Is ELO operative for 8 mans at all?
My experience with ELO has been great; our 4 man group which traditionally would win 75-90% of our matches in a night has dropped to almost exactly 50% with much tighter competition. IMHO it is night and day.
For solo play it has also been quite good, the solo experience is much improved.
Regarding consumables, you are operating under the assumption that consumables automatically provide an advantage over and above any permanent module you coudl have slotted. From what I have seen so far I am not at all convinced of that. Certainly I would not give up target decay and sensor range modules from my Trebuchets.
Second point, random lone wolves without much money will not care much about consumables either. Competitive players who will be flsuh with cash all the time will be the ones who care. I for one cannot imagine ever bothering to use a coolant flush in a random match. It’s just not that important.
In world of tanks, only crazy people fire gold rounds/use gold consumables in public matches.
meeper
1882
Are we talking about the same World of Tanks? You know, the one where getting nailed by a random gold shot in a public match isn’t terribly uncommon? Or are we just defining ‘crazy people’ to include a significant subset of their player population?
Not common enough that I noted it all that much in 4000+ matches. I imagine its more common now that you can pay credits for that ammo, but yeah I think its crazy behaviour. And who cares if a few people do it?
One of my great joys in MWO is fiddling with Jenner builds to produce the most heavily-armed light mechs I can. ERPPC+2MLAS Jenner is probably my most successful, what with full armor, 110kph speed, and sufficient numbers of heat sinks to actually use its armament near-constantly, and I’m usually worth a kill or two and 400 damage with it in a good game. “If one PPC is good, more must be better,” I thought, so with some fiddling I was able to get an ERPPC and a PPC onto one without slowing it down too much. It’s less useful in most games because of heat issues and the trouble with light mechs (I have trouble fighting them off without lasers), but on the other hand, I also cored an Awesome in a sniper duel at 800 meters on Wednesday night.
Two PPCs is about the maximum for a mech that remains drivable as a light mech: north of 100kph, 192 armor, 12 double heat sinks. The lack of chassis weight matching in the ELO system makes anything more pretty superfluous. As a thought experiment, though, I wondered if I could fit three PPCs. To my surprise, the answer is yes, and although it would be a very poor light mech (slow, badly armored, bad at close-range fighting, and crippled by heat problems), it wouldn’t actually be so bad that I would dismiss out of hand the possibility of actually building it.
It ended up with 128 total armor, 10 total double heat sinks, and speed-with-tweak of 86.6 kph. I’m thinking of building it and running it alongside my buddy’s planned dual AC-20 Catapult.
meeper
1885
It always pains me when I see double* heat sinks and their craptastic implementation in MWO. At least we’re able to judge for ourselves how they work, but I just wish they were consistent.
- Double for the first 10 that fit in the engine, then a coefficient of 1.4 for each additional ‘double’ above 10 or that don’t fit in the engine.
Yeah, it bothers me too—I ended up going from an XL 145 and a single jump jet to an XL 170 for the extra engine heat sinks (in lieu of the one jump jet I probably wouldn’t use much anyway). Not that I’d use this mech much anyway to begin with.
pg1
1887
What’s so ironic about this now is we were told it had to be 1.4 to be balanced then they add coolant which boosts the cooling over 2.0 DHS values. They’ve been saying a lot of conflicting stuff lately. I was looking through some of the earlier game details and only like 50% of the stuff is in the game if not less. Ever since the consumables debacle I’ve become less convinced MWO is going to succeed in the long run.
A good build I see a lot but don’t know the exact details on is the CDA-3M with 2 ER PPCs or 2 PPCs. ECM + fast + small + torso mounted PPCs = good sniper.
Double heat sinks were broken in tabletop so there is little surprise they’d also be broken in MWO.
They’ve hit a reasonable balance point now, even though I would have preferred they just come up with a consistent value for all double heat sinks, engine mounted or otherwise. They never said it “had to be 1.4” they just said that was the balance point that seemed to work out the best. I can’t say I really disagree.
The success of MWO entirely hinges on whether they can make enough money from the current customer base to keep things rolling. If you have alternative suggestions, by all means suggest away!
Ridiculously good run in my Spider SDR-5V tonight. Yes… that is the Spider widely derided as terrible, with only two CT energy slots and no ECM. Dropped 100% solo:
46 matches, 31 wins, 15 losses (23 kills, 23 deaths, 713 xp avg per match, slightly above my overall average of 701). In multiple matches I was fighting 3-5 enemy mechs while my teammates chewed up the rest of their team. No question the lax discipline of pugs allows touching the enemy base or off-axis harrassing attacks to be extraordinarily good at drawing attention, but I did not expect it to work THIS well. I fully expected the 5V grind to be reasonably painful. Instead, it was a blast! Most fun I’ve had in a light mech in a long time.
