28 replies to this topic

[Xandralkus]

Warning: Mega-Threadnought ahead.

TLDR: Skip to spreadsheets and bold text.

Over the past few weeks, I have compiled a gigantic spreadsheet of weapon values and derived stats. I first started with the current values, ran some calculations, and as I figured, I was very disappointed with the present state of game balance. So I began typing in different numbers, trying to see what the values for balanced weaponry would actually look like.

Here they are. Note that I have been making tweaks and edits slowly. The latest iterations include a massive array of global buffs to heat efficiency, a more proper scaling of DPS between the Large Laser, Medium Laser, and Small laser, a very slight nerf to ballistic damage to bring them more in line with energy weapons, and a minor rescaling of damage per heat values among pulse lasers.

In this chart, I have included several weapons which do not yet exist in-game, such as the UAC2, UAC10, and UAC20, along with SSRM4 and SSRM6. Balancing these weapons in the very near future will be necessary as well, and as such, they are included.

Click the spreadsheets to make them bigger; the forum window squishes them a bit and makes them smaller and harder to read.

Energy Weapons:



Ballistic Weapons:



Missile Weapons:



Now, to explain what all these numbers mean:

Tonnage, Damage, Cooldown, Heat, Criticals, and ideal and maximum ranges should be self-explanatory.

AmPT = Ammunition Per Ton. This is not a raw measure of the number of rounds per ton, but instead the number of shots for each ton of ammuntion for the indicated weapon. With most weapons, this will be the same as rounds per ton, but not with weapons that fire more than one round per trigger pull (such as missile weapons).

DPS = Damage Per Second. This should be reasonably obvious; it is the amount of sustained damage a weapon does.

DPS/Ton = Damage Per Second Per Ton. This is a measure of the sustained damage output of a weapon, versus its tonnage.

APT = Alpha Per Ton. This is a raw measure of how much damage the weapon can do in a single shot, compared to its tonnage. Note that APT can sometimes be deceiving and is not always an entirely accurate measure of how effective a weapon is at burst-damage potential. For example, most ballistic weapons do all of their damage to a single part of the mech, whereas lasers hit instantly but apply their damage over a short period of time. Missiles spread their damage across a large area, and some missiles may miss their target completely and apply no damage.

DPH = Damage Per Heat. This is a very important derived value, since it indicates the absolute efficiency of a weapon in terms of heat generated versus damage produced. Ballistic weapons have very high DPH, while energy weapons have much lower DPH.

DPS/Crit = Damage Per Second Per Critical. A measure of how much sustained damage the weapon does, versus the amount of space it takes up inside the battlemech. Due to derpy mechlab mechanics, larger chassis are more prone to running out of criticals.

APC = Alpha Per Critical. This is a measure of the effective burst damage of a weapon, compared to how much space it takes up inside the battlemech.

ATPM = Ammunition Tonnage Per Minute. This indicates the rate of ammunition consumption (in tons) per minute of continuous firing. It is a gauge of how ammunition-efficient a weapon is.

DPAT = Damage Per Ammunition Ton. This is a raw measure of the total damage that a single ton of ammunition will do once fired.

HPS = Heat Per Second. This is a value stating the amount of heat the weapon will generate every second, if fired at its maximum rate of fire, It is a rough indication of how many heat sinks will be needed to effectively compliment the weapon.

HPS/Ton = Heat Per Second Per Ton. This is a figure purely for the sake of balancing, indicating the heat generated per second at maximum rate of fire, in relation to weapon tonnage.

SHSS = Standard Heat Sinks to Stability. This indicates the number of standard heat sinks which are necessary to fire the weapon indefinitely.

DHSS = Double Heat Sinks to Stability. This is the number of double heat sinks you will need to fire the weapon and have it be completely heat-stable.

DPS/HST (SHS) = Damage per Second per Heat Stable Tonnage. This is the DPS per ton of the tonnage of the weapon + tonnage of standard heat sinks required to make it heat-stable.

