26 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

"Boats", e.g. mech builds that exclusively use only one type of weapon, are a common occurence in Mechwarrior games. They are easy to handle, work well in their specialized role.
But they are also kinda boring, and if you have one broken weapon, it being boated will make it stand out even worse.

MW:O uses hard points to make it more difficult to "boat" weapons. Someone that has only 4 energy slots cannot boat a lot of medium lasers, even if he had the tonnage for it.

But we still find many "boats" in MW:O, and I think it's often because people don't necessarily need all the hard points on their mechs, adn can focus on the "good ones". Also, weapons produce a lot of heat, so people can do well with just using their 4 energy hard points and filling the rest with heat sinks.

In the past, when weapons were balanced, very often the approach was to increase the heat or increase the damage. I think this was the wrong method.
Instead, heat and damage should have been decreased. If a weapon seems too powerful, lower its damage. If it's too weak, lower its heat.

The result is overall - people need more weapons to deal the same damage, but they need less heat sinks to do it - so they have the weight and critical space to equip more weapons as well.

[Theobald Hauser]

What weapons need damages lowered, and what weapons need heat reduced, in your mind ?

[Shae Starfyre]

Not sure if this is what he is suggesting, but this is what it made me think.

If I boat lasers, it generates more heat, and potentially, the more heat that is generated, the lower the damage as the weapons have a fail safe to keep it from exploding unless you push them too far, of course.

By distributing the weapons, using less of a given type, you are distributing the heat more efficiently, and there would then be less likely-hood of reaching the fall-safe limits. This would effectively reduce over-all heat allowing for more sustained combat and would also provide more variety in load-outs.

This would make stock variants make more sense and encourage their original design in use (with minor alterations as one sees fit of course).

On the flip side, this is what is already happening, to an extend. Because people boat, they are more prone to over-heat, which lessons their sustained damage capabilities. It just isn't perceived this way.

Edited by Aphoticus, 25 January 2013 - 05:24 AM.

[Eddrick]

I'm not realy condoning boating weapons. But, what about the designs that boat weapons by defult?

Boating weapons has a natural weakness without accounting for damage and heat. It specializes the Mech to a point that they are easly countered. All that can realy be done is to keep it to a minimum. Unless, you limit the crit size on the hardpoints like in MechWarrior 4 and MechWarrior Living Ledgends. People will boat weapons, regardless. Just because they can.

[Pachar]

Aphoticus, you missed it entirely. He was saying that if, for instance, Large Lasers are doing so much damage that people run nothing but, even on a mech that has a bunch of balistic and missile hard points, then you lower the damage on Large Lasers rather than increase the damage on other weapons. His thinking is that people will start to fill up their other hardpoints to try to increase their damage. On the other hand if a weapon is never used he's advocation lowering it's heat to increase it's appeal so people will use it more.
I like the idea because you don't have to think about how armor is affected by the weapon changes nearly as much. It would make balancing weapons easier and not affect the rest of the game as much when they are trying to balance them.
As far as boating goes I have no problems with it because, like you said, it makes the mech naturally weak due to overspecializing. If a person is willing to do that to themselves then cool. Either they're good enough with that weapon to justify it, or they fail hard often and figure out it's not worth it.

Edited by Pachar, 25 January 2013 - 08:18 AM.

[Bhael Fire]

Nothing wrong with boating. It has many drawbacks that balances it out.

Specialists suffer in that they are not flexible and have a very limited window of effective use.

[Mazgazine1]

Soo what about mechs with only one type of hardpoint?

[focuspark]

Wow, Stalkers would be screwed with this suggestion... and that poor little 4 machine gun spider. I mean, it's already screwed but you get the point.

[MustrumRidcully]

Mazgazine1, on 25 January 2013 - 08:44 AM, said:

Soo what about mechs with only one type of hardpoint?

You mean like the Hunchback 4P or the Awesome 8Q?

Currently, a 4P may use 9 Small Lsers or something like 6 Medium Lasers and still have manageable heat. A 8Q is way to too hot with 3 PPCs, but a build with 8 Medium Lasers or Medium Pulse Lasers can work (the MPL version may feel a bit too hot, the ML version may run into "underweight" issues - .e.g run ouf of crits but still have weight over and the engine size can't be increased).

For all these cases:
- If all hard points are already filled, equip some heavier weapons in some of the hard points.
- If not all hard points are filled, equip additional weapons.

