1063 replies to this topic

[Doc Holliday]

HRR Insanity, on 25 February 2013 - 10:49 PM, said:

The ECM allows you to dictate range. You then use massive boats (AC20x2, Splatcat, etc) to do massive alphastrikes to single panels killing 'Mechs nearly instantly. That's boating and it wouldn't work if you couldn't make all the weapons hit the same spot. Yes, even with weapon spread/convergence it would still be somewhat effective because you'd be in close range, but Splatcats and other boats are most effective when ALL the missiles hit one panel... that shouldn't be possible with any sane form of weapon convergence/spread fix.



/shrugs/ Sure.



I'd be happy to demonstrate how quickly your snipers would explode, but unfortunately we can't run sandbox matches to test these things out. Suffice it to say that the moment one of your guys popped their 'Mechs out of cover, it would be either completely cored out (ie: only internals left) or dead (headshot most likely). Even if it survived to close range, it would be an easy one-hit kill for any of the infighters. As for 'taking cover'... a good team employing multi-PPC snipers would not close range. They would maneuver laterally to continue sniping and force you to try to rush them. At which point you would again be in large amounts of trouble because you're either taking fire or trying to hide... neither of which will be be a winning long-term strategy.

This TheoryWarrior doesn't mean anything though. Why don't you ask around the competative teams that are playing in RHOD (please note, I'm not one of them due to the issues noted above) or lots of 8-man experience (I've played enough to know what I see when encountering competent opponents and what WE run) how many are running mix-range configs on their 'Mechs?

I would be... more than slightly surprised to find anything but dedicated boat platforms (on which a few might have some 'backup weapons'... like the 4PPC+2SRM6 Stalker) which rely on pinpoint convergence. 40-60 damage to a single point at up to 800m is ... very difficult to deal with.

Now I understand why you think this is a problem. You're greatly overestimating the real-world capabilities of your boats. I've run a double AC20 build before. Yes, it can 1-shot most lights. It certainly won't 1-shot an assault. Nor will two AC20 builds firing simultaneously.

As for sniping, I've also run a quad PPC build before. You're not going to hit a cockpit at sniping range (1000m+) except by sheer chance. Not so much because of the capabilities of the weapons but because you can't zoom in far enough to aim that precisely. You're also not going to strip anything larger than a medium's front armor in a single volley. If your sniper engagement is happening at a range close enough to hit a cockpit, your handful of snipers is going to be getting rocked too much by 5 or 6 mechs pounding away at them to do anything of the sort.

If anything, you've convinced me even more of the gaping weaknesses true boats leave you and your team.

Edited by Doc Holliday, 26 February 2013 - 05:52 AM.

[Lheo]

Makes MWO Fun? HEAL YEA....so it will survive and no MWO is not a Mechsimulation....

[Terror Teddy]

MadcatX, on 07 January 2013 - 06:05 PM, said:

But wouldn't the implementation of weapon spread remove the element of aiming to an extent? As mentioned before it would become spray and pray. We've already had that implemented once in the streakpult to an extent.

Well, I can see some of his point.

Powerful singular weapons like the Gauss and AC20 would have a 100% normal accuracy but when you start stacking weapons you could explain it that the limited targeting computer gain more and more problems in getting all weapons to converge correctly - so you get a larger cone of fire the more weapons you cram into the weapon group.

This could most likely be done in a good way but there are problems.

For example - grouping X8 medium lasers or X9 small lasers? Should they get the same penalty to hit?

If such a system is enabled I would have no problem with it but in that case you also need something to counter the drawbacks to allow player to be efficient with grouped weapons - like improved targeting computers and gyro upgrades to make a more stable platform.

One should also put into consideration that two things will essentially also remove the "cone".
-Speed
-Aiming time

A mech standing still focusing on a distant enemy would most likely not suffer from a cone so the result would be like what we have today - a long distance sniper with perhaps X4 grouped ER PPC's instakilling an enemy.

[Terror Teddy]

Kyrie, on 25 February 2013 - 11:46 PM, said:

I would like to try a system that would base weapon accuracy off of heat:
0-25% heat: As it works currently, no penalties.
...
Etc...

I would rather see more effects than that like:
-Ammo Cook Off
-Ballistic weapon cycling slower
-Engine speed slow down due to overheat (slower twist/turn/accel/decell)
-Jump Jet fuel temporarely lowered (to hot funnel energy to jets)
-Emergency cooling (jump jets fuel goes to 0 as the mech vents heat through the jets)
-Overheated targeting systems (cockpit effects)
-Energy weapons jamming due to heat (longer cycle time)
-Missiles misfire and detonate after leaving the launcher due to excessive heat around the mech
etc...