DPS/HST (DHS) = Damage per Second per Heat Stable Tonnage. This is the DPS per ton of the tonnage of the weapon + tonnage of double heat sinks required to make it heat-stable.

Game Design Philosophy:

There should be no such thing as a crappy weapon.

There should be no such thing as an overpowered weapon.

No weapon should have a narrowly constrained role.

You never give a player the capability to push a button and prevent other players from doing actions. The entire premise of CC in PvP is flawed.

All weapon viewshake is reduced to the point where it does not interfere with aiming by any statistically significant degree. Viewshake is for immersion purposes only.

Weapon tonnage must not be altered, or this will screw up stock variants. This also means that EVERY mech configuration you have made so far, you can still use!

The role of a weapon is to do damage. Anything else a weapon does other than damage will be minor, existing somewhere between purely ancilliary and completely incosequential.

These figures assume that hit detection and lag issues get resolved. The developers are busy working on this.

There is no reason why a critical and a hardpoint cannot be the same thing. To ever separate the two was a mistake.

Every chassis should be able to mount many multiple smaller weapons if the pilot chooses, to the same extent as the Swayback.

It may be too late to get the developers to fundamentally recode the mechlab and give us a Mechwarrior 4 style mechlab where criticals and hardpoints are the same thing. If this is the case, all mechs' hardpoints need to be globally and radically buffed (to match the Swayback).

The developers have stated that they intend to apply a heat penalty to duplicate weapons on the same body part of the mech, the above balancing changes assume they follow through with this. This perfectly balances mechs with 10+ hardpoints.

"Heat sinks do not cool fast enough" is fundamentally the same as "Weapons generate too much heat in relation to heat sink cooling speed".

If we first balance the damage per heat of all weapons in the game, and then globally scale the heat down to the point where current heat sinks can competently manage the heat, then this solves the problem BETTER than just increasing heat sink cooling speed.

TT is a radically & fundamentally different game than MWO. What happens in TT stays in TT.

Now, I imagine a few of you are scratching your heads, wondering what dafuq is up with those Ultra AC's and that insanely awesome Alpha per Ton. Allow me to explain, because the Ultra AC's require a fundamental reworking of their firing mechanics:

The UAC2 should fire 10 rounds over 1 second, each doing 0.72 damage. (280 ammo per ton)
The UAC5 should fire 9 rounds over 1.2 seconds, each doing 1.3 damage. (153 ammo per ton)
The UAC10 should fire 8 rounds over 1.3 seconds, each doing 2.7 damage. (72 ammo per ton)
The UAC20 should fire 8 rounds over 1.6 seconds, each doing 3.6 damage. (48 ammo per ton)

This means that the odds of any UAC applying all of its alpha per ton to a single location is very low. Standard AC's will forever remain the kings of high damage application to a single body part in very little time. Jam mechanics may not be necessary for UAC's, only RAC's (whenever they come out)

Standard lasers need a slight nerf to their firing duration (fire for slightly longer for higher spread of damage). The gap between standard laser and pulse laser effectiveness should be widened only slightly. I strongly advise against any change to either laser type's firing durations by more than 10%.

SSRM homing issues need to be resolved. I trust the developers are working on this. (EDIT: SSRM's no longer hit CT-only, so this is mostly resolved)

TAG and NARC should be nerfed hard; these should only slightly tighten missile spread. Pinpoint-accurate LRM's should be impossible regardless of the amount of TAG, NARC, and Artemis assistance. (EDIT: I think this has been done already, to some extent)

Flamers will need to fire a single PPC-like blast of superheated plasma from the mech. Until a better effect can be made, I would actually advocate using a recolored PPC blast as the flamer effect, albeit with a lower projectile velocity.

Flamer #1 is an idealized flamer, balanced to do damage, and almost nothing but.

Flamer #2 sacrifices some damage from Flamer #1; this is with the intention of doing some statistically significant heat to the target as well. Note, however, that this flamer is still a numerically competent weapon.

Flamer #3 has the same damage as Flamer #1, but has an increased heat cost - with the intention that this flamer variant would also do statistically significant heat to the target. I honestly like this flamer the best, and would like to see it in-game.