So the 8 ML Awesome might change to 2 LL / 6 ML mech with less engine.

Quote

What weapons need damages lowered, and what weapons need heat reduced, in your mind ?

Going over the changes that have been made in the past, I would for example have lowered the damage on medium lasers and small lasers, and lowered the heat on large lasers, large pulse lasers and er large lasers, PPCs and ER PPCs.

The Large Laser family in particular got a mix of changes, but a big part were also damage increases. I would have made these heat reductions, not damage increases.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 27 January 2013 - 06:56 AM.

[MWHawke]

What about range, critical slots and weight considerations? You cannot just judge a weapon by people boating it.

[MustrumRidcully]

MWHawke, on 27 January 2013 - 07:01 AM, said:

What about range, critical slots and weight considerations? You cannot just judge a weapon by people boating it.

I am not sure what you are trying to say here?

Obviously a weapon is defined by several attributes. I am just talking about how changing a few specific attributes that all weapons have (damage and heat), you can encourage certain types of builds.

[Mujinn]

If you want to see more weapon varieties then they need to make some changes to a lot of the weapons mostly energy weapons. They took out the minimal weapons range that most ballistic weapons are suppose to have in this game, they need to do the same thing to the normal PPC.

One of the biggest problems with using large lasers over medium lasers is the cost vs reward. Medium lasers give you 5 damage and a max range of 540m, all for 1 ton and 4 heat. Large lasers give you 9 damage and a max range of 900m for 5 tons and 7 heat. So you are getting not even 2x the effectiveness on either the damage or the range at 5 times the cost in tons and almost 2x the heat. They need to either up the damage by like 3 points and increase the range by 300m and lower the heat by 1 or lower the tonnage down to like 3 tons and the range heat would be fine. All the higher damage energy weapons like PPC, LL, ER PPC, ER LL, LPL need similar tweaking as I suggested with the LL. Right now they are really only viable on heavy and assault mechs as they have the tonnage to use and tend to move slower so need the added range to soften up faster moving mechs. Even still for them is still hard to justify the cost vs reward.

Right now I have a mech running with 5 MPL and 2 SRM 6 with 3 tons of ammo, 3 tons of ammo is generally enough to last a match. This setup only costs me about 19 tons. 2 tons per MPL, 3 tons for each SRM 6 and 3 tons of ammo. 2 x 5 = 10, 2 x 3 = 6... 10 + 6 + 3 = 19. Granted for all this damage to work I need to be at 270m max but going at about 92 kph closing the gap isn't really a problem, using terrain and buildings to block ranged weapons like a smart mech pilot would. Now if I were to go to 4 LL and 2 MPL, can't go 5 LL because of the limit crit slots for the 5th energy point. 4 LL doing 9 damage each and 1 MPL doing 6 damage each you got a potential damage of 42 at a cost of 22 tons. 4 LL costs 5 tons each and 1 MPL costing 2 tons. 4 x 9 = 36... 36+6 = 42. Tonnage cost 4 x 5 = 20... 20 + 2 = 22. This build has a max range of 360m to do full damage.

If you lowered the LL tonnage to 3 this would allow the mech to use 1 SRM 4 with 1 ton of ammo or 2 SRM 2 with 1 ton of ammo get up to 54 damage, or if you want to drop a ton of HS, engine or armor get and SRM 6 with 1 ton of ammo get up to a potential damage of 59, making it basically identical DMG potential. Heat output of these 2 builds would be the balancing effect between the 2 build as the 4 LLs would produce a bit more heat then 4 MPL.

Edited by Mujinn, 27 January 2013 - 11:18 AM.

[MWHawke]

MustrumRidcully, on 27 January 2013 - 10:09 AM, said:

I am not sure what you are trying to say here?

Obviously a weapon is defined by several attributes. I am just talking about how changing a few specific attributes that all weapons have (damage and heat), you can encourage certain types of builds.

Two sides to the coin. Hardcore BT fans (I have to admit I am one of these) will want it as close to canon as possible and others will want their version of "balance". Some questions here are which version of "balance" are we talking about? And will the "balancing" take us to the point where we might as well play only 1 weapon since every weapon is balanced to the same effect, ie. not really different enough to warrant their own niche.