[Roland]

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For example - grouping X8 medium lasers or X9 small lasers? Should they get the same penalty to hit?

It's actually the light energy weapons which are the biggest issue.

In terms of ballistics, like dual AC 20's, it's not really a massive issue... because, first, those weapons are supposed to be able to cripple or kill a mech in a single shot, even if you only have one of them. Second, their weight makes them somewhat difficult to boat a ton of them anyway.

The light energy weapons, like medium lasers specifically, become much more powerful with the ideal convergence we have in mechwarrior.

We've seen it in every single mechwarrior title to date. For 4 tons you can slap together a small array of medium lasers, and have a weapon which is roughly equivalent to an AC20. When this becomes apparent, you then see what we saw in MW4... which is the extreme nerfing of medium lasers. But that just caused them to be replaced by the Large laser as the optimal weapon system.

In MWO, the same basic sequence of events took place. The medium lasers were extremely powerful, specifically on mechs like the Jenner and Hunchback 4P. The same goes for the small lasers. As a result, they ended up nerfing those weapon.

However, in MWO, the addition of a damage-over-time effect helps mute this somewhat. Lasers, as a class, have some degree of inferiority to the single hit weapons, and this ends up resulting in some of the damage spread that would normally balance the medium lasers against weapons like PPC's or AC20's.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really balance them against larger laser weapons. Generally, two medium lasers is just better than a single large laser if you have the hardpoints, since it basically functions like a single large laser, but is much lighter, and only sacrifices a small amount of range.

Ultimately, I'm not terribly worried about all the weapons balance stuff... it's not really that far off, in my mind, although the issues of being able to combine smaller weapons into what is effectively a single super weapon will have far reaching balance implications. We saw it throughout the entire lifecycle of MW4, and I haven't seen anything to suggest we won't see the same issues here.

At this point though, I think perhaps some of the issues arising from ECM may trump the balance issues arising from perfect weapons convergence.

[Terror Teddy]

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 06:27 AM, said:

At this point though, I think perhaps some of the issues arising from ECM may trump the balance issues arising from perfect weapons convergence.

Technically speaking shouldn't ECM be able to completely screw up weapon convergence?

I mean, after all, the pilot does not DIRECTLY aim his guns but he is using his MECH's targeting sensors and aim the reticle provided by the same sensors to get machines servos to align to the infomration given by the sensors.

If said sensors are JAMMED by an ECM it should play merry hell with actual targeting because the pilot would still see his targetin reticle ON target but the sensors themselves might just believe that the target is just SLIGHTLY to the right.

It sure as hell is not a farfetched notion.

[Doc Holliday]

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 06:27 AM, said:

The light energy weapons, like medium lasers specifically, become much more powerful with the ideal convergence we have in mechwarrior.

We've seen it in every single mechwarrior title to date. For 4 tons you can slap together a small array of medium lasers, and have a weapon which is roughly equivalent to an AC20. When this becomes apparent, you then see what we saw in MW4... which is the extreme nerfing of medium lasers. But that just caused them to be replaced by the Large laser as the optimal weapon system.

In MWO, the same basic sequence of events took place. The medium lasers were extremely powerful, specifically on mechs like the Jenner and Hunchback 4P. The same goes for the small lasers. As a result, they ended up nerfing those weapon.

However, in MWO, the addition of a damage-over-time effect helps mute this somewhat. Lasers, as a class, have some degree of inferiority to the single hit weapons, and this ends up resulting in some of the damage spread that would normally balance the medium lasers against weapons like PPC's or AC20's.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really balance them against larger laser weapons. Generally, two medium lasers is just better than a single large laser if you have the hardpoints, since it basically functions like a single large laser, but is much lighter, and only sacrifices a small amount of range.

Small amounts of hard points have prevented that from being an issue so far in MWO. I don't know why they'd change that in the future. Excessive heat also keeps that kind of boating toned down. I don't think you'll find too many people trying to argue that an HBK-4P is in general more effective than an HBK-4SP. Medium lasers are quite possibly the least-complained about weapon in the game, and lasers overall are the most balanced. Boating ballistics is (as you also noted) inhibited by their high tonnage. When people complain about boats, it's almost always LRMs or SRMs - which already don't depend on convergence.