Fun fact: With these proposed changes, Flamer 3 (and 1) does the same alpha-strike damage as Medium Lasers, but have significantly reduced range. They also have a faster cooldown, for higher DPS. Additionally, while Flamer 3 generates much more heat than a Medium Laser, it is also balanced to add heat to the target, which makes Flamer 3 a good counter against Swayback-esque configurations. For maximum effect, the flamer can be used against only very close targets - thus why a Jenner or Swayback armed with nothing but flamers is not necessarily a good idea. Game design can be so much fun!

These three different flamer variants are merely examples of appropriately balanced and competent flamers, because multiple weapon mechanic models could theoretically apply to the flamer.

Now, you may also notice that all the weapons barely generate any heat. Remember that getting our mechs to overheat is something that is not supposed to happen regularly. This is because the 'burst DPS' in the game occurs not in a matter of 2-3 seconds as in most games, but often over 15-30 seconds. This means that we need to overheat in 15-30 seconds of alpha-striking, not 2-3 seconds of alpha-striking.

Heat sinks cool 0.1 heat per second, and add 1 heat capacity to the mech's base heat capacity of 30. Now, to demonstrate how these new heat values work on a hot-running, default configuration, I will go ahead and lay out the math for the AWS-8Q's heat stability.

The AWS-8Q has 28 heat sinks, which increases its base heat capacity to 58, and cools 2.8 heat every second. The updated PPC generates.6.4 heat per shot, or 19.2 heat per alpha-strike (or 33 percentage points on the heat indicator). After the first alpha strike, the 2.7 second PPC cooldown means that the mech will cool 7.56 heat during the recharge time.

The second alpha will raise the mech from 11.64 heat to 30.84 heat. (53% heat)
The third alpha will raise the mech from 23.28 heat to 42.48 heat. (73% heat)
The fourth alpha will raise the mech from 34.92 heat to 54.12 heat. (93% heat)

This is exactly how heat is supposed to work. Alpha-striking results in a steady and rapid rise in heat until the pilot either lets the mech cool, or overheats the mech. This also means that ERPPC's are completely usable in numbers in an identical role, provided that the pilot has a reasonably large number of heat sinks.

Now, you may be wondering: Okay, so globally reducing heat is a smart thing to do if we want to be able to alpha-strike with any semblance of regularity. But how do we know that THESE values between heat, ballistic, and energy weapons are actually where they need to be? How do we know for a fact that missiles, or ballistics, or energy weapons are NOT going to become completely dominant on the battlefield because of improper heat scaling between weapon types?

Great question, and a question that I lacked an answer to for a few days. As it turns out, this question is answered by the derived statistic: Damage per Second per Heat Stable Tonnage. Simply put, I calculated the number of heat sinks that would be necessary for each weapon to fire at maximum speed and be completely heat-stable, and added that tonnage to the weapon's tonnage, and then divided the weapon's DPS by that number.

I was absolutely shocked at how closely the individual weapon types were matched against one another. The parity of firepower is incredible. At first glance, it looks like ballistics are actually better when compared against energy weapons, but remember that DPS per Heat Stable Tonnage does not account for ammunition tonnage. Once that tonnage is added in, ballistic DPS per Heat Stable Tonnage will go down just a bit, and even more closely match energy weapon DPS per Heat Stable Tonnage.

So, now that we have redesigned all weapon values, fundamentally made everything useful without resorting to narrowly constrained roles, fixed the issue of heat and overheating, made ourselves ready to bear the burden of increased clan-tech heat saturation without really even intending to, and perfectly solved the problems with default builds running arbitrarily & apocalyptically hot, are we done?

Nope!

You see, even though Medium Lasers and Large Lasers are balanced against each other (as is every single other weapon in the game), do we actually have the option of removing a single Large Laser and installing five Medium Lasers? Medium Lasers aren't OP anymore, after all.

What's this? Hardpoints are in the way?! And you can only do this conversion on ONE mech, the Swayback?!

