballistics/missiles and are made even more inadequate by this oversight. Look at how many mech variations are entirely energy based and for this lack of change with heat it really hampers any build that doesn't have a mix of weaponry. You can't triple the rate of fire and not alter the rate of heat dissipation.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Xerxys, on 19 November 2012 - 09:46 PM, said:

Heat dissipates over time. Only so much heat can be dissipated in the time frame you're referring to. Now lets look at the major drawback to running these: x3 critical slots per DHS. That alone limits the number you could possibly field on any given chassis.

They're not as OP as you people make them out to be. You would never be able to fit enough DHS to allow these alpha strikes that you speak of. I have them on my hunchback and can only field 5 DHS over the initial 10. I simply don't have enough critical space available in enough areas to allow any more than that. TT conversion actually would work in this instance. It's the clan DHS that is going to be OP if they only take up 2 critical slots, but the lore would fit. The balance is there, but people are imagining all the critical slots being filled with weapons or DHS.

I have several areas on my mech that only have 2 spaces available so I can't fit another DHS. The originator of this post is absolutely correct on most of what he says about this IMO. TT should only be converted where it can be and only altered when necessary to make it work in a game like this. Dropping off anything from the x2 heat dissipation the part should have needs to be countered by reducing the critical slots required to field it.

hence the part where I call BS on the dev who said dhs "completely breaks the game".

[Xerxys]

Valder, on 05 November 2012 - 08:14 PM, said:

Okay, I'm actually going to read all of your giant post... hold on.

Edit: Okay, I regret reading all of that. Of course exact build translations from tabletop are going to be wonky. Are you telling the devs all weapons should only fire once every 10 seconds?

I find my tier 2 equipment dragon far superior to my tier 1, because I designed it with real-time rules in mind, not because I was designing a tabletop mech. If I would have built a dragon using tabletop rules, it would probably be terrible.

C'mon man. Of course things are going to have to change for balance. You think the Doom board game is the same experience as the computer game? Of course not.

Ok, but with your logic they should find superior variations of the TT game to sell you don't you think? They're selling the same variations as the TT game and while some things don't work perfectly in a straight transfer the alterations should be minimized.

If it would allow for honest heat dissipation I wouldn't care if I could only shoot a weapon once every 10 seconds. At least my complete energy based variant wouldn't be completely worthless when I first buy them. Either energy weapons need to have their heat cost cut to a third of what TT has it, or you need to triple heat dissipation to keep this crap equal. Every adjustment I've encountered has made missiles/ballistics more/less powerful because they're looking for the balance, but nothing has been done to energy weapons. Lasers are significantly less powerful than other weapon systems and (from what I've seen) cost more heat to fire. PPCs used to be only slightly less powerful than gauss with the major advantage of never running out of ammo. The power of this weapon is terrible and the heat cost is about the same as it's always been, but heat dissipation is 1/3 of what it should be.
Tripling the heat dissipation would make heat a non-issue, but by reducing the heat cost of energy weapons they would at least regain some of their usefulness. On most builds they are simply a secondary weapon, but on energy only variants they are all they have.
If you were to run a mech with only SRM2s and another mech running only small lasers and you kept the number of weapon systems and heat sinks equal to each other, the mech popping off SRMs is going to do much more damage and accumulate much less heat than the laser mech. I think this is the core problem/imbalance that people are experiencing with the game.

[Hurnn]

Yes and not to beat a dead horse but;

The heat scale is fine, the heat weapons generate is fine, I will concede DHS are broken and 1.4 is ******** but mostly for reasons people are not addressing and I will deal with it latter. What is broken is the way heat works in the first place.

Every weapon in TT was balanced based on a 10 second turn. The problem is when you increase the firing rate to 3 times the intended amount high heat weapons will naturally lag behind lower heat ones, it's pretty basic math. The most stunningly obvious fix and the one I can't begin to understand why PGI has never seemed to even consider is Increase base heat dissipation to 2-3 times what it is now.