[Roland]

Doc Holliday, on 26 February 2013 - 07:24 AM, said:

Small amounts of hard points have prevented that from being an issue so far in MWO. I don't know why they'd change that in the future.

Eh, I dunno. You tend to see most mechs effectively running fairly large amounts of medium lasers. Jenners running between 4 and 6, the HUnchback running between 5 and 8.

It's not quite the "gun bag" issue we saw in MW3, thanks to the addition of hardpoints, but it does in fact have an effect when you realize that a 4SP, with 5 medium lasers, is carrying a higher effective alpha strike, not even counting the SRM's, than an AC20.. and it only cost him 5 tons.

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Excessive heat also keeps that kind of boating toned down.

Well, I think that with the addition of Double Heat Sinks, this has largely become a non-issue. You get the effectiveness of 20 heat sinks, basically for free. That's enough to run a few medium lasers all day without issue.

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I don't think you'll find too many people trying to argue that an HBK-4P is in general more effective than an HBK-4SP.

Well, the 4SP is able to carry 5 medium lasers on its own.. but ALSO carry SRM's. Also, remember that in the past they've actually already had to nerf the medium laser because it was so widely used... and before that, they had to nerf the small laser, for the same reason. Because people were essentially just strapping as many of them as possible together, and making a single super-laser out of them.

Like I said, this is not a new issue. The exact same issue has existed in all of the mechwarrior games.

The games start out based on battletech, but without some sort of weapons convergence, the light energy weapons become extremely powerful.

In battletech, the big benefit that an AC20 has going for it is not simply that it does 20 damage.. it's that it does 20 damage to a single location. While you can carry 4 medium lasers for far less tonnage, and do the same damage, it's going to be spread out among 4 different panels.

With all the mechwarrior games, this element has been removed, and so you've seen the effect where folks strap weapons together to make super weapons. And then, as a result of THAT, those energy weapons end up getting nerfed.

In MW4, everyone ran around in medium laser boats... in MW4, they tried to prevent this by nerfing the medium lasers, which led to everyone boating LARGE lasers.

Now, the DOT effect of lasers does in fact mitigate this to some extent, which I think makes the issue less obtrusive... but I think you still see the same ultimate effect in game when comparing things like large lasers to medium lasers.

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Medium lasers are quite possibly the least-complained about weapon in the game, and lasers overall are the most balanced.

Well, again, I point out that they most definitely WERE complained about previously, resulting in their nerfing.

I think that this is the issue that Insanity is mainly focused on, not some desire to simply add in randomness to the mix. By nerfing certain weapons, like the medium laser, you're kind of treating the symptoms rather than the disease. And you run the risk of constantly having to deal with new balance issues that arise as new variants with new hardpoint configurations come into play.

[ChrisOrange]

If you CAN find it I put my suggestions on this thread already that have nothing to do with spread/cones of fire etc. It's mostly for clan tech but it could be used for any weapons in the game. I don't actually believe weapon spread/recoil etc works well in this game. I'll find the post link and put it here.

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__1959731

Edited by ChrisOrange, 26 February 2013 - 07:59 AM.

[Doc Holliday]

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Eh, I dunno. You tend to see most mechs effectively running fairly large amounts of medium lasers. Jenners running between 4 and 6, the HUnchback running between 5 and 8.

And when you run that many at a time, you're quite limited on how often you can fire them before you have to let things cool down. I know this, because I run those types of mechs, to fairly good effect - but not as good as my mixed builds that have another low-heat weapon to fire while waiting on heat to go down to use lasers again.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Well, I think that with the addition of Double Heat Sinks, this has largely become a non-issue. You get the effectiveness of 20 heat sinks, basically for free. That's enough to run a few medium lasers all day without issue.

Do you actually play the same MWO I do? Because that's most certainly NOT the case in the MWO I play. For starters, DHS are not true double heat sinks, and weapons generate a lot more heat accordingly than they do in TT. If you're boating nothing but lasers you're going to get 3-4 alpha strikes max, before you have to run around for a while to let them cool down. You're also not going to get full damage from any of those on any mech that's not standing still or pretty large. The net result is that if you run nothing but lasers, your short-term damage and killing potential is a lot lower than if you also run some low-heat weapons. (Your long-term potential is higher, if the game goes long enough, simply because you can't run out of ammo.)

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Well, the 4SP is able to carry 5 medium lasers on its own.. but ALSO carry SRM's.