It is impossible to balance the Swayback versus other mech designs without either abandoning the hardpoint system completely and going with weapon-type-specific criticals, or globally buffing all weapon hardpoints to approximately the same levels as the Swayback. As stated before, all these numbers are based upon pilots actually having the option to choose between 1 large laser, 5 medium lasers, or 10 small lasers. EVERY mech needs to have the freedom of configuration that the Swayback does. We must either proceed down the path of ample hardpoints on all designs, or a hardpoint-free mechlab.

Now I understand that reverting back to a Mechwarrior 4 style mechlab would require a complete overhaul of the interface, and would require the devs to spend a month or so (at minimum) in coding hell. Add another month to make the new mechlab stable (at the very least). Asking the devs to take a two-month break from EVERYTHING is just not practical. Making ample hardpoints will be infinitely faster; all they have to do is type in the numbers into the servers, and maybe add some more fire points to the mechs.

Specifically, by ample hardpoints, I mean we need an equation! The Swayback, a 50-ton mech, has 9 hardpoints. For the sake of simplicity, let's subtract one hardpoint from the head, and add one hardpoint to each arm, leaving us with 10 total. This will be the basis of all mech hardpoints.

Since all mechs exist in five-ton increments, this means that each mech should have hardpoints equal to one-fifth their tonnage. That five-ton increment thingy REALLY makes things convenient to figure out!!!

I will demonstrate an example of what a mech such as this might look like, post hardpoint-balancing:

AS7-K (The energy-weapon atlas):

Left Arm - 4 Energy
Right Arm - 4 Energy
Left Torso - 2 Missile, 3 Energy
Right Torso - 2 Ballistic, 3 Energy
Center Torso - 2 Energy

Ideally, this Atlas should be graphically modified with extra firepoints in its left and right torsos, and physical guns in its hands (variable firepoints, as with the Raven). Although in the interim, I would not care if lasers shot out of the missile and ballistic firepoints. That can be fixed once hit detection, lag issues, and stability are fixed.

It is overwhelmingly apparent why the developers did not spend six hours in front of a spreadsheet experimenting with weapon values - they are too busy making the game stable and playable to be concerned about fixing weapon balance right now. (EDIT: They have no excuse now, they're just sitting on the content conveyor spewing new crud to try and get us to buy MC) Open beta is when weapon balance needs to be resolved; I have simply spared them from a lengthy trip through spreadsheet hell (or spreadsheet heaven, depending on your point of view).

Almost all of the fundamental changes I suggested can be made immediately, simply by typing in different numbers for the weapon values and adding some hardpoints. These changes do not need to be time-consuming, or require massive feats of recoding. We can have weapon balance fixed NEXT TUESDAY...but only if you, the player base, demand it.

Edited by Xandralkus, 08 March 2013 - 01:12 PM.

[zariaah]

i agree with 99% of this post. i can't stress enough how much this needs to stay on top.

[Skyfaller]

Sorry there is a flaw in this. The light mechs, particularly the jenner, still retain the ability to load massive firepower for a 'light' mech.

Medium laser should weight 2 tons minimum.

[Bobzilla]

A lot of it makes sense, but the 'no weapon should have a narrowly constrained role'. Think of a sniper rifle or shotgun.
Also its hard to quantify things like min/max range, velocity, lock-on time when your balancing. The weapons are never going to balanced on paper unless they all have the same mechanics,

[Xandralkus]

I have edited the tables of my main post, and added more text.

I have widened otherwise narrowly constrained roles for the Machine Gun, Flamer, and Small Laser. They apply maximum damage at a shorter range, but the falloff range is longer.

Additionally, AC's and UAC's have been edited to maintain relative parity alongside energy weapons. Gauss heat efficiency has been nerfed, but it is still by far the best in game.

I have added missile ranges to the fields, they were missing before. Note that no missile range changes from the game's current defaults have been made.