There are weaknesses of course: meeting a commando 2D in a fairly open space is a death sentence, though the spider is substantially more maneuverable and the jump jets allow you to disengage if you choose. The Raven 3L is actually easier to get away from for whatever reason, and you can even wind with them if you can slip just out of their front arc so they cant maintain lock. Any heavy or assault mech who decides to try and hit you as you skip around them is killing their own team. Medium mechs can be solo’d reasonably well.
After i got speed tweak I swapped in a standard engine which significantly increased my durability. With 2 medium lasers instead of 2 medium pulse lasers I did noticeably less damage, but my survivability actually went up substantially. This worked out every well in conquest maps where I was the last survivor… at least 3 times I pulled out the win missing one or the other torso (and once, legged while under the guns of a Stalker!).
Anyway just thought I’d share my unexpected success. I wonder if things would have been worse pre-ELO?
meeper
1890
Inner Sphere double heat sinks were broken in tabletop? If you’re implying that IS DHS were overpowered, well, we’ll have to agree to disagree there. :) I liked the implementation of IS DHS as it led to some serious decisions regarding whether to mount DHS or not.
I’ll give you that Clan DHS were incredibly powerful, but that was an issue with BV 1.0 – not with the capabilities or design rules regarding DHS, particularly given how BV 2.0 significantly improved their balance. However, reducing the overall effectiveness of ‘double’ heat sinks in order to balance them for yet-to-be-implemented Clan gear, or worse yet, in favor of a consumable (per pg), sounds like the result of other less-than-optimal design choices. If Clan tech is what they’re worried about, then there are a raft of asymmetrical team/tonnage adjustments they could have made – though given that we know effectively nothing about their implementation of Clan tech yet, this is just supposition.
If they weren’t going to maintain the ‘double’ in DHS, then they could have at least changed the darn name to Improved Heat Sink or something and not give the vast majority of players who don’t crawl the forums looking for rules the wrong impression of their effectiveness.
The simple question with double heat sinks is this:
If you take any mech design at all, would it be be improved by double heat sinks?
The answer is 99% of the time yes; personally I cannot think of a single mech design that is better off with single heat sinks. The incredibly damning thing is that even at a value of 1.4 you almost always want them, and with the current MWO balance of 2.0 for engine heat sinks and 1.4 for mounted heat sinks, you still definitely always want double heat sinks… break even is ridiculously high, ~33 heat sinks before singles become “worth it” again. Even then because double heat sinks dissipate heat more rapidly, you are probably better off with 20-21 doubles than 34-36 singles, never mind the pretty vast weight savings.
A decision you should always make is not a serious decision.
Definitely that. I find myself running out of slots before I run out of weight in a lot of DHS designs, and so far, I haven’t run into an instance where it makes sense to switch to single heat sinks instead of installing a bigger engine.
meeper
1893
It’s the arbitrary hardpoint framework of MWO that sets the plate for less-than-meaningful DHS decisions which results in designs that often have more tonnage or crits available than hardpoints remaining. Within this framework, you’re absolutely right, choosing DHS is a no-brainer – but the 1.4 value is really just another bandaid atop the underlying flawed hardpoint system.
DHS in tabletop was a serious decision as not every mech required enormous heat sinking capability, which left a valid choice between weapons/heat/speed. Of course that’s not true in MWO, with it actively restricting speed choices, penalizing you (via reduced damage potential due to hardpoint limitations) for choosing non-optimal weapons (in terms of damage), and therefore leaving you with enough crits that DHS is seldom a ‘choice’.
Look at hardpoint distribution summed across all mechs currently available in MWO: 228 energy, 102 missile, and 50 ballistic. It comes as no surprise that the most common weapons are those that have the best tonnage:crit ratio (and worst heat:tonnage ratio) and the least common weapons are the ones with the worst tonnage:crit ratio (and best heat:tonnage ratio). The result of this weighted distribution is that the weapons with the best crit:heat ratio (ballistics) are so restricted that the average number of ballistics points per mech is less than 1.0 (four of the precious ballistic hardpoints are allocated to a darn 30t spider that can’t mount anything more than a machine gun with them). If you aren’t able to equip the weapons with the best crit:heat ratios, then it naturally follows that you’re going to wind up in situations where DHS is a non-choice. To me, even cursory analysis of this data points to a pretty serious design flaw.
