59 replies to this topic

[Eisenhorne]

I've actually been using ER PPC's on my dragon to pretty good success. (400-500 damage most games, 2-3 kills)

Loadout is -

XL300
18 DHS
400/402 armor
Endo Steel

2 ER PPC in shoulder mount
SRM 6 w/ 1 ton ammo in chest
MPL in arm
ML in arm


The shoulder mounted PPC's allow me to JUST poke out of cover and fire off a few bolts. If the enemy gets in close, I lay in with the arm lasers and SRM6.

[Buckminster]

How does that set up work for heat? I'd like to ultimately swap out the PPCs on my K2 for ERPPCs to nix the minimum range, but don't want to end up in a pressure cooker. I figured endo steel and DHS would make it a very viable option, but that's still a few million c-bills down the road.

[Eisenhorne]

Buckminster, on 19 November 2012 - 09:52 AM, said:

How does that set up work for heat? I'd like to ultimately swap out the PPCs on my K2 for ERPPCs to nix the minimum range, but don't want to end up in a pressure cooker. I figured endo steel and DHS would make it a very viable option, but that's still a few million c-bills down the road.

I have a .99 heat efficiency rating with this. Think of it as 2 separate weapon systems, basically. If I'm firing the PPC's, I'm not going to be firing the other weapons, so the heat is managable (can fire off like 10-12 blasts before overheating).

In a close range situation, I'm normally not going to be firing the PPC's very often, maybe only if the target overheats right in front of me. Even if I need to fire the PPC's at close range, the heatsinks are good enough that I can basically fire the med lasers and SRM without generating any additional heat, so I'll get a good 4-5 PPC shots in at close range before I need to stop using it and use only the secondary weapons.

[AlanEsh]

Buckminster, on 14 November 2012 - 05:35 AM, said:

Until heat gets straightened out, the gauss will always be a better option.

As an old TT guy, I know I was looking forward to marching around in something Warhammer style - twin PPCs blazing. The number of heat sinks you need to do that has approached stupid though, I think it's something like 30 heat sinks to keep each PPC from cooking you off. DHS help somewhat, but still only some.

That being said, when I buy my K2 I plan on sticking with PPCs. Then again, I'm one of those guys that insists on using a joystick even though I could get finer aiming with a mouse.

Put your PPCs in the C1 so they're better protected in the torsos. Yeah, silly "variant" and "hardpoint" system isn't it?

[Buckminster]

Oddly enough, getting the PPCs shot off my K2 hasn't been a problem. First thing I did was ditch the machine guns for an AMS and a half ton of armor, and once I can get endo steel I'll be maxed out. The stock catapult just doesn't have enough armor in my opinion.

There's a part of me that feels that hiding stuff in the torso is kinda "cheese" - I know it's part of the system so I won't say it's cheating - but I feel like I'm defeating the 'feel' of the game. That being said, I did come up against a C1 that had 3 large lasers in the torso - it was remarkably effective.

Also worth saying is that my C1 already has all the basic skills, I'm trying to get them all on other chassis.

Edited by Buckminster, 19 November 2012 - 10:50 AM.

[betocorp]

To be heat neutral, a PPC have 0.09DPS/ton while a Gauss have 0.17DPS/ton.

PPC is just bad, and have min range.

[Eisenhorne]

betocorp, on 19 November 2012 - 01:40 PM, said:

To be heat neutral, a PPC have 0.09DPS/ton while a Gauss have 0.17DPS/ton. PPC is just bad, and have min range.

Consider the ammo as well. I fire WAY more PPC blasts than I ever do Gauss blasts, because I know I only carry 20-30 Gauss rounds. PPC's... I can fire as many as I want. In long battles (and the battles get longer as player skill on both sides goes up) a PPC is very nice to have.

[betocorp]

Eisenhorne, on 19 November 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

Consider the ammo as well. I fire WAY more PPC blasts than I ever do Gauss blasts, because I know I only carry 20-30 Gauss rounds. PPC's... I can fire as many as I want. In long battles (and the battles get longer as player skill on both sides goes up) a PPC is very nice to have.