Bobzilla, on 23 November 2012 - 11:48 AM, said:

A lot of it makes sense, but the 'no weapon should have a narrowly constrained role'. Think of a sniper rifle or shotgun.
Also its hard to quantify things like min/max range, velocity, lock-on time when your balancing. The weapons are never going to balanced on paper unless they all have the same mechanics,

With the above changes, all sniper weapons are usable at short range - just the dedicated short-range weapons perform better at these ranges.

Additionally, LBX spread should be adjusted (tightened) so that using the LBX10 in the AC-10's optimum and falloff ranges begin to result in some of the rounds missing. The same should hold true for LBX20 and AC20's optimum and falloff ranges. Within ~120 and ~80 meters (respectively), I would expect the majority of LBX rounds to land in a very tight cluster and damage only one or two body parts. They sacrifice some more ranged engagement capability for more kaboom up close, to a greater extent than the standard AC's - that is the role of LBX. Not to be useless at range, but to be less useful than an AC of similar caliber at range.

Applying the rock, paper, scissors mentality to game design is not always the best idea. Ever noticed how OP rock is when you pick scissors? And how OP scissors are when you pick paper? And how OP paper is when you pick rock? Rock, paper, scissors is the very epitome of narrowly constrained roles. No one uses their rock better or worse than anyone else's. Skill does not enter into the equation that determines the victor. In fact, I could even argue that rock, paper, scissors is not just a boring game, but a fundamentally BAD one - because it limits player choice. If I enjoy the playstyle of scissors above paper and rocks, then the game model actually punishes me for consistently picking one of its three narrowly constrained roles.

We should instead have a game design more reminescent of 'smooth rock, pointy rock, hard rock', where the victory conditions are determined upon player skill instead of min-maxing and theorycrafting.

Skyfaller, on 23 November 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

Sorry there is a flaw in this. The light mechs, particularly the jenner, still retain the ability to load massive firepower for a 'light' mech.

Medium laser should weight 2 tons minimum.

Look at the medium laser stats I suggest. It no longer oozes pure, concentrated, overpowered WIN, when compared against other weapons. With my proposed changes, a Jenner with 6 medium lasers can inflict 21.6 damage upon alpha ( 6.97 DPS @ 3.62 heat per second). A Jenner with 6 small lasers can inflict 12.0 damage upon alpha ( 4.0 DPS @ 1.94 heat per second).

I am also curious to see what you guys think of the actual stats proposed here.

Edited by Xandralkus, 26 November 2012 - 12:17 AM.

[Funkin Disher]

Impressive work, i approve!

[Xandralkus]

Main post has been edited. I corrected a minor mathematical error in the body text of the post. As it turns out, I do not math quite so well at 4:30 in the morning.

Tomorrow I will balance all the heat values so that no heat sink changes are required from the dev team. All weapons will have their heat globally multiplied by some value and the spreadsheets will be updated. This means stock designs will no longer run extraordinarily hot when I am done with them.

Edited by Xandralkus, 25 November 2012 - 04:12 PM.

[Xandralkus]

Global heat edits are complete, stock designs are no longer overheat-prone, and the addition of individual heat sinks rather than massive groups of them produce meaningful and tangible changes in the heat efficiency of a mech.

Note also that these changes require no change to present heat sinks. All weapon heat has gone down to match present heat sinks.

[Volthorne]

Oh, good, another "I know how to blance things because I can do math" thread.

[focuspark]

I don't see how this balances Streak SRM 2 vs SRM 2 (or pick you missile count). I also do not see how this balances PPC vs ER PPC vs Gauss Cannon.

These things need to be balanced.

Recommendation: Streaks do 20% less damage and take long to reload (reduced RoF). Gauss should lag from trigger pull to projectile launch by about 200-300ms to make the mostly useless in brawls, but still amazing sniper weapons.

[Xandralkus]

focuspark, on 26 November 2012 - 01:00 AM, said:

I don't see how this balances Streak SRM 2 vs SRM 2 (or pick you missile count). I also do not see how this balances PPC vs ER PPC vs Gauss Cannon.

These things need to be balanced.

