No replies to this topic

[ReguIus]

There have been a couple of things on my mind lately, and I've finally decided to let them out of the box. I expect that most of my concerns are simply temporal, at least from the dev's point of view. Some things are real though and affect the gameplay exprience even now.

Love it, hate it, here we go.

Variant Balance

There used to be some pure truths about which variants were worth taking and which not, but for some certain mechs, the ECM finally blew them out of the water for good. I'm not criticizing ECM here; I'm simply pointing out that they may have been allocated to "wrong" variants, or even mechs.

There are couple good examples of this:

The Raven. Raven 3L comes with XL 210 engine, while every other has STD 175. Even prior to ECM, the problem was obvious: 3L could fit a larger engine, allowing it to move faster than other variants. Since ECM was introduced, all other Raven variants are absolutely lackluster compared to the 3L.

Same could be said about Atlas:

Put it this way: Energy weapons aren't worth taking over SRM/UAC, (AS7-RS) AMS is obsolete given the ECM/general decrease in LRMs (AS7-K), and AS7-D-DC simply does everything an AS7-D can do - except better, let alone the fact that D-DC comes with the ECM. Add into the mix the superior amount of modules the D-DC can carry, and you find yourself in a situation where there is very little reason to take anything other than D-DC.

For the time being, would it be too bad if the D-DC couldn't carry an ECM? This problem is obviously going to go away when even some drop limitations go live, but until that happens it would be nice to see some variation.

Also, get rid of the "faster variants", such as Awesome 9M and Centurion 9D. They are unreasonably fast.

ECM

First of all, ECM is the best thing this game has seen so far. Whatever they say, don't nerf it. However, sometimes too much is too much. I suggest that you limit the maximum amount of ECM's that can affect a certain point to three. While this does hardly affects your average gameplay, it does give you a chance to defend against massive ECM spam. Other than that, I don't see any further problems.

And lastly, a small, disregardable plea: When mech is at 0% heat*, it won't show up on Heat vision. Go sneaky lights!

*Or alternatively, since every level appears to have its own "background heat", when a mech is exactly at that heat level, it logically won't show up.

That's all for now.

Edited by Kurbutti, 16 December 2012 - 03:24 PM.