108 replies to this topic

[EmeraldSongbird]

I used my Cataphract 4X variant yesterday and it uses 2 LBX-10. It was amazing, I managed to pump out 700 damage in that round and generating almost no heat is a big plus for me with this cannon. (I also 1 shotted a raven point blank in the torso with them for a kill, almost full center torso armor) They are definitely better, and have my approval.

[Esplodin]

Sifright, on 20 February 2013 - 06:46 AM, said:

Your 'experiences' are suffering from confirmation bias.

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

See you on the battlefield.

[Sifright]

Esplodin, on 20 February 2013 - 06:49 AM, said:

You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

See you on the battlefield.

I suppose so, but the math is in favour of my argument and ultimately this game is math warrior online. Who ever has the superior math is much more likely to win

[Booran]

The problem with gauging weapons this way is that the math is "too pure", it's just number, you can't factor in the feeling of the guns, which will be subjectivelly different between pilots. Add to that what kind of build on which chassis, play style, team work etc.
If some people like/dislike the weapons, let them use them, or at least discuss the topic with more substance than "har har my argument is best because I can handle a calculator and excel docs"

[MourningZero]

The only way that these critical abilities are worth it at the moment are for triggering ammo explosions, which requires knowing where the ammo has been stored by your target, opening that section of armor, then following them around with MG/Flamer/LBX trained on that spot while you wait for the critical damage to add up to an explosion. Any other weapon will readily carve through the internal structure and destroy that section just fine, but the critseeking weapons will leave the section intact long enough for you to destroy the ammo.

Ammo explosions can wipe out an entire mech, but it's definitely more of a niche use for a weapon slot when you could be doing guaranteed damage with anything else.

Ammo boating mechs (SRM, LRM, or ACs) legs make fun targets for this technique.

[Sifright]

Booran, on 20 February 2013 - 06:57 AM, said:

The problem with gauging weapons this way is that the math is "too pure", it's just number, you can't factor in the feeling of the guns, which will be subjectivelly different between pilots. Add to that what kind of build on which chassis, play style, team work etc.
If some people like/dislike the weapons, let them use them, or at least discuss the topic with more substance than "har har my argument is best because I can handle a calculator and excel docs"

but the other side is bringing feelings into it which is

A ) Subjective
B ) Devoid of information that can be numerically analyzed

When I can empirically show that flamers and mgs are not capable of doing what people say they are and they dont back them selves up using any kind of rational argument then you simply aren't credible.

Splatcats over heat in caustic valley. They do that regardless of the Flamer being on them or not.

The flamer in his scenario is incidental and made little to no difference.

The only thing flamers and mgs are even slightly good at thanks to the buffs they have received is exploding ammo, which they can't do effectively as they can't strip the armour from those sections.

Edited by Sifright, 20 February 2013 - 07:04 AM.

[Booran]

Yeah, I'm just a bit tired of "clinic" arguments, armchair genrals thinking they know best, etc..
I belive the MGs might be more fun now, will try them out as soon as I can.

[Esplodin]

Sifright, on 20 February 2013 - 07:01 AM, said:

When I can empirically show that flamers and mgs are not capable of doing what people say they are and they dont back them selves up using any kind of rational argument then you simply aren't credible.

I am not an AI algorithm. I have a pilot "style" and way I do things that naturally make some weapons better for my personal use then yours. It's a SPIDER. I'm NOT going to get kills (although my max achievement is 4 kills working it like a boss though!). My job (to bring your precious math into it) it to lower the overall DPS of the other team through making them torso twist away from their target, blind them with the flamer, etc. Flamers and machine guns also mask higher DPS weapons because there is no way to tell if the paper doll is dancing from a flamer or the 2 med pulse I'm poking you with.

Then there is also the psychological effect of MG and Flamers. There are NO better weapons to make a heavy go squirrel hunting. NONE. I think this is due to people not being spreadsheets. Of course if you ignore me, I'll strip you eventually with my pulse lasers and let flamer crit magic happen.

Again, raw DPS is only part of the game. I work to defeat the PILOT, the metal follows.

Edited by Esplodin, 20 February 2013 - 07:18 AM.