My 4SP gets its killing power roughly half-and-half between the 5 medium lasers and the two SRM6's. That's using two distinct weapon systems in equal measure, which is the polar opposite of boating. I also usually only use one (head) or two (one of the arms) of the lasers at a time due to heat issues, or because I'm firing from partial cover.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Also, remember that in the past they've actually already had to nerf the medium laser because it was so widely used... and before that, they had to nerf the small laser, for the same reason. Because people were essentially just strapping as many of them as possible together, and making a single super-laser out of them.

I don't remember any medium laser nerf. Perhaps that happened in closed beta?

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

Like I said, this is not a new issue. The exact same issue has existed in all of the mechwarrior games.

No one's yet shown it to actually be an issue at all in MWO. I see lots of hypothetical situations and people overestimating the real-world capabilities of boats while glossing over their huge weaknesses, but that's about it.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

The games start out based on battletech, but without some sort of weapons convergence, the light energy weapons become extremely powerful.

And yet I see all kinds of different builds using all kinds of different weapon mixes getting top damage and kills.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

In battletech, the big benefit that an AC20 has going for it is not simply that it does 20 damage.. it's that it does 20 damage to a single location. While you can carry 4 medium lasers for far less tonnage, and do the same damage, it's going to be spread out among 4 different panels.

And that's translated to MWO quite well by the fact that lasers do damage over time, which even you noted. It's a lot easier to get 20 damage on one location with an AC20 than it is with 4 medium lasers. And you can keep doing it indefinitely until you run out of ammo. As the pilot of the mech being hit with the lasers, it's quite easy, trivial even, to turn or move and cause some, most, or even nearly all of the laser damage to miss or be distributed upon several locations, even when they're already being fired.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

With all the mechwarrior games, this element has been removed, and so you've seen the effect where folks strap weapons together to make super weapons. And then, as a result of THAT, those energy weapons end up getting nerfed.

In MW4, everyone ran around in medium laser boats... in MW4, they tried to prevent this by nerfing the medium lasers, which led to everyone boating LARGE lasers.

Now, the DOT effect of lasers does in fact mitigate this to some extent, which I think makes the issue less obtrusive... but I think you still see the same ultimate effect in game when comparing things like large lasers to medium lasers.

Which is irrelevant, because the most laser damage you can effectively boat in MWO is around 40-45. After that you run into heat issues, and you're better off using the extra space and tonnage for extra heat dissipation. And like you said, even that is damage over time and you'll very rarely get all that damage to hit one location.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

I think that this is the issue that Insanity is mainly focused on, not some desire to simply add in randomness to the mix. By nerfing certain weapons, like the medium laser, you're kind of treating the symptoms rather than the disease. And you run the risk of constantly having to deal with new balance issues that arise as new variants with new hardpoint configurations come into play.

And I think the "disease" is nonexistent. This is not MW4, and apparently the weapon systems are FAR more balanced than they were in any previous MW game. Because all the "issues" you and others keep bringing up, simply don't exist.

Edited by Doc Holliday, 26 February 2013 - 08:10 AM.

[Roland]

Quote

Do you actually play the same MWO I do? Because that's most certainly NOT the case in the MWO I play. For starters, DHS are not true double heat sinks, and weapons generate a lot more heat accordingly than they do in TT.

All of your engine heat sinks are true double heat sinks. Which is why I said "you basically get 20 heat sinks for free".

The heat involved with boating large arrays of medium lasers is really a non-issue at the moment. For instance, on my Jenner I can run 4 medium lasers, AND two SRM4's.. and basically run around at 150 kph, and fire all day. Certainly, I cannot literally fire as fast as the weapons recycle, forever.. but I can fire enough to do a huge amount of damage, and then I can just chill out for a bit while they cool down. The reality is, heat really isn't the huge handicap that some folks may think it is based upon a pure mathematical analysis. In practice, heat efficiency isn't as important because mechs don't just stand off at 100 paces and shoot at each other until one dies. In practice, the most effective mechs tend to be ones which run quite hot.

Quote

I don't remember any medium laser nerf. Perhaps that happened in closed beta?

Yes, and it resulted in the heat numbers for small and medium lasers that we see now. That's why those weapons are hotting in MWO than they are in battletech, because with battletech numbers, those weapons are utterly dominant compared to everything else if you allow them to focus all of their damage on a single point.

In the original stats, a medium laser only generates 3 heat. A small laser only generates 1. First, folks were running all over the place with tons of small lasers, so they nerfed those such that they generated twice as much heat (now generating 2). Then folks moved to medium lasers, so they nerfed those and now they generate 4 heat.