Recommendation: Streaks do 20% less damage and take long to reload (reduced RoF). Gauss should lag from trigger pull to projectile launch by about 200-300ms to make the mostly useless in brawls, but still amazing sniper weapons.

If you look on the spreadsheets I made, SSRM's have a longer cooldown and a higher tonnage than SRM's, which results in greatly diminished DPS per ton compared to non-streaks. In fact, SRM's have a 62% advantage in DPS per ton over SSRM's. Streaks have homing capability and will always apply their full damage, whereas the same is not necessarily true of non-streaks.

Look carefully at the spreadsheets and the Gauss' DPS per ton. Then look at its alpha per ton. Now compare it to the AC10 and the LBX10 (Or especially an AC-20). Compare it to Medium Lasers and Medium Pulse Lasers, and SRM's - which the Gauss-user will likely be facing at brawling ranges. All of them will outperform it - and not just by a little bit. The only thing the Gauss has on them is an advantage in Damage per Heat.

The problem with Gauss right now is that it outperforms ALL of these weapons, both at brawling and at range, whereas that is not the case with my new weapon values. The Gauss is no longer made of concentrated win.

PPC's and ERPPC's beat the Gauss Rifle significantly in terms of DPS per ton and alpha per ton, although they suffer from much lower damage per heat. And with the heat cost of these weapons reduced to competent levels, they are a competent alternative to the Gauss Rifle.

Overconstraining the Gauss' role to sniping only is a mistake. Yeah, you can brawl with it. Technically. You can also technically shoot an AC-20 at things 600 meters away and do damage. It's just that brawling weapons outperform the Gauss at brawling ranges, and the Gauss reaches much further than brawling weapons do. If you get caught in a brawl with a dedicated brawler, and you have a Gauss on board, the brawler is going to have higher damage potential than you do. Unless they are badly damaged, or unless they are very bad at aiming, or unless you are very good (or some combination thereof), that situation is not going to end well for you.

Edited by Xandralkus, 26 November 2012 - 01:54 AM.

[focuspark]

Measurements per ton are erroneous due to the hardpoint system. Weapons need to be directly compared now.

[Xandralkus]

focuspark, on 26 November 2012 - 01:49 AM, said:

Measurements per ton are erroneous due to the hardpoint system. Weapons need to be directly compared now.

There was never any need to change the fundamental weapon loadout mechanic (tonnage). Hardpoints serve as an arbitrary leash for firepower on large mechs, and if the devs actually follow through on balancing maneuverability (increasingly radical range of turning radius, acceleration, and deceleration between tonnages), then firepower really will be only half of the equation.

Also, one mech (the Swayback) ignores all the hardpoint rules with its insane hardpoint to tonnage ratio, and it is not going anywhere. If anything, the indication that there is one shows us that there will inevitably be more, and the gap will only widen between mechs with ample hardpoints and those with arbitrarily constrained hardpoints. There is no tangible gameplay-related reason why hardpoint availability should be dependent on anything except tonnage.

^ See above about 1 Large Laser vs. 5 Medium Lasers vs. 10 Small Lasers. This should be a choice; all these permutations should be equally viable. And if you check, Medium Lasers and Small Lasers are no longer made of concentrated win.

The only reason why I advocate 1 hardpoint per 5 tons is because removing hardpoints completely would take the devs too much time.

Edited by Xandralkus, 26 November 2012 - 02:24 AM.

[Bobzilla]

Back to the narrowly constrained role thing. That is per weapon, not per mech. If you take 2 guass then yes its like picking rock, if you take 1 gauss and 1 AC then its like picking rock and paper. Gauss shouldn't be able to be used up close or incredibly hard to aim at least to maintain realizim. If you wanna take a mech that does a bunch of damage at long range like a lrm boat fine, but up close your going to get spanked. So it doesn't matter how much dps the lrm does at range because it does 0 up close. It seems to me that the only people complaining about OP weapons are are brawlers against ranged weapons. You get the ranged user complaining about AC's and light mechs. And if you pick an all around mech, your not going to not have that knock-out punch that other narrowly constrained roles have.

