298 replies to this topic

[stjobe]

Jakob Knight, on 07 February 2013 - 12:12 PM, said:

To illustrate, if it takes a PPC (doing 10 points of damage) 4 seconds to fire and then fully recharge, and a MG fires 20 times in that period of time, the damage a MG in MWO should do 10/5 = 2 points of damage, divided by 20, or 0.1 damage per shot. Any more than this, and MGs would be doing more damage than they should.
[...]
IMHO, Machine Guns are fine where they are

This does not compute, since the MG fires 40 times in 4 seconds, for 0.04 damage per round, or 1.6 damage.
Also, ammo dependency.
Also, need to stay on target for the full 4 seconds.
Also, ammo explosion.
Also, the difference in effectiveness of a 10-point hit versus a 0.04-point one, both in damage and crit.
Also, range.
Also, what about comparisons with an AC/20? An AC/2? A Small Laser? All of those give different results for your "how much damage the MG should do" equation.

You're ignoring so many factors it's almost hilarious.

[Joseph Mallan]

stjobe, on 07 February 2013 - 12:06 PM, said:

Are you proposing to
1. Make the MG fire in 0.75 second burst
2. With a 2.25 second cooldown between bursts
3. Doing 2 damage per burst
4. Still having 0 heat and 2000 ammo/ton
5. And a 90m effective range?

I could live with that, although I don't think it'll ever happen.

Whatever it takes to keep the damage less than a Small laser(per turn). See as I can tell an AC2 does not do 2 points of damage. TT AC 2 is fired once in 10 seconds and does 2 damage here an AC 2 does 20(ish) damage per turn.

[Tarman]

Jakob Knight, on 07 February 2013 - 12:12 PM, said:

MGs in Battletech are similar to the coaxial MG mounts in modern tanks that are designed against infantry overruning the tank and for unarmored targets where a use of anti-vehicle weapons would be a waste of ammo.

These weapons are not effective against armored vehicles (which is why you have anti-armor weapons on a tank), though they can cause some surface damage if applied long enough.

In MWO, MGs should do absolutely no damage whatsoever to even the lightest armored 'mech (as even a 20-ton 'mech is better armored than most armored vehicles), but the capability for doing damage was included as a nod to the fact that 'Machine Gun' in Battletech covers the range of ballistic automatic weapons reaching from light support arms up to .50 calibur miniguns with armor-penetrating rounds (the level it becomes an Autocannon). Of course, the damage from such weapons in Battletech were set on the basis of that weapon being fired for the same length of time that a PPC (or the longest-recycling weapon in the game) would take to reload for firing.

Thus, if we were to translate it correctly, a MG in MWO should, over the course of time required for a PPC to fire and rearm, do 1/5th the damage of a PPC to a target, in total over constant firing during that time. How many times the MG would fire during this time would divide that damage down to how much damage it should do per shot/firing.

To illustrate, if it takes a PPC (doing 10 points of damage) 4 seconds to fire and then fully recharge, and a MG fires 20 times in that period of time, the damage a MG in MWO should do 10/5 = 2 points of damage, divided by 20, or 0.1 damage per shot. Any more than this, and MGs would be doing more damage than they should.

It is important to realize that MGs are anti-infantry weapons. Anyone who takes them on their battlemech is willingly trading off anti-armor capability for anti-infantry ability, and has no grounds to complain that these weapons are not doing any real damage to armored vehicles.

Finally, remember the ranges in Battletech are -effective- ranges. A MG might be able to throw a round many times past it's effective range, but that round has neglegible chance to hit -and- do more than dent the paint (the same way beam attenuation makes firing a laser past its effective range little better than shining a flashlight on the target) on a combat target.

IMHO, Machine Guns are fine where they are. That they have no place in a combat environment of MWO is the fault of those who decided to include them in the game and those who insist on installing weapons without a purpose in their mechs, not the weapon itself.

>____________________________________________>

It's not even remotely close to being a co-ax fifty dude, it's more like the nose-cannon in an A-10. This isn't even a debatable topic; about the size of the gun you are flat wrong.

As far as damage output, in TT the MG did 2 damage against other mechs. When the game began. When there were zero infantry units. It was comparable in damage to the AC2 but at a low range. It got bonuses vs infantry when infantry was included but it did just fine against mechs. It was a light weapon to fill in slots, or to go crazy with some of the multiple MG chassis available. Arguing against it as an anti-infantry only weapon in the context of Battletech is also just wrong.