Again, these changes were essentially necessary because there was no downside to having 9 different weapons vs. having 1 large weapon system.

Quote

And yet I see all kinds of different builds using all kinds of different weapon mixes getting top damage and kills.

I agree to some extent, which is why I'm not ultra worried about the issue. I'm mainly pointing out that an issue does in fact exist, just so that you understand that Insanity's goal is not to simply add randomization to the mix. A lot of the folks who talk about weaponspread aren't simply folks who want to roll dice, but rather folks who want to avoid issues we have seen in previous mechwarrior games.

However, to address your point here, I have to point out that you're starting to see other weapons more, but in order to make that happen those other weapons had to be buffed significantly.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I played around with PPC's a lot, but I rarely ever saw anyone ELSE using them. They ran far too hot compared to most other weapons (despite simply generating BT standard heat, while other weapons like medium lasers had already had their heat increased by 30%).

Ultimately, I think that what you're going to see is just a total reconfiguration of all of the weapons stats, because by removing any type of weapons spread, you basically just break the entire battletech weapons balance system.

This is not inherently bad, I suppose. However, the only reason why you are being forced to totally rebalance all of the weapons is because of the fact that there is no weapons spread.

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And that's translated to MWO quite well by the fact that lasers do damage over time, which even you noted. It's a lot easier to get 20 damage on one location with an AC20 than it is with 4 medium lasers.

Yes, which is why I think that you need to actually look at weapons of the same type to see the remaining effect of grouped weapons fire.

That is, you need to compared DOT weapons to DOT weapons. Like the medium laser to the large laser. Despite the fact that the medium laser has been made hotter, and the large laser has been made signfiicantly cooler, the medium laser is still generally a better weapon. The large laser only really has a use in cases where a mech is significantly hardpoint constrained.

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And I think the "disease" is nonexistent. This is not MW4, and apparently the weapon systems are FAR more balanced than they were in any previous MW game. Because all the "issues" you and others keep bringing up, simply don't exist.

Well, I think that it's been demonstrated a few times now that those issues do in fact exist. It's resulted in weapons nerfs/buffs in this game. A lot of the mechs which have drawn the most complaints are ones which are able to put a lot of grouped weapons fire onto a single location.

But ultimately, if you do not actually see any of these issues in game, then you will obviously see no need to change anything. And that's ok. Like I said, I don't see the weapons grouping issue as the largest issue at the moment anyway. But I think it's somewhat naive to pretend like it doesn't exist at all.

It's important to understand though that different folks who have different opinions about this are not in fact trying to ruin the game, or remove skill from play. I think if folks go into the discussion with that in mind, the conversation tends to be more productive.

Edited by Roland, 26 February 2013 - 08:37 AM.

[HRR Insanity]

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I don't remember any medium laser nerf. Perhaps that happened in closed beta?

ML used to do 5 damage for 3 heat (as per BT). It was heat nerfed to do 5 damage for 4 heat (a 33% increase in heat) to prevent ML boating on the HBK-4P and AWS-8Q (and other 5-6 ML boats such as the JNR-F).

Quote

No one's yet shown it to actually be an issue at all in MWO. I see lots of hypothetical situations and people overestimating the real-world capabilities of boats while glossing over their huge weaknesses, but that's about it.

It is an issue. It has already caused a number of balance changes over the last 8 months. The Devs are continuing to play wack-a-mole with individual weapon changes while not addressing the underlying issue.

Quote

And yet I see all kinds of different builds using all kinds of different weapon mixes getting top damage and kills.

All of the optimal builds rely on putting maximum damage into a single strike. That is the issue the proposal addresses. DPS builds are (in my experience) inferior to alpha/grouped weapon builds.

Quote

And that's translated to MWO quite well by the fact that lasers do damage over time, which even you noted. It's a lot easier to get 20 damage on one location with an AC20 than it is with 4 medium lasers. And you can keep doing it indefinitely until you run out of ammo. As the pilot of the mech being hit with the lasers, it's quite easy, trivial even, to turn or move and cause some, most, or even nearly all of the laser damage to miss or be distributed upon several locations, even when they're already being fired.

Partially correct... but this isn't only a laser issue. It's a 3PPC+GR issue. It's a 6xSRM6 issue. It's a 4xAC2 issue. ALL of these builds rely on the ability to combine damage into better weapons that are made up of groups of weapons. And as a result, individual weapons are weak. This is a fixable problem.