As an aside, the 2.0 multiplier for up to the first 10 sinks in the engine skews the benefit towards lighter mechs that are more likely to primarily have engine-mounted sinks.
Keep in mind I was talking about tabletop when I said I cannot think of a mech design that would not benefit from double heat sinks. And in tabletop it’s worse than MWO… the already optimal weapons are greatly, greatly enhanced by double heat sinks. The quintessential medium laser, for example.
I literally cannot think of a single design where it is better to have single heat sinks. Can you?
Also the speed choice thing is crazytalk. Tabletop was much much much more restrictive, as you were bound by even multiples of your tonnage. And tabletop massively punished picking non-optimal weapon load-outs, more massively than MWO where almost every weapon system can be made to work reasonably well.
I was a huge Battletech junkie. Pretty sure I can still rattle off the specs of every mech in the 3025 technical readout with a high degree of accuracy off the top of my head… but the only reasonable weapon choices in tabletop were 1) medium lasers 2) PPC/Large Laser 3) LRMs (which were pretty situational). Other weapons were taken more for flavour and fun rather than good mech design.
MWO has done a FAR better job with weapon balance.
pg1
1895
I forgot where I read it (maybe even on here, too lazy to check!) but someone said in TT many SHS builds were heat neutral even. In MWO the same builds aren’t even with DHS(?). Is that true? I think the decision of double armor and high heat was for FPS gameplay. Overtime I’ve moved away from lasers towards missiles and ballistics. They seem much better overall to me. Part of it is how you aim lasers, at best you’re not doing more than 50-60% damage (weapon stats will confirm this now) and it’s spread over parts. So not only are lasers among the hottest weapons but they are also the hardest to use. I have about 60% hit with PPCs and I can aim those much better. Most my weapons are in the 50-60% effective range for damage even if the accuracy is much higher (for lasers). Gauss is actually my lowest at 40% but I’ve only run it on my CTF-3D a few matches where it’s paired with PPCs so I probably miss it more on alphas due to slower speeds at large distances.
I gave in and got RVN-3L. It’s amazing and definitely strong. I have virtually zero experience in lights and I was doing very well in it. The problem of course is the other RVNs are TERRIBLE! Trying to get experience on the RVN-2X is a nightmare. It’s not even half as good as the RVN-3L. The only good thing the RVN-2X has going for it is people usually ignore you because they know it’s such a bad mech. No amount of minor mech tuning can save a mech that bad.
My team is also likely going to sign up for - http://proxis.midgardmc.eu/mwo/ You can still sign up late but you need 8 people or more in your unit. It looks like a lot of fun and I’d be surprised if PGI can out do the community for community warfare. I just hope they don’t lock control up on the game to stamp out community leagues. In this league factions, clans, mercs and pirates are all competing with each other and have have access to the same resources basically but have different properties and goals. Factions are ranked by planets, clans by honorable kills (kills in matched tonnage or less tonnage), mercs by wins and pirates by sheer Cbills. The only negative I can find is you can’t play as a Lone Wolf (yet anyways). It also solves some of the ‘cheese’ problems as you rarely have access to every mech you’d want and have to make do with mechs available via allies or your own planets. Mercs when hired loan their mechs and pilots out so they will actually play with the other unit in real life. Clans could get screwed easily but a unit agreeing to send 600 tons then only sending 550 tons which would make that battle dishonorable. Be interesting to see it play out.
In tabletop it is easy to build a heat neutral mech. With double heat sinks it is trivial.
MWO is different; the possible rate of fire is much higher, and so it is much harder to acheive heat neutrality; instead you basically have to make decisions about how much/how quickly to fire before chance of overheat, an issue that rarely comes up in tabletop unless playing with some of the more terrible stock mechs.
Part of it is how you aim lasers, at best you’re not doing more than 50-60% damage (weapon stats will confirm this now) and it’s spread over parts. So not only are lasers among the hottest weapons but they are also the hardest to use. I have about 60% hit with PPCs and I can aim those much better.
Lasers are terrific weapons in MWO. Considering that my medium laser hit percetage is at 94% despite prolific use, even if I am only getting 60% damage out of each shot, that would be close to the same damage effectiveness as my PPC (which, like you, is at 60%). And they are still quite a bit more heat efficient than PPCs.
Hmm you are right this is easily calculable with the new stats. 2808 medium laser shots for 7832 damage, netting 2.7 damage per shot (including misses). 942 ER PPC shots for 5703 damage, netting 6 damage per shot. In terms of effective percentage damage per shot that is quite close (54% vs 60%)!