They are acting like heat neutral mechs were/are rare, and are a bad thing. Neither is true. Mechs that were heat neutral or ran slightly hot were incredibly common, and those that weren't got tweaked to be so by most players. My current Atlas build would be 7 points heat negative in TT. In TT I would drop a HS and scrape up another ton and slip in 2 more mediums and still be heat neutral. In MWO I over heat in 3.5 alphas, I would be better off adding a second gauss riffle and dropping HS or boating even more more mediums throwing out my SRM racks and loading up more HS but I can't because of the lame hard point restrictions.

Now for DHS. I agrees completely with the people who say they should be true doubles, not 1.4's. At 1.4 they simply are not worth it for high heat assaults and heavies because they take up to much space. I Think that if PGI insists on making them only 2/3 as effective as they should be, then they should also reduce their size to 2/3 of what they are, making them viable to bigger mechs who are generally limited not by tonnage but by crit slots. While not a perfect solution it would at least be an improvement over their current state.

The only reason true doubles supposedly broke the game is the helped the mechs that already preformed better than they should in comparison to everything else because of the heat dissipation being 1/3 what it should be to begin with. At this point I think it's just Ego keeping them from considering changing it, because it is clearly broken, but time and time again they take a we know better than you attitude, even though time and time again they miss broken **** in their in house testing.

Edited by Hurnn, 19 November 2012 - 10:40 PM.

[Xerxys]

Tempered, on 05 November 2012 - 08:31 PM, said:

@OP
Don't you think you're being a bit overly dramatic? You can not translate a turn based pen and paper game into first person mech simulator without making some changes. It just doesn't work. The core ideas are all still there in MWO.

The problem with this statement is that the game has already been converted from it's TT design into a simulator game. I've played most of the games and am basing my opinions on them more than the TT rules and this game is falling quite short of those games in practically everything. This argument is appearing all over the place and if they used the previous generation MW games as a starting point most of the crap we're having to deal with now would have been avoided. In some cases TT rules can't just be incorporated, but for those they simply needed to look at what the previous MW games did and follow that. Fine tuning would have been involved, but at least we wouldn't have to go through constant overpowering/under-powering of weapons systems and this infernal heat system. I remember being able to fight for much longer spurts at the outset of battles than I've been able to in this game. Things do seem mostly balanced until you jump into an entirely energy based variant of a mech. It is here that you'll find lasers or energy weapons of any type to be grossly under-powered in the over-all scheme of things. As a general rule energy weapons have shorter range, less power, and more energy cost than the missile/ballistic counterparts. Perhaps PGI needs to increase the heat threshold for purely energy based mech variations and that can help to counteract the imbalance, but double heat sinks should do what they say they'll do regardless of TT rules. Instead of being stupid about this just adjust the heat dissipation of single heat sinks so that the double version can hold true to its name AND not be this OP everyone seems to think they'll be.

[lordlazarus]

all i know is i get to shoot people in the face on the internet with a giant mechanical killing machine

dont know cannon dont care

dont know table top,, dont care

enjoying game 90%

dont like black screen or fps bug


anything else is gravy

that is all

[Teralitha]

HRR Insanity, on 06 November 2012 - 05:55 PM, said:

The only reason that happened is because the Devs stubbornly refuse to add weapon spread which fixes ALL of your complaints and allows canon weapon, heat, armor, and damage values. That's the problem. It's always been the problem. Add cone of fire, fix MWO. Insanity

Add cone of fire..... really? While I can see how that would be the simplest fix to balance, it wouldnt make for a game of skill. And I expect mechwarrior to be a game of skill, not dice rolling.

[Bleary]

Hurnn, on 19 November 2012 - 10:34 PM, said:

They are acting like heat neutral mechs were/are rare, and are a bad thing. Neither is true. Mechs that were heat neutral or ran slightly hot were incredibly common, and those that weren't got tweaked to be so by most players.

They weren't very common in the 3025 or 3050 TROs. They also weren't common or often practical under level 1 rules in general, which encompasses the entire founding era of the game's history, and the point where Battletech was the closest it ever came to being balanced.