Forget to mention, with the gauss having 3min steady fire ammo (4.5ammo)

A gauss role is snipe DPS in critical places while PPC to alpha and cool down. But 0.17 x 0.09 DPS is almost 2x more DPS, just is so hard to choice the PPC insteady of the gauss

[Selfish]

PPC is more of an AC/10 equivalent in this game. I used to run two of them on my old AWS 8Q before the introduction of DHS/ES/etc. It was fun. I treated it like a rapid fire, longer range, much more warm AC/20. Their ballistics quality let me spread more incoming damage in fights than lasers can. It's also very good for learning the properties of ballistics since you don't need to conserve/pay for ammo. I wasn't afraid to take potshots at lights to "see what happens".

AC10s and PPCs, on a crit, completely destroy equipment with the most common crit type available (1x). That's pretty solid, but the range/heat/punch of the 10/PPC need work to really be comparable to their nearest heavy/lengthy hitters. 540-270 range fights are seemingly rare, or at least not very well suited to accurate exchanges for how long they last.

I prefer ballistics these days. You can house them on more varied builds without devoting lots of tonnage to heat efficiency. For all energy heavies/assaults? Not bad, but hard pressed to beat the LL/LPL. I think when ballistic aiming is smoothed out, and the EW effect added, that the PPC will start to come into its own.

[JohnO_]

I run 4 x PPC on my atlas, A ton of single heat sinks, heat efficiency of around 1.2? Anyways an Alpha on caustic is around 60% of my heat bar, so I can two in before shutdown.

Ive having a ton of fun with it, heat is really manageable especially on normal / ice maps. I dont know how, but ive manage to one shot 3 hunchbacks, maybe headshots?

Can anyone tell me how the 90m min range works? Is it flatout NO damage or does it scale down? because ive killed mechs right in front of me with these?

[Kaargh]

Quote up: normal (Inner Sphere) PPC or ER PPC suffer in the original board game as same as here for heat problems. For first edition no matters, there were no more weapons like that...And very few mechs with Gauss Rifle. But after some edition and Clan's techn., if the game will follow the original (with ER PPC, LPL, and ultra ac/'s), normal PPC is like a tax...

[Buckminster]

betocorp, on 19 November 2012 - 01:40 PM, said:

To be heat neutral, a PPC have 0.09DPS/ton while a Gauss have 0.17DPS/ton.

PPC is just bad, and have min range.

"Heat neutral" is an admirable goal, but not really necessary. I have 22 heat sinks with my dual PPCs on my K2, which is far from "heat neutral". But I tend to move around a lot - acquire a target, fire a couple volleys and keep moving. I do still overheat sometimes if I find someone that just let's me shoot the crap out of them, but that is not the typical case.

I am still going to eventually upgrade to DHS, but right now things are still working well. And not having ammo means that I have no problems taking pot shots at people at long range. I don't need to worry as much about making every shot count.

[Snowcaller]

The PPC is a relativistic weapon and until the (re)introduction of the Gauss Rifle, it was the king of sniping weapons in TT.
That it needs deflection skill that would make an Arma/Red Orchestra player feel at home is bizarre.
The PPC, in cannon, is a particle accelerator. The energies involved are immense but the particle streams are quite minute amount of mass.At the speed the bolt travels in MWO an infantryman would need a heat suit, not battle armour to survive.

It's the speed that transmits the energy. This breaks immersion as what i'm seeing is a, blue, plasma cannon, not available in 3049

Imo PPC's should 'charge up' a delay to make them less effective brawlers but still effective LR weapons, still do max damage at PB. Time traveled should be technically instantaneous.

I 'sell' this game to everyone i know andI will sing the the praises like a Pavarrotti concert for PGI and their treatment of BT/MW, the canon, us as a community, their stunning rendition of the Mechs and for IGP to know that this is a fantastic project with great devs at the helm. But this current interpretation of a PPC is making my eyes go googly and my brain quiver with the effort of containing this much 'wha?'