PGI did a horrible job of porting over the MG into this game, because it does so little damage that it acts like the fifty-cal you think it is. Doesn't mean that we throw the gun away, it means we tweak it till it's useful. MG needs to be a viable weapon to make use of all those empty ballistic hardpoints because there isn't a useful low-weight filler weapon for ballistics, while missiles and energy weapons both have low-weight filler weapons.

Or we could go with your system and leave a completely useless weapon in the game or just take it out entirely.

[Joseph Mallan]

Tarman, on 07 February 2013 - 12:50 PM, said:

Or we could go with your system and leave a completely useless weapon in the game or just take it out entirely.

It's what I did for 25+ years...
...
...
Just sayin'

[Tarman]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:53 PM, said:

It's what I did for 25+ years...
...
...
Just sayin'

If you were making MWO then we wouldn't be having this convo. I notice though that you're not, so we have this instead.

[Sifright]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:53 PM, said:

It's what I did for 25+ years...
...
...
Just sayin'

that doesn't make it a sensible thing to do in this game.

The lighter mechs needs a workable light ballistic weapon to fit the missing game play hole that currently exists.

Tarman, on 07 February 2013 - 12:54 PM, said:

If you were making MWO then we wouldn't be having this convo. I notice though that you're not, so we have this instead.

I he was making this game I wouldn't be playing it because it would play like crap.

Game play > crappy tt lore.

[Joseph Mallan]

Sifright, on 07 February 2013 - 12:55 PM, said:

that doesn't make it a sensible thing to do in this game.

The lighter mechs needs a workable light ballistic weapon to fit the missing game play hole that currently exists.

Only because to many people abuse free designing of Mechs. Trust me Light Mechs do not need Ballistics to make them effective. I firmly blame the video game crowd for getting us in this mess.

[Sifright]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:58 PM, said:

Only because to many people abuse free designing of Mechs. Trust me Light Mechs do not need Ballistics to make them effective. I firmly blame the video game crowd for getting us in this mess.

Yet pgi have included light mechs that can't work with out a workable light weight ballistic weapon that fits that hole.

[stjobe]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

Whatever it takes to keep the damage less than a Small laser(per turn). See as I can tell an AC2 does not do 2 points of damage. TT AC 2 is fired once in 10 seconds and does 2 damage here an AC 2 does 20(ish) damage per turn.

Since there are no "turns" in MWO, I'm going to assume you mean the 10-second BattleTech turn:
In BT, an AC/2 did 2 damage per turn.
A Small Laser did 3 damage per turn,
A Machine Gun did 2 damage per turn,

In MWO an AC/2 does 40 damage per "turn" (10 seconds).
A Small Laser does 12 damage per "turn".
A Machine Gun does 4 damage per "turn".

The AC/2 has been buffed to 20 times its BT damage over 10 seconds.
The Small Laser has been buffed to 4 times its BT damage over 10 seconds.
The Machine Gun has been buffed to only two times its BT damage over 10 seconds.

Nobody wants to buff the MG like the AC/2 has been buffed, but many seem to want it to at least be buffed as much as the small laser has been buffed.

I personally think its characteristics (continuous-fire mechanics, ammo dependency, limited range etc) justifies buffing it beyond that, to where it does comparable or better DPS than the Small Laser.

[FupDup]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:58 PM, said:

Only because to many people abuse free designing of Mechs.

Hardpoints here make it much harder to abuse free designing of mechs than other games like MW3 (load 16 Light MGs on any mech and you can core an Atlas or Daishi in somewhere around 5 seconds, lol).

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2013 - 12:58 PM, said:

Trust me Light Mechs do not need Ballistics to make them effective.

The Raven 4X and Spider 5K, if you ignore the ballistic hardpoints, are inferior in every possible way to the other variants of their respective chassis. The same goes for the Cicada 3C.

While it is certainly possible to make decent use of those mechs without ballistics, you would be pretty much handicapping yourself when you could do the same thing but better in a different variant.

Edited by FupDup, 07 February 2013 - 01:16 PM.