And yes, being able to easily make a chassis heat neutral does have repercussions. Once you do that, heat no longer impacts a game. If you watch two lances of custom 'Mechs square off, or two lances of 'Mechs handpicked from later TROs, heat scales will never go past 4. You also won't see AC/2s, AC/5s, AC/10s, LRMs (unless they're spotting with a C3 network) or SRMs (unless someone wanted a crit-seeker and couldn't get a 'Mech with an LB-20X for some reason). The base game mechanics weren't designed for double heat sinks, and the weapons weren't balanced around double heat sinks.

If you could easily make a 'Mech heat neutral in MWO (or effectively so) everyone would do it. There'd be no real reason not to. At which point they may as well fold the weight of the necessary sinks into the weapon and get rid of the heat scale.

Edited by Bleary, 19 November 2012 - 11:08 PM.

[Xerxys]

Josef Nader, on 19 November 2012 - 09:34 AM, said:

I would agree that we shouldn't be -too- concerned about stock designs working in real-time, as they were intended for a turn-based game with completely different rules and concerns than a real time game. However, we are forcing new players to play these super-inefficient stock designs against efficiently built custom jobs. That's -really- rough on new players.

I'm fine with PGI changing the TT rules to fit the real time scenario. They should also optimize the stock TT mechs to make them work in their new system so trial players aren't completely bent over the table by those that can afford to build working mechs.

IMO if PGI alters from TT rules to the point the TT variants are practically worthless, they've done something bad wrong. PGI is picking and choosing what aspects they change and to what degree. From what I've gathered so far PGI has doubled mech armor, tripled firing rates, altered damage in the quest to "balance" the game and make it simulator friendly. What I haven't noticed is any change to heat dissipation, damage output, heat cost for energy weapons. They've changed ballistics and missiles now, and are in fact still trying to figure missiles out. I believe they made changes to ballistics as well, but wasn't playing for those so don't really know.
Here's the major imbalance I'm seeing with the game as it sits right now. Missiles have been far more powerful than lasers, and depending on size they generally have superior range. Ballistic mechs can run without a single heat sink above the initial 10, and have only slightly greater range than energy weapons. Energy based mech variants are the only ones that get royally screwed in this game. Energy weapons don't have the range, damage, or heat/damage ratio as the other weapon types. When energy weapons do start to match their ballistic counterparts in range they are even more inefficient than they previously were. I have tried every possible build to make the heat/damage ratio of pure energy mechs somewhere close to neutral and still don't have a solution. I have run two commandos that were exact opposites of each other. One ran 1 SSRM and 3 small lasers, the other ran 3 SSRMs and 1 small laser. With fewer heat sinks to allow for more ammo my 3 SSRM Commando overheated a quarter of the time as my 3 SML 1 SSRM Commando and I generally did 2.5-3 times the damage in my SSRM Commando. With this in mind I tell all you people who are thinking that energy weapons will be OP if heat is allowed to dissipate for them the way they should that you're wrong IMO. Things would simply be even.

Edited by Xerxys, 19 November 2012 - 11:12 PM.

[zverofaust]

MWO is essentially Call of Mechduty now. Except nowhere near as fun. Stumbling around a tiny battlefield with a handful of teammates not being able to shoot anything because you overheat every bloody half second and end up sitting there like a loose puppet while some heatsink-boating ultrajenner tears you a new one... yeah that's totally Mechwarrior!

[Bleary]

Have you ever played Call of Duty? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds to someone who has played a lot of Call of Duty? I mean . . .if you don't like MWO, fine. But overheating has nothing to do with CoD, and the maps are nowhere near as small as the average CoD map. Why bring up the comparison?

Xerxys, on 19 November 2012 - 11:09 PM, said:

IMO if PGI alters from TT rules to the point the TT variants are practically worthless, they've done something bad wrong.