[Doc Holliday]

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

All of your engine heat sinks are true double heat sinks. Which is why I said "you basically get 20 heat sinks for free".

The heat involved with boating large arrays of medium lasers is really a non-issue at the moment. For instance, on my Jenner I can run 4 medium lasers, AND two SRM4's.. and basically run around at 150 kph, and fire all day. Certainly, I cannot literally fire as fast as the weapons recycle, forever.. but I can fire enough to do a huge amount of damage, and then I can just chill out for a bit while they cool down. The reality is, heat really isn't the huge handicap that some folks may think it is based upon a pure mathematical analysis. In practice, heat efficiency isn't as important because mechs don't just stand off at 100 paces and shoot at each other until one dies. In practice, the most effective mechs tend to be ones which run quite hot.

Sure, but lights can't boat enough of anything for it to matter. Four medium lasers is still only 20 damage, and you're never going to get that all on-target moving at 120KPH+ in a light. Can you sometimes sneak up behind an unsuspecting assault or heavy and blast them in the back for huge amounts of damage? Yeah. But only if it's a bad player, in which case they're going to die badly regardless.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

Yes, and it resulted in the heat numbers for small and medium lasers that we see now. That's why those weapons are hotting in MWO than they are in battletech, because with battletech numbers, those weapons are utterly dominant compared to everything else if you allow them to focus all of their damage on a single point.

In the original stats, a medium laser only generates 3 heat. A small laser only generates 1. First, folks were running all over the place with tons of small lasers, so they nerfed those such that they generated twice as much heat (now generating 2). Then folks moved to medium lasers, so they nerfed those and now they generate 4 heat.

Again, these changes were essentially necessary because there was no downside to having 9 different weapons vs. having 1 large weapon system.

And for a real-time video game, that's a much better method for balancing than simply tossing in some randomness and luck.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

I agree to some extent, which is why I'm not ultra worried about the issue. I'm mainly pointing out that an issue does in fact exist, just so that you understand that Insanity's goal is not to simply add randomization to the mix. A lot of the folks who talk about weaponspread aren't simply folks who want to roll dice, but rather folks who want to avoid issues we have seen in previous mechwarrior games.

However, to address your point here, I have to point out that you're starting to see other weapons more, but in order to make that happen those other weapons had to be buffed significantly.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I played around with PPC's a lot, but I rarely ever saw anyone ELSE using them. They ran far too hot compared to most other weapons (despite simply generating BT standard heat, while other weapons like medium lasers had already had their heat increased by 30%).

That's just basic balance issues. You're going to have that at the start, regardless of what kind of aiming and firing or convergence system you use. If they used weapon spread, they'd have had a different balance issue instead. The only way to completely avoid balance issues is to make all weapon systems work exactly the same, which is incredibly boring and not worth playing. The current system I think is quite beautiful really. You've got high-damage weapons that are reasonably low heat and low weight... but the damage gets spread out. You've got weapons capable of putting all their damage in a nice spot all at once... but they weigh far more for their total theoretical damage, and thus you can't take nearly as many of them. Then you've also got weapons that do good precise damage and don't weigh much... but they generate a lot of heat that has to be managed. Why on earth would you want to make them all just variations of missiles?

[

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

Ultimately, I think that what you're going to see is just a total reconfiguration of all of the weapons stats, because by removing any type of weapons spread, you basically just break the entire battletech weapons balance system.

This is not inherently bad, I suppose. However, the only reason why you are being forced to totally rebalance all of the weapons is because of the fact that there is no weapons spread.

This should be expected. This is no longer a TT game, it's now a real-time, live-action video game, which plays out totally differently. You can't directly translate from the one medium to the other because it just wouldn't be fun. If you want a direct TT -to-VG translation, it's going to have to be a turn-based strategy game where you play a mech commander, not a mech warrior. How well do you think it would work to translate UT directly to a board game? You'd have to make the same kinds of tweaks going that direction as well.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

Yes, which is why I think that you need to actually look at weapons of the same type to see the remaining effect of grouped weapons fire.

That is, you need to compared DOT weapons to DOT weapons. Like the medium laser to the large laser. Despite the fact that the medium laser has been made hotter, and the large laser has been made signfiicantly cooler, the medium laser is still generally a better weapon. The large laser only really has a use in cases where a mech is significantly hardpoint constrained.