[Gremlich Johns]

Maverick01, on 05 February 2013 - 06:44 PM, said:

Machine gun range should be changed to 750 meters. This would make the MG great for suppressive fire tactics (although an ammo consumption monster). Furthermore, I would argue the DPS needs to be "slightly" increased to make this weapon viable on the battlefield (yes, all weapons need to be viable in MWO). The developers are taking the wrong approach in balancing this weapon: http://mwomercs.com/...apon-balancing/

For comparison purposes, the light machine gun employed by the U.S. Military is as follows:

M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW)
Effective Range: 800 meters (point target)

Consider a 7.62mm weapon like the SAW. Trucks and below are the only thing it has any effect on - anything more armored just gets cross. The .50 cal (whether shot from a M2 or the M85 aircraft MG) or the 12.7/14.7mm is good against APCs and anything with a similar armor level. It is not until you get the 20mm-40mm API (like the 20mm Vulcan or 23mm ASU/ZSU-23-4) that you can effect any damage component, but it will still not penetrate significant armor unless you are shooting a squeeze-bore 40mm or are using the 30mm GAU-8 shooting DU rounds. Even the AC2 takes a while to damage something on a Mecha. The sabot rounds shot by a modern tank (whether 105mm or 125mm) is only about 35mm in diameter, but it is traveling in excess of a mile a second - waaay faster than any MG round.

If there are to be MGs in a mechwarrior game, they need to be roughly 20mm in size an have four of them to an array. Anything smaller is just a noisemaker intended to scratch a mech's back.

I fired many different munitions during my military service and know what the various types can do. The M85 .50 Cal aircraft MG had two rates of fire - 750 and 950 rounds per minute. Both it and the M2 jammed a bit, although the M85 had a fixed headspace and jammed much less often.

Edited by Gremlich Johns, 07 February 2013 - 01:22 PM.

[Gaan Cathal]

Gremlich Johns, on 07 February 2013 - 01:19 PM, said:

If there are to be MGs in a mechwarrior game, they need to be roughly 20mm in size an have four of them to an array. Anything smaller is just a noisemaker intended to scratch a mech's back.

Handily, they are 20mm. Glad that's sorted. Now lets stop comparing real life weapons with the lasers with a range of 90m shall we?

[Sifright]

Gremlich Johns, on 07 February 2013 - 01:19 PM, said:

Consider a 7.62mm weapon like the SAW. Trucks and below are the only thing it has any effect on - anything more armored just gets cross. The .50 cal (whether shot from a M2 or the M85 aircraft MG) or the 12.7/14.7mm is good against APCs and anything with a similar armor level. It is not until you get the 20mm-40mm API (like the 20mm Vulcan or 23mm ASU/ZSU-23-4) that you can effect any damage component, but it will still not penetrate significant armor unless you are shooting a squeeze-bore 40mm or are using the 30mm GAU-8 shooting DU rounds. Even the AC2 takes a while to damage something on a Mecha. The sabot rounds shot by a modern tank (whether 105mm or 125mm) is only about 35mm in diameter, but it is traveling in excess of a mile a second - waaay faster than any MG round.

If there are to be MGs in a mechwarrior game, they need to be roughly 20mm in size an have four of them to an array. Anything smaller is just a noisemaker intended to scratch a mech's back.

I fired many different munitions during my military service and know what the various types can do. The M85 .50 Cal aircraft MG had two rates of fire - 750 and 950 rounds per minute. Both it and the M2 jammed a bit, although the M85 had a fixed headspace and jammed much less often.

good thing the Mgs in btech are 20mm autocannons.

[Gremlich Johns]

Gaan Cathal, on 07 February 2013 - 01:29 PM, said:

Handily, they are 20mm. Glad that's sorted. Now lets stop comparing real life weapons with the lasers with a range of 90m shall we?

You are somewhat correct, in BT, MGs are 20mm and below. also, MGs are intended more for suppressive and anti-infantry fire.

[Sifright]

Gremlich Johns, on 07 February 2013 - 01:33 PM, said:

You are somewhat correct, in BT, MGs are 20mm and below. also, MGs are intended more for suppressive and anti-infantry fire.

and yet battle tech considers the AC2 and the MG equally powerful in anti mech combat. The MG just happens to be even BETTER against infantry.

Edited by Sifright, 07 February 2013 - 01:39 PM.

[Gaan Cathal]

Gremlich Johns, on 07 February 2013 - 01:33 PM, said:

You are somewhat correct, in BT, MGs are 20mm and below. also, MGs are intended more for suppressive and anti-infantry fire.

