SilverlightPony, on 22 November 2012 - 08:23 PM, said:
Okay, maybe not entirely useless. But keep in mind, that 2 damage in TT represents a sustained burst over however long one turn is. How many bullets do you think were in that burst? Now divide 2 by that number.
It was my understanding that, in the BT lore, MGs on a 'Mech were intended primarily as anti-personnel weapons, and were never a weapon of choice to use against other 'Mechs.
You'd be correct on that number if we didn't have increased fire rates in MWO (otherwise the laser would do less than one damage per firing, as it has about a 3.33 fire rate per 10 seconds currently). If we wanted to be fair with the MG, we'd have it do 0.066 (instead of the current 0.04) damage per round, which would keep the damage ratio with the small laser. The damage output would obviously be different, but its only fair since everything else puts out far more damage per 10 seconds than they put out in the TT.
Besides that, two damage is respectable against a light mech in the TT. Most lights had somewhere around 6-8 armor points per location, some as low as 3 or 4. A couple of machine guns could really rip lights apart, and even some mediums. Massed machine gun fire could be really nasty, like the Piranha.
You're correct for the most part, though. Machine guns were often added with the intent of taking out light vehicles, transports, and infantry, not so much for battle mechs (although, as I said, they could perform pretty well against lightly armored mechs and some mediums in proper quantity).
As for the current topic at hand, I would like to see the critical amounts raise for machine guns, not for any lore reason, but because a crit in the TT was a crit. You hit the item, it died (with the exception of a few things like engines and what not). MWO uses a health based system, however, which GREATLY devalues machine guns against internals. Even with .066 damage you'd have to crit an item 152 times to destroy it, which would require around 15 seconds of continuous fire, assuming all 1x criticals for each bullet. Assuming all 3x would reduce that to 5 seconds, which is highly unlikely to happen, meaning the average time it takes to remove one item would lie at 10 seconds of continuous, no-miss firing, which is also unlikely to happen unless the target is standing totally still. Besides that, by the time you'd have done enough to crit one item off (assuming all crits even hit the same item, which would also increase the time it would take), you'd have dealt some damage to their internals anyways, meaning they're far more likely to die from the damage before you'd have ever removed a weapon from them.
Valore, on 22 November 2012 - 08:30 PM, said:
Is this how it works in MWO though? From the quote above which comes directly from the devs, I wouldn't have intepreted it that way.
That said, having damaged and destroyed weapons on mechs fairly often ingame, I'm inclined to think you're correct.
If you use a weapon that produces 10 or more damage per shot, the MWO system works almost exactly like the table top, since a single crit from your weapon would always destroy at least one item. MWO's system, however, does not work in the TT in that you can produce multiple crits from a single weapon firing (at least in the capacity of non-burst fire weapons, like the AC/10).
If you use a less than 10 damage per shot weapon, the differences between the TT and MWO's implementations are quite notable, such as my example above with machine guns.
Edited by Orzorn, 22 November 2012 - 08:46 PM.
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