The problem with that argument is that many variants were worthless under TT rules. If MWO sticks to TT, do you really want to run around in a Jagermech?

Edited by Bleary, 19 November 2012 - 11:17 PM.

[Rifter]

zverofaust, on 19 November 2012 - 11:11 PM, said:

MWO is essentially Call of Mechduty now. Except nowhere near as fun. Stumbling around a tiny battlefield with a handful of teammates not being able to shoot anything because you overheat every bloody half second and end up sitting there like a loose puppet while some heatsink-boating ultrajenner tears you a new one... yeah that's totally Mechwarrior!

Sadly this is where its heading. They arent even trying to keep this like a simulator anymore they are adding third person view for godssake. I expect auto aim will be next, then 360 degree radar, i mean we cant make it to hard for the newbs you know...

[MustrumRidcully]

Bleary, on 19 November 2012 - 11:04 PM, said:

[/font]
They weren't very common in the 3025 or 3050 TROs. They also weren't common or often practical under level 1 rules in general, which encompasses the entire founding era of the game's history, and the point where Battletech was the closest it ever came to being balanced.

And yes, being able to easily make a chassis heat neutral does have repercussions. Once you do that, heat no longer impacts a game. If you watch two lances of custom 'Mechs square off, or two lances of 'Mechs handpicked from later TROs, heat scales will never go past 4. You also won't see AC/2s, AC/5s, AC/10s, LRMs (unless they're spotting with a C3 network) or SRMs (unless someone wanted a crit-seeker and couldn't get a 'Mech with an LB-20X for some reason). The base game mechanics weren't designed for double heat sinks, and the weapons weren't balanced around double heat sinks.

If you could easily make a 'Mech heat neutral in MWO (or effectively so) everyone would do it. There'd be no real reason not to. At which point they may as well fold the weight of the necessary sinks into the weapon and get rid of the heat scale.

It is still possible in MW:O to make heat neutral mechs. Why don't people generally build those (unless they use Dual Gauss?) - because it's not worth it.
You never ever need to fire an infinite amount of time. You don't even need to fire all your weapons for a straight minute in this game to kill another mech.

And so, people optimize their mechs for shorter "uptimes". But even if you think in 10 or 20 second increments, high heat weapons are not as efficient as low heat weapons. And that's a fundamental problem in this game.

If you want to see true heat management skills matter in this game, we need a lower heat capacity, and a higher heat dissipation - meaning managing your heat is all about managing the timing of your shots - you may not be able to afford 3 PPCs every 3 seconds together - but you can fire each PPC every 3 seconds if you have a delay between the indivdual PPCs of 1 second, for example.

But this game isn't like that. It's "alpha strike until you can't anymore so you get the most from convergence, than hide".

[Ghosth]

I don't get it, in all of this, I can't once recall seeing anyone mention what seems to me an obvious answer to too powerful lights and mediums once heat is balanced correctly.

All you have to do is add a penalty for firing more than 1 energy weapon at a time. Just for the sake of discussion we'll use Medium lasers with their 5 heat.

Fire 1 = 5 heat
Fire 2 =10 heat plus 2.5 heat penalty for total of 12.5

Fire 4 at one time you get stacking penalty for 3 or 20 heat + 7.5 for total of 27.5

Then balance heat dissipation at least +50%. Rate of fire got tripled, ammo pretty much got a 50% across the board buff, do the same for heat.

Now a single PPC can be used as a sniper weapon and fired again, and again, and again without overheating.
But the guy who tries to fire 8-9 medium or small lasers at one time pays for it.

It seems to me like the obvious answer. It encourages diversity.

Heck you could even make it so you could fire 1 large laser, 1 med laser and 1 ER LL in the same group with no penalty. If you wanted to encourage that sort of grouping.

3 PPC awesome with chainfire now becomes viable as does the 2 PPC 2mlas K2.

Jenners can choose to fire all their lasers at once and take the heat, or break them up into groups/chainfire.

Why is this not already in the game? And Why for all that is holy do the Dev's refuse to balance heat?