The only good thing the RVN-2X has going for it is people usually ignore you because they know it’s such a bad mech. No amount of minor mech tuning can save a mech that bad.
The 2X is very poor… I think I would just make it a PPC sniper if I had to do it again. At least it can’t do that any worse than any other light PPC sniper mech. The 4X on the other hand, I have perverse love of. Jump jet capable and able to mount an unexpectedly large gun.
I just hope they don’t lock control up on the game to stamp out community leagues.
Agreed. IMHO it would be best if they implemented private servers (even if they are paid for) to support these efforts. However I am not sure what whacky thing they are planning since the last comment on the issue was that theyw ere working on private matches but that “it would not be what most people are epxecting” or some such.
meeper
1897
You’re absolutely right. I completely disregarded the benefit of having 10 tons freed up simply by making the switch to doubles.
I’m not sure I’ll agree with you here. While we were restricted to multiples of tonnage under tabletop, we had a wider range of available ratings if we were willing to pay the tonnage penalty. That said, I’ll certainly agree that tabletop had optimal loadouts.
That said, the hardpoint imbalance I identified is pretty extreme and something that I’d love to see addressed in some way. 5:1 energy:ballistic availability is pretty crazy.
I agree… to a degree. I think MW4 had the the right idea with their hardpoint system which took into account the size of weapons, whereas MWO wanted to adhere closer to the tabletop design principles while still limiting loadouts to avoid ultra-cheesebuilds and retain mech flavour (to a degree). I still thiney could have put in hardpoint sizes, but maybe they were worried about limited people too much?
That said the specific complaint about there being more energy than ballistic hardpoints is just a function of the mechs they’ve chosen to add so far and that energy wepaons also are more ubiquitous than ballistics (not to mention lighter and easer to use).
The Jagermech and the soon-to-come Blackjack will go a ways towards correcting that.
Speaking of which I am looking forward to tomorrow! I have been playing my Spiders heavily (and successfully! The SDR-5V is still my winningest mech amazingly) and feeling like its time to get back into something with a bit more heft, and the Jagermech I think will fit the bill perfectly. Rumours of a 6 ballistic slot variant abound. We shall see!!!
meeper
1899
Even with the addition of the Jagermech and Blackjack, I doubt we’ll see much of an improvement. Oh sure, we may see the ratio shift to 4:1 or at best 3.5:1, but we’re never going to see parity (they’ll add energy hardpoints to those mechs too, remember). Take missile-centric mechs: we already have a number of those (Catapult, Treb, and arguably the Stalker), and yet we still have a ratio of 2.5:1 in favor of energy over missiles.
It’s certainly true that energy weapons have always been more ubiquitous in BT than their missile and ballistic brethren, but the ratio and distribution suggests that there’s a design philosophy biased against them. Even the 50 ballistic hardpoints in the game are somewhat misleading when you consider how many slots the average ballistic weapon requires and how many of those are grouped together in locations where only a subset can be used for non-MG ballistic weapons. I’m not necessarily suggesting that there’s malice in the design philosophy against ballistics – it may be an art pipeline issue or even, as you suggest, a sampling bias – but I do think that it’s present, and I think that it’s unfortunate. If it is based on the fear that ballistics are overpowered in some way, I hope they come to their senses.
With regard to overall hardpoint design, I think you’re right that they’re trying to avoid the ultra-cheesebuilds, but the funny thing is that those cheesebuilds were almost always predominately energy-based – and that just happens to be the direction they’re leaning in terms of hardpoint allocation.
Completely agree. Tomorrow’s content patch is easily the one I’ve been looking forward to the most in almost a year of playing. The Jagermech is one of my all-time favorite mechs and I’m thrilled that it’s finally available.
I record all the details shown on the summary screen of all my matches (and I’ve been doing so for months, so I have quite the dataset). For me, my founder’s catapult is easily my all-round best. I tend to do a bit less damage in it, but I kill more, and my kill-death ratio is much higher than anything else.
pg1
1900
Tomorrow’s patch should be interesting. I just hope the splash damage bug doesn’t lead to air and artillery strikes being OP. They are removing all missile splash damage on April 2nd because one SSRM can do as much as 15 damage with splash! All missiles are broken not just SSRMs. My best mechs are either the CTF-3D or AS7-D-DC I think. I’ve been mainly grinding garbage mechs lately (RVN-2X and RVN-4X) to get the RVN-3L all maxed out. Sadly tomorrow’s patch is changing (or fixing?) the RVN-3L hit box so it might not be the top light anymore.