Personally, like I said, I would like it to represent as close to canon as possible since Mechwarrior is based on BT and any large changes to the game mechanics would make it not representative to BT?

[MustrumRidcully]

MWHawke, on 27 January 2013 - 11:53 AM, said:

Two sides to the coin. Hardcore BT fans (I have to admit I am one of these) will want it as close to canon as possible and others will want their version of "balance". Some questions here are which version of "balance" are we talking about? And will the "balancing" take us to the point where we might as well play only 1 weapon since every weapon is balanced to the same effect, ie. not really different enough to warrant their own niche.

Personally, like I said, I would like it to represent as close to canon as possible since Mechwarrior is based on BT and any large changes to the game mechanics would make it not representative to BT?

I am hardcore BT fan because I believe the BT stats tend to be much better balanced for the table top game than the Mechwarrior Online weapon stats are balanced for a real time mouse aiming with weapon convergence game.
But I am aware that the BT stats are not necessarily better balanced for a real time mouse aiming with weapon convergence 0game. But I also think that weapon stats must be designed with taking real time mouse aiming with weapon convergence in mind as well as with making stock mech configurations reasonable.

So, if one stock configuration, say, has 6 medium lasers and 2 LRMs and 12 heat sinks, and only runs into heat issues if it fies all weapons, than all weapon adjustment we make to make these weapons better balanced for MW:O should also keep a stock config like the before as a constraint we have to consider. If we find that thanks to mouse aiming and convergence instead of the table top mechanics, medium lasers are stronger in MW:O than in the table top game, we can "nerf" by, for example, by lowering damage or increasing heat. But if we increase heat, we'd be making the aforementioned stock config hotter and unable to sustain its weapons, making it work less like it's expected to - if we instead lower damage, that stock mech just loses abit of damage.

Quote

ne of the biggest problems with using large lasers over medium lasers is the cost vs reward. Medium lasers give you 5 damage and a max range of 540m, all for 1 ton and 4 heat. Large lasers give you 9 damage and a max range of 900m for 5 tons and 7 heat. So you are getting not even 2x the effectiveness on either the damage or the range at 5 times the cost in tons and almost 2x the heat.

One of the nice examples of how real time mouse aiming with convergence differs from table top rules and leads to different values. The range advantage in the table top would have increased the hit probabilitiy with a large laser even inside the regular range categories of the medium laser. But with mouse aiming, it's equally difficult to hit a target at 270m with a medium laser as with a large laser. To compensate this, we need to rebalance the stats. And in this case, I'd suggest err on lowering the heat of the large laser and/or lowering the damage of the medium laser, rather than the increasing the damage of the LL and increasing the heat of the mediuml aser - because with the former, we ensure that people need "more" weapons and less heat sinks and are forced to fill different hard points (if they have them), while with the latter we only encourage limiting your selection to a small set of weapons and making all stock configs too hot.

[Karl Streiger]

Additional you can take the RoF into consideration. One of the remaining advantages of the PPC is the incredible high rate of fire. However we know that RoF is still a problem. A Stock Mech like the 3F should be able to fire all its long range or all of its short range weapons in 10sec without overheating.
That means at the other hand...a AWS-9M needs only a single ER-PPC to work like a AWS-9M with 3 ER-PPCs because of the RoF. You will have 14tons and 6crits that could be used for anything else.


So when Large Laser and Medium Laser will need the same time to recharge - and Medium Laser will cause the same amount of heat (or at least two medium laser should create more heat than a single large laser) - the large will always be the better option. However that impacts medium laser carriers and only those that use a lot of them. Mechs that boat large laser or PPCs or SRMs will still be effective.

[Asmudius Heng]

Extreme boating needs extreme drawbacks. Simple as that.

Sometimes this works well and sometimes it doesn't though because of teh changes in how things from from TT which was then translated into MWO. Let's look at the medium laser for example.

A single medium laser or a pair of them were a good set of weapons in TT. Versatile, decent damage, not too bad heat and low tonnage. The Swayback too it to the extreme with 8 of the suckers! Now obviously the heat was a ***** but it did what it was design to - get into optimal range and fire as much as you could take heat wise.

The drawbacks were that the lasers didnt all hit and didnt all hit the same location. It was a laser shotgun basically and that was it's role. It didnt have good range, it had heat issues, and it's damage was inconsistant. It had plenty of drawbacks.