Edited by Ghosth, 19 November 2012 - 11:24 PM.

[Valaska]

Prosperity Park, on 05 November 2012 - 09:29 PM, said:

I like your Sig, MCXL, it's as if you're either warning people, or complaning to the developers inthe hopes that your sig will raise awareness and cause the peoples to rise up and force the devs to put more manpower behind fixing the netcode. We all know they don't see the hit detection problems, and we know they're not doing anything about it in the upcoming patch... or maybe they are, I forget. no, wait, I remember, they are rolling back their latest changes that caused some problems and are working on new solutions.

Good thing you have the siggy to keep them on their toes.

They already tweaked hit detection and this terribly netcode is a double edged sword, its so terrible and bad cheating isn't as rampant as it could be, IE Unreal Engine where you just need to get into the console lol.

I made a decent post here, its a mechwarrior game through and through, I am sure said post is burried now. DHS 1.4 actually, sort of works, but heat is an overarching problem that needs to be addressed, Gauss and SRM's are fine and Gauss will be balanced even moreso when it becomes fragile.

[Bleary]

MustrumRidcully, on 19 November 2012 - 11:19 PM, said:

It is still possible in MW:O to make heat neutral mechs. Why don't people generally build those (unless they use Dual Gauss?) - because it's not worth it.

Sure. And that's how it should be. But if the heat scale was more like the TT and heat neutral 'Mechs were common (as you were advocating) then it would be worth it. There's no reason not to make a heat neutral 'Mech on the TT.

Quote

You never ever need to fire an infinite amount of time. You don't even need to fire all your weapons for a straight minute in this game to kill another mech.

And so, people optimize their mechs for shorter "uptimes". But even if you think in 10 or 20 second increments, high heat weapons are not as efficient as low heat weapons. And that's a fundamental problem in this game.

If you want to see true heat management skills matter in this game, we need a lower heat capacity, and a higher heat dissipation - meaning managing your heat is all about managing the timing of your shots - you may not be able to afford 3 PPCs every 3 seconds together - but you can fire each PPC every 3 seconds if you have a delay between the indivdual PPCs of 1 second, for example.

But this game isn't like that. It's "alpha strike until you can't anymore so you get the most from convergence, than hide".

The game isn't at all like that unless you're playing a Jenner. The existing heat system means that some 'Mechs (fast 'Mechs) are configured to alternate between periods of alpha striking and not firing while they cool down, while slower brawlers are configured so that they can lay down continuous fire long enough to hopefully kill their target. But if they end up in a protracted engagement, or are engaged again too soon after coming out of a fight, they'll be caught 'heat fatigued' and won't be able to fight at 100%.

If you lower capacity and increase dissipation, every 'Mech will configure their heat the same way and the fatigue aspect will be taken out. You'd basically just be giving weapons a manual cooldown.

Edited by Bleary, 19 November 2012 - 11:32 PM.

[Xerxys]

Alexa Steel, on 19 November 2012 - 04:40 AM, said:

I run Centurions, I NEVER overheat, UNLESS I get trigger happy. Fielding 2 Large Lasers, 2 Medium Lasers and 2 SRM6s... you must be doing something wrong sir.

You have learned fire control... good for you. The problem is that these are supposed to simulate an actual battle. Do you honestly believe ANY armed force would field a weapon that could overheat within seconds of a skirmish? Getting trigger happy should have it's consequences and it should play a role in battles, but lets try to keep it close to how TT works, or at least a little closer to how the novels play out. How many novels had mechs overheating left, right and center only seconds after initiating combat? It would make for a very boring book. How many times did mechs overheat during TT games? This should be the measure of how heat works more so than how rules transfer over. If you take a stock energy variant and alpha strike twice the next weapon group you fire is going to overheat you. Nobody wants a game where people are just running around alpha striking non-stop, but at the same time I'm getting really bored with LRMs and SSRMs and overheating from energy weapons. Ballistics wouldn't be too bad if the round actually went where the crosshairs were (somehow they always tend to be off to one side or the other for me or they're going through the target). The battles should be a bit more fast paced and energy weapons should be far more efficient than they are now. From what I remember in the novels and on TT is that they were usually waiting on weapon systems to recycle.