[icey]

unless youre critting ammo, mg crits won't be killing anything themselves - they still do very low actual damage to armour and structure. they should be good for disabling weapons in enemies that bunch them up though - missile pods on catapults, missile pods in atlas LT, 4P laser hunch.

nice if you can throw them in mid-cycle while you wait for you punchier weapons to finish a section off - you could get lucky and deny them a shot at you. problem is that you have to face them to do it, which means you can't twist away. possibly more useful when you're not the centre of attention

[Sifright]

Esplodin, on 20 February 2013 - 07:12 AM, said:

I am not an AI algorithm. I have a pilot "style" and way I do things that naturally make some weapons better for my personal use then yours. It's a SPIDER. I'm NOT going to get kills (although my max achievement is 4 kills working it like a boss though!). My job (to bring your precious math into it) it to lower the overall DPS of the other team through making them torso twist away from their target, blind them with the flamer, etc. Flamers and machine guns also mask higher DPS weapons because there is no way to tell if the paper doll is dancing from a flamer or the 2 med pulse I'm poking you with.

Then there is also the psychological effect of MG and Flamers. There are NO better weapons to make a heavy go squirrel hunting. NONE. I think this is due to people not being spreadsheets. Of course if you ignore me, I'll strip you eventually with my pulse lasers and let flamer crit magic happen.

Again, raw DPS is only part of the game. I defeat the PILOT, not the metal.

Your example only works against inexperienced pilots that don't know any better as experienced players don't suffer from the effects you are describing.

Your play style also doesn't matter at all. Because the mg and flamer are so absolutely worthless that fitting heat sinks instead is a better alternative.

Admittedly the Spider variant that has 4 bal HP is gimped by this fact, but your mgs really aren't doing anything.

[De La Fresniere]

I hate re-stating the obvious, but it's pretty much exactly like you'd expect.

Flamers are useless, except on River City Night, where they will blind the target completely and probably tank their FPS as well.

The LB10-X was a very bad weapon. With its poor ability to crit fixed, now it's just a bad weapon.

Where MGs were useless, they are now super-specialized equipment only good for destroying items inside unarmored sections. A mech with some tonnage left and an extra ballistic hardpoint or two might consider investing the 1.5 or 2 tons into MGs, but the benefits would be minor. That's about it. If you wanted to use a Spider or Cicada with 4 MGs, they'd be useless most of the time; while they could follow teammates and target opponents with exposed sections, they should just equip real weapons and contribute to the target's actual armor-stripping and destruction instead.

I can't figure out where they're going with weapon balance. Every decision sounds completely random.

[Stringburka]

I think it's hard to determine how well it works since so much is unknown/unreported in game.
- Critical damage is not noted as damage on the scoreboard.
- Destroying internal components is not noted as component destruction when it happens.
- We can't know for sure if the target has actual internal components in those departments.
- We (or I at least, are there numbers?) don't know how much structural damage an exploding internal component deals to the department and how much it deals to the departments alone.

I have a 4MG spider that I'm trying to exp with, and I must say it FEELS as if I do more damage. Quite often when I see a ripped armor and go on to shoot at it, the structure quickly jumps from yellow to red but I rarely get component destruction. It feels as if they do plenty damage for 2 tons of weapons now, but I'm not sure since the damage screen at end of match still shows about 50 damage dealt total.

Thus, we can only look at math and theorize, which is very limited. But here it goes:
Machine guns deal 0.04 damage per shot 10 times per second. They have 39/22/6% chance to crit for .5/1/1.5 damage. So, each second of shooting you have gotten of 10 shots and on average, 3.9 of those have dealt .5 damage, 2.2 have dealt 1 damage and .6 have dealt 1.5 damage, for a total of 5.05 critical damage. HOWEVER, this damage is split over a number of slots - for central torso, side torso and arms it's 12 slots. Each of those slots, thus, have on average taken .42 damage. An item that takes up 3 slots (such as a PPC) will have take 3 times this damage, and something that takes 10 slots (like an AC-20) will have taken 10 times that damage.
tl:dr; crit damage is ( .39 * 0.44 + .22 * 2 * 0.44 + .06 * 3 * 0.44 ) / 12 * 10 = 0.4225 DPS to each critical slot

If we compare this to another 1/2 ton weapon, the small laser (disregarding weight of ammo/heat sinks):
SL deal .3 dmg 10 times each 2.25 seconds, have a 25/14/3% chance of critting for .3/.6/.9 damage. The damage per second is:
( .25 * 0.3 + .14 * 2 * 0.3 + .03 * 3 * 0.3 ) / 12 * (10/2.25) = 0.0688 DPS to each critical slot

In other words, a machine gun deals a little more than 6 times the critical DPS of a small laser.