O.o

Edit: p**p is blanked...really?!

Edited by Snowcaller, 16 December 2012 - 02:53 PM.

[Wintersdark]

I think a major problem with a lot of weapon balancing in this game is less that various weapons suck, and more that the Gauss Rifle is just too good.

AC20 or Gauss? Gauss is clearly superior. PPC or Gauss? Again, Gauss is clearly superior.

While there are specific circumstances when other weapons are superior to a gauss rifle, those circumstances are very specific and not at all common.

Adding side effects to AC20 and PPC would help balance the field a bit, but the reality - in my opinion, at least - is that the Gauss Rifle is just too good. Right not, if you're physically capable of mounting a Gauss Rifle, you know your best off mounting one. Sure, you can elect to take other paths if you want to do something different, but...

Derrick's(that's me) Golden Rule of Balance: If a choice is easy to make, there's a balance problem.

[Kmieciu]

If someone is doing "WELL" with two ERPPC in a CAT, he would absolutely ROCK with Gauss.
I though I was a decent player using a stock K2: 2-3 kills per match. Then I switched to dual Gauss with 7 tonnes of ammo and had my fist 7 kill match. I remember thinking "OMG this game is so easy" :-)

Edited by Kmieciu, 17 December 2012 - 04:03 AM.

[Buckminster]

Thing is, it was like this in TT. The heat issues have only been exaggerated, but the gauss was king when it first came out then too.

The only limiting factor then was the amount of ammo it could carry - I forget how much it was but it wasn't much - and when you're using dice against the mediocre odds of long range, ammo actually meant something. But now, with the fact that we have very precise mouse aiming and the ability to modify our mechs in ways they were never meant to be, the only real downside of gauss isn't much of a downside after all.

Honestly, if they fixed the rampant heat issues with PPCs, they'd become much more common. I use them for nostalgia, and it takes me 20 DHS to make them feasible. If the heat was more in line with TT, I could ditch 10 of those DHS, and that'd give me a lot to work with. I could even just ditch 6 of the DHS, add PPCs to the torsos, and I'd have a 4 PPC machine that is about as heat manageable as my current 2 PPC mech. And I'd take 4 PPCs over 2 gauss any day.

Edited by Buckminster, 17 December 2012 - 07:41 AM.

[Gigastrike]

gianni001, on 19 November 2012 - 09:29 PM, said:

I run 4 x PPC on my atlas, A ton of single heat sinks, heat efficiency of around 1.2?

How do you have a heat efficiency of 1.2 with only 1 ton of heat sinks? (Isn't it hilarious that "a ton", which usually means a lot, means almost nothing in this game?)

Anyway, sure the PPC builds up a lot of heat, but I still think people overstate it. I use an ER PPC on my Dragon and it works very well for me. Firing the ER PPC and even a UAC/5 on top of it has very manageable heat, while still putting out good dps. It's not something that anything short of an assault mech can boat, but in small doses I love it to death.

(...Not that I would love that heat efficiency buff, PGI.)

[Buckminster]

What do you have for heat sinks?

I have 20 DHS (10 engine + 10 extra) on my twin PPC K2, and I can still overheat the thing. It takes some work, but it's still very doable. I've been tempted to swap them out for ERPPCs, but my calculated time to overheat goes from something like 30 seconds to 13 seconds.

[Gigastrike]

Buckminster, on 17 December 2012 - 10:12 AM, said:

What do you have for heat sinks?

I have 20 DHS (10 engine + 10 extra) on my twin PPC K2, and I can still overheat the thing. It takes some work, but it's still very doable. I've been tempted to swap them out for ERPPCs, but my calculated time to overheat goes from something like 30 seconds to 13 seconds.

I have 15 DHS (5 extra) to give me a heat efficiency of 1.1. I should also mention that the efficiency is greatly decreased by 2 MPLS.

[Buckminster]

Hm. So I guess an XL engine and more DHS are really necessary if I want to run dual ERPPCs. Not sure that I'm too keen on adding an XL engine, although if repair and rearm costs are going away there really isn't a reason not to.