[Xandralkus]

On the topic of narrowly constrained roles, I specifically mean the arbitrary means of one weapon being a hard counter against another, and/or making a weapon completely useless in a role. This is not so much of an issue with smaller weapons, such as small lasers, machineguns, and flamers, because they have very, very low weight. Having two or three tons worth of these weapons becoming unavailable represents a very small sliver of one's potential firepower.

The Gauss, as shown above, does not have a narrowly constrained role. With 1.0000 Alpha per ton, 0.2703 DPS per ton, an ideal range of 660 meters, and 10 damage per heat, the Gauss is actually one of the best all-around generalist weapons in the game, and I have balanced it as such. I have not removed or changed its role of 'omni-range heavy ballistic weapon'. Unless you actually have an enemy beyond the Gauss' maximum range (very unlikely), then if you have line of sight on a target, you can Gauss it.

Since weapon DPS per ton and alpha per ton generally increases as the range decreases, this means that sniping weapons generally do less damage than brawling weapons. Sniping weapons (including the Gauss) are generalist weapons - they do not care what range the target is at. They still apply damage. The tradeoff for this is that such generalist/sniper weapons do notably (but not cripplingly) less damage than the slightly more constrained brawling weapons.

Ideally, LRM's and PPC's should do zero damage at a distance of zero meters, and then slowly scale up to full damage as they get closer to their ideal minimum range (180 and 90 meters, specifically). This means that these weapons, if used as primary armament, are not completely useless in a brawl scenario. Likewise, the AC-20 is not completely useless against a target at 600 meters.

The Gauss already has low DPS per ton and low alpha per ton. Its only redeeming qualities are its AMAZING ratio of damage per heat and its tendency to perform moderately decently at any range. Remove the tendency to perform moderately decently at any range and it turns into a weapon with a VERY narrowly constrained role; a niche-weapon that weighs fifteen tons.

Notice that in the spreadsheets, AC's outperform Gauss. Every AC has more DPS per ton than the Gauss, especially the smaller ones (though they sacrifice damage per heat efficiency and alpha per ton for this). If you want to do as much damage as possible, bring something else other than Gauss. Small AC's will require a lot of aiming and likely exposure to enemy fire, and larger AC's will require you to maneuver and dictate range if you want to use them effectively.

TLDR: No one ever deserves autowin, against any target, regardless of what range they happen to be at. Completely removing one's capability to overspecialize and do so effectively means that designs will become hybridized in role execution, and the counter to every mech in the game is: "Maneuver and shoot better than your enemy". With the weapon changes I propose, the Gauss will be outclassed by brawling weapons by a significant enough margin to make brawling against Gauss users appealing to brawlers, without being instant autowin for brawlers.

Edited by Xandralkus, 26 November 2012 - 03:58 PM.

[Xandralkus]

PPC edited for balance, bringing its stats more in line with autocannons instead of lasers, since its damage application mechanics are more autocannon-like than laser-like. Additionally the PPC's range was reduced, with the intention of removing the PPC's minimum range altogether, or at least buffing it significantly. The PPC is no longer a long-range weapon, that role is now filled by the ERPPC.

Edited by Xandralkus, 04 January 2013 - 04:52 AM.

[Roll Beefgristle]

I'm kind of glad someone did the Damage per Heat and Damage per Ton thing. I have been meaning to do this, but just haven't had the time in my life lately.

[DivineEvil]

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No weapon should have a narrowly constrained role.

It can, as long as it is compensated with other features making it better in it's role compared to general role alternatives. Works the same in any game.

Quote

You never give a player the capability to push a button and prevent other players from doing actions. The entire premise of CC in PvP is flawed.

There's nothing wrong with CC as long as it get the flaws equalizing it with direct-damage models. Same in any game, as well.

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All weapon viewshake is reduced to the point where it does not interfere with aiming by any statistically significant degree. Viewshake is for immersion purposes only.

Why? AC20 is noticeable weapon by canon, since it can kick the target off their feet.