And PGI has done a lot better with that than they have with balancing their spread-pattern weapons.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

Well, I think that it's been demonstrated a few times now that those issues do in fact exist. It's resulted in weapons nerfs/buffs in this game. A lot of the mechs which have drawn the most complaints are ones which are able to put a lot of grouped weapons fire onto a single location.

You've demonstrated that they used to exist. Apparently, fixing those issues is one of the things PGI has actually done quite well at, as they are no longer present.

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 08:36 AM, said:

It's important to understand though that different folks who have different opinions about this are not in fact trying to ruin the game, or remove skill from play. I think if folks go into the discussion with that in mind, the conversation tends to be more productive.

Whether that's their intention or not, what they're trying to have changed in the game would accomplish exactly that.

[Roland]

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And for a real-time video game, that's a much better method for balancing than simply tossing in some randomness and luck.

And again, it must be pointed out that I think you are misunderstanding some of what folks have proposed.

Most suggestions involving weapons spread center upon actions which are totally under the pilot's control. That is, you do not intrinsically lose weapons precision, but rather only lose precision when firing a large number of weapons together at the same time.

In such a scenario, you have not reduced the required pilot skill, but rather you have added another choice that the pilot can make on the fly. He can either chose to fire one large volley, which will be imprecise but will do a lot of damage, or he can choose to land multiple shots on the same location, which will require more skill on his part, but which will focus that damage on a single location.

Thus, this does not actually remove pilot skill from the equation at all. It actually requires a more skilled pilot to achieve the same large amount of pinpoint damage.

[Doc Holliday]

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 08:56 AM, said:

ML used to do 5 damage for 3 heat (as per BT). It was heat nerfed to do 5 damage for 4 heat (a 33% increase in heat) to prevent ML boating on the HBK-4P and AWS-8Q (and other 5-6 ML boats such as the JNR-F).

And thus, it's already been dealt with... and thus, as I said, not an issue.

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 08:56 AM, said:

It is an issue. It has already caused a number of balance changes over the last 8 months. The Devs are continuing to play wack-a-mole with individual weapon changes while not addressing the underlying issue.

There's always going to be balance issues with weapons. Simply tossing in randomness and chance doesn't solve that. Your suggestions would make all weapons little more than slight variations on missiles. No fun, no thanks.

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 08:56 AM, said:

All of the optimal builds rely on putting maximum damage into a single strike. That is the issue the proposal addresses. DPS builds are (in my experience) inferior to alpha/grouped weapon builds.

You still have yet to show anything supporting that. All of my experience shows the exact opposite. Builds that rely purely on maximum alpha damage get a few lucky kills here and there, but against a well-played balanced build they always succumb to their weaknesses.

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 08:56 AM, said:

Partially correct... but this isn't only a laser issue. It's a 3PPC+GR issue. It's a 6xSRM6 issue. It's a 4xAC2 issue. ALL of these builds rely on the ability to combine damage into better weapons that are made up of groups of weapons. And as a result, individual weapons are weak. This is a fixable problem.

You're still overestimating the real-world capabilities of setups like that. I've run most of those. Sure, in the right situation, they're pretty powerful. But you can't force those perfect situations the majority of the time, even if you're on a full team working together. And even when you force a certain situation, you've only got 1 or 2 mechs optimized for that specific situation, and guess which mechs will get alpha'd by the entire enemy team of more flexible mechs, who can all contribute? And 6xSRM6 is absolutely NOT the issue you're talking about. Your solution is weapon spread, which SRMs already do.

[Doc Holliday]

Roland, on 26 February 2013 - 09:04 AM, said:

And again, it must be pointed out that I think you are misunderstanding some of what folks have proposed.

Most suggestions involving weapons spread center upon actions which are totally under the pilot's control. That is, you do not intrinsically lose weapons precision, but rather only lose precision when firing a large number of weapons together at the same time.

In such a scenario, you have not reduced the required pilot skill, but rather you have added another choice that the pilot can make on the fly. He can either chose to fire one large volley, which will be imprecise but will do a lot of damage, or he can choose to land multiple shots on the same location, which will require more skill on his part, but which will focus that damage on a single location.

Thus, this does not actually remove pilot skill from the equation at all. It actually requires a more skilled pilot to achieve the same large amount of pinpoint damage.

Right. So which system do you think is best? Heat reducing precision? Yes, let's all fire one laser then run around like morons for the next 10 seconds while we wait for heat to go down far enough to actually hit anything again. How about movement? Sure, let's all stand around like dumbasses shooting at stationary targets so we can actually hit something.