Edited by Xerxys, 19 November 2012 - 11:37 PM.

[Bleary]

No armed force would ever field a 'Mech.

Battletech started life as a boardgame. Not even a wargame, and certainly not a battlefield simulation. A boardgame. Its mechanics are as arbitrary as picking up $200 for passing Go in Monopoly. They exist because the designers thought the rules would make for a more interesting game. Nothing else.

Battletech also doesn't work anything like what you see in most of the novels. People aim at specific locations in the novels. Wasps are taken out by jeep mounted machine guns. Pilots manually reroute coolant. Stuff like the fact that the Rifleman has a big honking radar dish on its head is actually supposed to matter.

And . . .again, the role heat plays on the TT varies wildly depending on whether you're playing with Level 2 rules and whether you're cherrypicking TRO variants and/or using all customs. If you use stock 3025/3050 'Mechs, you will run the risk of overheating all the time if you get trigger happy.

Edited by Bleary, 19 November 2012 - 11:39 PM.

[Valaska]

Bleary, on 19 November 2012 - 11:34 PM, said:

No armed force would ever field a 'Mech.

Battletech started life as a boardgame. Not even a wargame, and certainly not a battlefield simulation. A boardgame. Its mechanics are as arbitrary as picking up $200 for passing Go in Monopoly. They exist because the designers thought the rules would make for a more interesting game. Nothing else.

Although powered armor is extremely promising, and mech's have been looked into in the past, don't know what happened to the projects but I assume they ran into power consumption and feasibility problems. Good for an urban environment maybe, especially with rubble, but not with any current day technology, especially with prohibitive costs!

But yeah, this is a game, not a realistic simulation. MWO has actually brought a bit or realism to it, sort of like the novels. Also I wouldn't say never, there are situations where it could be extremely handy to have humanoid shapes to move through, IE urban environments, they just wouldn't be to the scale we have now.

[Xerxys]

Ghosth, on 19 November 2012 - 11:23 PM, said:

I don't get it, in all of this, I can't once recall seeing anyone mention what seems to me an obvious answer to too powerful lights and mediums once heat is balanced correctly.

All you have to do is add a penalty for firing more than 1 energy weapon at a time. Just for the sake of discussion we'll use Medium lasers with their 5 heat.

Fire 1 = 5 heat
Fire 2 =10 heat plus 2.5 heat penalty for total of 12.5

Fire 4 at one time you get stacking penalty for 3 or 20 heat + 7.5 for total of 27.5

Then balance heat dissipation at least +50%. Rate of fire got tripled, ammo pretty much got a 50% across the board buff, do the same for heat.

Now a single PPC can be used as a sniper weapon and fired again, and again, and again without overheating.
But the guy who tries to fire 8-9 medium or small lasers at one time pays for it.

It seems to me like the obvious answer. It encourages diversity.

Heck you could even make it so you could fire 1 large laser, 1 med laser and 1 ER LL in the same group with no penalty. If you wanted to encourage that sort of grouping.

3 PPC awesome with chainfire now becomes viable as does the 2 PPC 2mlas K2.

Jenners can choose to fire all their lasers at once and take the heat, or break them up into groups/chainfire.

Why is this not already in the game? And Why for all that is holy do the Dev's refuse to balance heat?

This is the best idea I've seen yet. It makes complete sense, but I might alter it a bit by saying that multiple weapons fired from the same body area. Arms, LT, RT, CT etc..... have the penalty. If you fire a medium laser from your right arm and left arm at the same time, I don't quite see the heat penalty for that. Even still, without being able to design my mech to make this effective due to the hardpoints, it's still a descent idea and would work even with an increase to heat dissipation.
CHEERS

Edited by Xerxys, 19 November 2012 - 11:56 PM.