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The role of a weapon is to do damage. Anything else a weapon does other than damage will be minor, existing somewhere between purely ancilliary and completely incosequential.

Why?

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There is no reason why a critical and a hardpoint cannot be the same thing. To ever separate the two was a mistake.

Hard Point system is based on the concept that each section of mech is suited for a certain feed mechanism, that allows the function of equpment installed in it. Ballistics are managed by gauge transporter mechanism, missiles by rack-loading elevator and energy weapons uses power condenser complex. These are not the part of weapons themselves, and refitting them makes the new variant. Weapons are designed to be managed by these systems regardless of caliber, but feeding missiles installed into energy hard-point seems ridiculous.

Weapon hard-points are the most significant difference between mechs and their internal variants, and broading them for all mechs will make all mechs in the same weight class way too similar to each other leaving visuals and hitboxes aside. Critical Slots are merely a degree of space volume.

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Every chassis should be able to mount many multiple smaller weapons if the pilot chooses, to the same extent as the Swayback.

That will require to completely replace or reweld Mech's locations to allow this weapons to work, making a new variant. Besides, heavier Mechs are logically intended to mount heavier weapons on themselves. Awesomes with 20+ Lasers simply will not be able to manage weapon groups of huge weapon arrays, and Atlas with missile racks everywhere will just generate so many projectiles, that even middle-tier system specs PCs will not be capable to coop with it. Limitations on amount of weapons is logically legit, as players have to choose variants and weapon layouts to fit these limitations, instead of just running generally uniform mechs. It worth a bit to know mechs, their essential mech locations and their possible layout variants.

At very most, the Critical Slots on locations must be scaled down depending on their physical size. If Cicada's Left Arm is so small, then it should not hold the same capacity as Atlas Left Torso.

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It may be too late to get the developers to fundamentally recode the mechlab and give us a Mechwarrior 4 style mechlab where criticals and hardpoints are the same thing. If this is the case, all mechs' hardpoints need to be globally and radically buffed (to match the Swayback).

It's already too late. Swayback's hard poinst are what makes it a Swayback.

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"Heat sinks do not cool fast enough" is fundamentally the same as "Weapons generate too much heat in relation to heat sink cooling speed".

Weapons heat generation can be balanced individually, while HS are affecting the overall heat dissipation perspective.

Edited by DivineEvil, 01 December 2012 - 02:30 AM.

[Volume]

Some very elegant and well thought-out ideas here.

I too agree that all weapons should have a role, and I seem to need to bring this up in every thread that mentions the machine-gun. Hardpoints might not necessarily need to be removed, per se, but they should at least be tied to criticals in some fashion, as you said.

Perhaps a mixed 'Mech lab could work. Instead of having, say, 1 energy hardpoint on the arm for an Atlas which could be 1 PPC or 1 small laser (really?), it could be, say, 5 criticals of energy hardpoints (which can fit only 1 PPC, but could fit 2LL, or 5ML/SL). These are just random numbers to demonstrate a concept. If we truly feel that 1LL should be equivalent to 5ML or 10SL and the choice should be there, recall that MechWarrior 2 and 3 only allowed 16 total weapons on a 'Mech. It should be a possible option to load at least 16 medium lasers onto my Atlas if I so wanted to.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

- Weapons do not only have the purpose of dealing damage. Take the flamer as example. The purpose is to hinder enemy mechs to fire again with hot weapons.
- Your large pulse laser is way too hot. Its a useless weapon in your sheet compared to others
- The game works towards a certain mechanic. Try to get this mechanic before adjusting it.
- LRMs are valid as passive suppressive fire. Thats the whole point of them. Either you have a spotter or you spot yourself, but in any case, this is what LRMs are for. Artemis was able to adapt to objects on the way and increase the lock-on for better tracking. If you want to counter it, increase the AMS-effect or use ECM.

Your whole work is a little biased to certain standoff-situations. Bear in mind, that every situation has its pros and cons. A total equalization of all weapons will kill all the strategic and intelligent tactical gameplay.

While I still like you work, I cannot approve for it until the bias is gone.