I think the flamers still feel lacking, but the MG's are now decent circumstantial weapons for their weight, and LB10-X which was a decent weapon before is now pretty good (though of course the increase in critical damage is less for that than for the MG.

Edited by Stringburka, 20 February 2013 - 07:21 AM.

[Helvetica]

I using 2 machine guns tied to an ac20. open it and kill it. I think it works fine. (on hunch)

[Esplodin]

Sifright, on 20 February 2013 - 07:17 AM, said:

Your play style also doesn't matter at all.

I just. . . wow.

[Serapth]

With the recent LBX/AC10 buff I decided to give one a try. I dusted off my founders HBK and loaded a LBX, 2xLL,1xML + 3 tons of ammo and it worked out rather well actually. The build tended to run a bit hot, but I was never out of the fight due to the low AC heat. 3 tons of ammo is more than enough (45 shots), so the lowish weight of the LBX combined with efficient ammo is a nice feature.

It was only one night, so its hard to differ luck from the changes, but I managed pretty solid rounds in this mech. I averaged about 2-3 kills per match and around 400 damage, which is respectible for a HBK. The LBX certainly seemed like a good finishing weapon, as well as a good weapon for taking off limbs.

The biggest problem with the LBX, probably the biggest problem with the LBX is SRMs are too effective. If SRMs werent in the game, or didnt get doubled damage, the LBX would be a ton more viable. As it stands now the LBX has a bit of a niche roll... it's one of the lightest useful ballistics, so if you are in a mech that doesnt have SRM room, LBX is your man.

[Sifright]

im done arguing here because people are literally trying to argue the game works in a way contrary to how it does. If you don't understand the mechanics you can't argue whether a weapon is good or not.

Esplodin, on 20 February 2013 - 07:23 AM, said:

I just. . . wow.

Woooosh, how far over your head my point sailed.

[Serapth]

De La Fresniere, on 20 February 2013 - 07:19 AM, said:

The LB10-X was a very bad weapon. With its poor ability to crit fixed, now it's just a bad weapon.

I tend to disagree with this statement. It wasn't a great weapon, the SRM is simply too good; making the LBX bad as a result.

Compared to other AC's, the lighter weight and more ammo is offset by the short range and lack of accuracy, a fair enough trade off.

Problem is, SRMs have better spread with artemis, are lighter, more ammo effective and do more damage per ton.

Edited by Serapth, 20 February 2013 - 07:27 AM.

[DocBach]

The LB10-X needs to do more damage from the start -- right now it weighs as much as three SRM-6 with an SRM-4 added for good measure. With each missile hitting that is 55 damage vs 10 damage for the LB10-X, if all cluster shots hit. The LB10-X needs its each submunition buffed up, perhaps from 1 to 3 damage for it to be considered a worthwhile weapon against the SRM's, the LB10-X's heat advantage doesn't make up for the raw damage taking the missile battery provides. Conversely, the SRM's could be brought back down from 2.5 damage a missile to 2 damage a missile to balance them against the LB-X better.

[Taurick]

Esplodin, on 20 February 2013 - 07:23 AM, said:

I just. . . wow.

It doesn't, not unless your playstyle includes magicking these awful weapons to do 10x their normal dps.


If your playstyle is harasser there are better harassing weapons out there.
AC2's and small lasers spring to mind

[Viper69]

Sifright, on 20 February 2013 - 06:18 AM, said:

if you think the mg or flamer is doing ANY of the damage you are hopelessly deluded.

Or as i like to call it... golded.

What does him having a gold tag have anything to do with his opinion or obsevations being wrong in your opinion? Can you not debate someone without reaching into the insult hat? Do yourself and your future arguments a favor and leave personal insults out. It does nothing but erase all the work you put into your argument.

Take my advice with a grain of salt if you wish.

Serapth, on 20 February 2013 - 07:25 AM, said:

I tend to disagree with this statement. It wasn't a great weapon, the SRM is simply too good; making the LBX bad as a result.

Compared to other AC's, the lighter weight and more ammo is offset by the short range and lack of accuracy, a fair enough trade off.

Problem is, SRMs have better spread with artemis, are lighter, more ammo effective and do more damage per ton.

Exactly why lbx need their pellet damage upped and prox fused detonation not point of origin spread.