Now MWO - the Swayback was the powerhouse of the closed beta for a while because medium lasers were really good. Take a single one it could hurt, but 8 of them was devestating. However it didnt have the drawbacks of the TT. The ehat is still an issue but generally manageable with DHS and its range is not terrible ebcause it is fairly easy to close range to optimal with the current map designs in MWO. All lasers hit the same spot as well so you have only one major drawback - heat - and a minor drawback - range.

To me this has multiple issues.

• The fact most weapons hit the same spot so boating many small weapons is very advantageous.
  
• When you run in a team a boat is better often because you fill a specilised role and your team mates fill the other missing roles
  
• Long range direct fire is not as scary as it perhaps should be due to vision and high armour (debatable i know just my opinion this one)
  
• Balance in TT meant that range mattered more as it ha significant to hit penalties for short range weapons which do not really apply in MWO as it is nearly as easy to hit with an AC20 at 270 range as an AC2.

I totally agree that the main reason boating is bad is that an OP weapon just gets spammed but that is mroe an issue with that weapon than boating.

There needs to be mechanics beyond just heat to balance boating if they are going to leave convergeance the way it is. More unique drawbacks that should leave a boat feeling very uncomfortable when not in thier niche range. I do not know what that is exactly but there are many things that can be done - however you need to make singular uses of that weapon viable as well so just nerfing damage, upping heat etc to punish boats should not punish people using just a few.

- Sorry that was totally ranbling but i hope the point was made

[Theobald Hauser]

Do you mean that LRM boats are too comfortable as of now when not in their niche range ?

[MustrumRidcully]

Karl Streiger, on 28 January 2013 - 02:11 AM, said:

Additional you can take the RoF into consideratios will still be effective.

It's also a factor, and quite important, obviously.

But the truth is - the difference between a PPC fire rate and a Medium Laser fire rate is only 1 second or 25 %. It's not that impressive as an advantage.

And its rate of fire is also part of the problem of the PPC. The Awesome comes with 3 PPCs and 28 heat sinks as stock configuration. It can be lucky if it can sustain the fire of 2 PPCs for a bit of time!

It's also an example of a buff that was in the wrong direction. The rate of fire of the PPC used to be lower in the Closed Beta, but it was increased together with the firing speed of all ballistic weapons. (I am not referring to the friends & family beta, much later, it was after Founders like me could join the CB)

But there is a huge difference between having a weapon that deals 10 heat fire one extra time in 12 seconds, or having a weapon that produces 3 heat fire one extra time in 12 seconds. It was a good move for the ballistic weapons, they gained a lot of extra firepower that they lacked back then, but for the PPC, it was almost inconsequential, as ithad already been too hot.

The best use for the PPC currently seems only to be to use it as alpha strike weapon where you don't care that it will take 20 seconds to fire another salvo, or as side weapon to set of primary weapons with low heat profile ballistics and missiles.

[focuspark]

Can I just say that I personally do not want to encourage more mixed weapon loadouts. The optimal solution to any weapon loadout is to get all of your weapons to have roughly the same range requirements. Why? So when you're at that range you're at your optimal. Use PPC + LL, or ERPPC + AC2. Use ML + S/SRM, etc.

Also, for those of us with 2 button mice, having fewer weapons means fewer groups which means more manageable play.

-1 dislike.

[Karl Streiger]

focuspark, on 28 January 2013 - 10:06 AM, said:

Also, for those of us with 2 button mice, having fewer weapons means fewer groups which means more manageable play.

You know that this is a weak argument, didn't you?
I have a mouse with 3 buttons and a scroll wheel ..however i'm still able to have 5 weapon groups on the mouse. The 6th weapon group is on the key board - keys 1 to 6 (as far as i can remember i used keyboard bindings for weapon groups since MW2)

As you see i usually use a mech with no less than 4 weapon groups. Simple because I'm feeled boring when using only 2 or even 1 weapon in the same range bracket. I feeled useless when my mech can't engage targets above 250m
I feel useless when i can't attack mechs below 180 or even 90m.

You may not be competive - but it is much more fun to fight in a well balanced mech - i have killed 3 Atlas und 2 CTF in a single round with my well balanced Atlas...(those with incredible long range weapons were attacked at point blank, those with short range weapons i guned down at long range)
when people are not able to handle multiple weapons it is their loose (of fun and challenge) not mine.