You know what would happen if you simply put in one system or the other? Suddenly everyone starts running SRM builds and nothing else, because everything would either be too imprecise to be worthwhile, or too slow to deal damage. So now you have to nerf missiles to accommodate that. And then you have to tweak something else, and something else, and every time you do it, the weapon systems become a little bit more like the others. And in the end, if you really follow that path to perfect balance, you end up with weapons that really differ only in name and appearance, not so much unlike CoD or Battlefield. So like I've said before, if that's what you want, those games are out there. Don't ruin this one like that as well.

[HRR Insanity]

Doc Holliday, on 26 February 2013 - 09:06 AM, said:

And thus, it's already been dealt with... and thus, as I said, not an issue.

/shrugs/ We disagree. That's fine.

Quote

There's always going to be balance issues with weapons. Simply tossing in randomness and chance doesn't solve that. Your suggestions would make all weapons little more than slight variations on missiles. No fun, no thanks.

It's not 'tossing in randomness'. It's balancing the ability to fire weapons in groups that hit a single point.

Quote

You still have yet to show anything supporting that. All of my experience shows the exact opposite. Builds that rely purely on maximum alpha damage get a few lucky kills here and there, but against a well-played balanced build they always succumb to their weaknesses.

How about this. Come play with me for a few hours sometime. We'll compare relative effectiveness and maybe we'll both learn something. I'm a pretty bad Dragon pilot, so maybe you can show me how to make that thing work better.

Quote

You're still overestimating the real-world capabilities of setups like that. I've run most of those. Sure, in the right situation, they're pretty powerful. But you can't force those perfect situations the majority of the time, even if you're on a full team working together. And even when you force a certain situation, you've only got 1 or 2 mechs optimized for that specific situation, and guess which mechs will get alpha'd by the entire enemy team of more flexible mechs, who can all contribute?

/shrugs/ We disagree. That's fine.

Quote

And 6xSRM6 is absolutely NOT the issue you're talking about. Your solution is weapon spread, which SRMs already do.

Yes, it is. If SRM6 spread more or if all the missiles weren't able to be fired as a group, then the Splatcat wouldn't work.

It's clear we disagree despite both of us trying to convince each other of our arguments. I'm fine with accepting that. Hopefully you are as well.

Drop me a friend request if you'd like to drop together and we can compare some notes.

[MustrumRidcully]

Of course, those small laser and medium laser boats of the old days might have been better fixed with lowering the damage of these weapons. That at least would have screwed over stock configurations a bit less, which are already all to hot because weapons fire 2-5 times more often then expected.

In MW:O, people can run a long way thanks to the high heat capacity. You can work with much worse heat production vs heat dissipation ratios than you could in Battletech. If they suddenly added heat penalties tot he game, things would change... But not for the better, just change.

[ChrisOrange]

Doc Holliday, on 26 February 2013 - 09:13 AM, said:

Right. So which system do you think is best? Heat reducing precision? Yes, let's all fire one laser then run around like morons for the next 10 seconds while we wait for heat to go down far enough to actually hit anything again. How about movement? Sure, let's all stand around like dumbasses shooting at stationary targets so we can actually hit something.

Anyway one of my suggestions was for reload time punishment as clan tech for example. Less DPS if you miss shots...more if you are on point. Also I liked the idea of bullet drop for these. It doesn't have to be recoil/spread to be skillful and this allows you to still decide between AC20 or UAC20's for example...or whatever fill in the blank weapons.

Also you guys are STILL doing this weird dance around battletech. It's like a love triangle between Gameplay...BT...and skill. Just cut out the BT from this whole discussion and choose gameplay above all then we can reach real suggestions. Think outside of the box and pretend BT/TT doesn't exist.

[Doc Holliday]

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 09:15 AM, said:

Yes, it is. If SRM6 spread more or if all the missiles weren't able to be fired as a group, then the Splatcat wouldn't work.

Come on. Don't do this, it's beneath you. You and I both know that the only changes you've proposed are weapon spread or minimizing convergence. You've proposed nothing about simply forcing weapons to be fired individually as opposed to a group.

HRR Insanity, on 26 February 2013 - 09:15 AM, said:

It's clear we disagree despite both of us trying to convince each other of our arguments. I'm fine with accepting that. Hopefully you are as well.

I'm fine with disagreeing. I'm not fine with people attempting to force unwarranted changes on a game I play.

Edited by Doc Holliday, 26 February 2013 - 09:31 AM.