It’s just an illustration of the principle of damage stacking. In MWO, they actually helped reduce this by introducing DOT effects to lasers, so it wasn’t quite the same issue that you saw in say, MW4.
In MW4, this difference was super highly pronounced though. There was no reason to take an AC20 really, because 4 medium lasers were just…straight up better. It weighed 4 tons instead of 14. It was instant hit. It had no ammo. And you could just take the extra 10 tons and load up heat sinks.
Now, in reality, in MW4, medium lasers were actually somewhat out of favor. You know why? Because in response to the metagame of MW3 (which was entirely medium lasers, especially since back then the mechs were pure gun-bags, so you could basically just load up anything with medium lasers). So they nerfed their heat efficiency… so everyone just moved on to large lasers, which dominated the metagame for pretty much forever. (In reality, there actually was a period of time early on in MW4’s development, where damage was calculated clientside, so the instant hit nature of lasers was less of an advantage as it eventually became, when the 1.1. patch moved hit detection onto the server)
But those specific notions can be fairly easily extrapolated out when you understand the fundamental principle.
That’s cool, at this point, I haven’t played in a few years. That’s why I was asking if anything had changed.
But like I said, I played for… ages. I played at the highest levels of competition back in MW4 days, which to be fair, was nothing like a modern game’s competitive environment. But I played in the most successful units of the old planetary leagues like TFS, UTS, NBT.
And the thing is, the game didn’t change much when it went to MWO. In terms of mech design and playing the game… it was still pretty much the same game. The guys who dominated the competitive scene in MWO? They were almost all just old MW4 players from the NBT league. They were largely the old IHx guys… previously DCM guys. We played together for years… I’m trying to remember when NBT finally wrapped things up. I think I stopped playing competitively in like, 2006? That’s the thing, a lot of the hard core MWO players early on all knew each other, because we were all old MW4 vets.
I was asking for specific changes, because I do in fact understand the fundamental mechanics of mechwarrior pretty well, having played multiple incarnations over a period of, damn, I guess nearly two decades now. I even worked with the old FASA dudes identifying and testing changes back in MW4.
That’s why I’m interested in just hearing about what kind of actual balance changes they made, if they addressed those longstanding problems that went back so long. Or if there’s live video footage of high level competition, I could easily enough just watch that and see what the current metagame is.
Nah, at this point the folks I played with have moved on, and we play other games together. Titanfall 2 took up the slack for stompy robots after MWO was done. That was probably one of the best things about playing Mechwarrior, the guys I played it with (and against). We had high hopes for MWO, as we really expected that they were gonna develop something akin to the Planetary leagues, since as a bunch of amature kids we were able to develop a whole economic and campaign based combat system using PHP, but it never quite materialized.
Did you ever play in the old planetary leagues like UTS or NBT? Man, the stuff that guys like Dark Phoenix pulled off was really impressive. I always wondered whether the PGI guys ever saw any of that stuff first hand.