Apologies if I seem like I'm being a little short here, but this is ground we've retrod repeatedly in several threads on this. The MG is large enough caliber to feasibly damage armour. It also does the same damage to mechs as an SRM in core BT, and is ergo a viable anti-mech weapon (also an AC/2, but that comparison seems to lead Bad Places). In MWO there are weapon-typed hardpoints, so a viable ballistic for light mechs is required. Currently the MG is the only candidate but it is so bad that it's invariably better to leave the hardpoints empty.

[Wolfways]

stjobe, on 07 February 2013 - 01:03 PM, said:

Since there are no "turns" in MWO, I'm going to assume you mean the 10-second BattleTech turn:
In BT, an AC/2 did 2 damage per turn.
A Small Laser did 3 damage per turn,
A Machine Gun did 2 damage per turn,

In MWO an AC/2 does 40 damage per "turn" (10 seconds).
A Small Laser does 12 damage per "turn".
A Machine Gun does 4 damage per "turn".

The AC/2 has been buffed to 20 times its BT damage over 10 seconds.
The Small Laser has been buffed to 4 times its BT damage over 10 seconds.
The Machine Gun has been buffed to only two times its BT damage over 10 seconds.

Nobody wants to buff the MG like the AC/2 has been buffed,

I do

Quote

but many seem to want it to at least be buffed as much as the small laser has been buffed.

I personally think its characteristics (continuous-fire mechanics, ammo dependency, limited range etc) justifies buffing it beyond that, to where it does comparable or better DPS than the Small Laser.

As MG's are the only ballistic i can really use on my ERPPC K2 i just want a decent weapon. A 90m AC2 sounds fine to me
Oh, and why is the MG the only ballistic to not have triple max range (200m max)?

[Novawrecker]

Sifright, on 07 February 2013 - 11:39 AM, said:

no you are wrong.

The small laser does all its damage in a quick burst.

The MG requires you to hold on target.

everything else you have said is rubbish.

Despite your lack of common sense, it still doesn't change the fact that the small laser is balanced out by having both a cooldown and produces heat. The MG, if damage is increased by 300% will be on close to on par DPS with an AC20 with out producing heat nor suffering from cool down. Be it holding a button continously down or drilling it in your thick skull.

You don't agree with my idea? We are all entitled to our opinions. Calling it rubish, especially since your missing the point of how broken it will be if they actually do the absurd change, that's YOUR flawed and rubbished idea.

As stated before. I am in full belief the MG needs a buff to damage. But something as rediculous as 300% is not the correct path.

[Sifright]

Novawrecker, on 07 February 2013 - 02:46 PM, said:

Despite your lack of common sense, it still doesn't change the fact that the small laser is balanced out by having both a cooldown and produces heat. The MG, if damage is increased by 300% will be on close to on par DPS with an AC20 with out producing heat nor suffering from cool down. Be it holding a button continously down or drilling it in your thick skull.

You don't agree with my idea? We are all entitled to our opinions. Calling it rubish, especially since your missing the point of how broken it will be if they actually do the absurd change, that's YOUR flawed and rubbished idea.

As stated before. I am in full belief the MG needs a buff to damage. But something as rediculous as 300% is not the correct path.

The balancing factor is the small laser user gets to evade and twist and turn and doesn't lose damage potential.

300% increase in damage is 1.2 DPS.

The absurdity is your lack of looking into other factors.

it will be almost impossible to maintain that damage in a meaningful way unless the target sits still whilst you shoot into him.

The Machine gun user wont be able to torso twist to avoid damage.

Turn away from the mech he wants to shoot.

that is why even if the mg does MORE damage over time than the small laser. It will still be less effective.

That is why what you have written is rubbish.

You aren't accounting for enough factors that occur in game play.

I might be brash and rude in dismissing what you have said but it's only because you are cherry picking with out using your noggin.

Edited by Sifright, 07 February 2013 - 03:01 PM.

[Novawrecker]

Sirfright, keep thinking that people will not abuse the MG if it's raised to 1.2 dps. We currently have legal mechs that can carry 4 ballistics on them (you know, one of those "factors" not accounted for, according to you). If the Pirannah, or omni-mechs with pod weights instead of other factors, are released, expect this matter to be even more absurd.


We've beaten this dead horse enough to ensure the zombie apocalypse, but 300% increase in damage is leading to broken levels. Don't want to believe me? Let them succumb to this appeal and have them do this increase .... then the real crying will begin.

Edited by Novawrecker, 07 February 2013 - 03:15 PM.