August 8th - Weapon Balance update

Saying that Clans are balanced against IS is definitely not correct. But saying that ClanMechs (all) are OP is a bit exaggerated. There are definitely some ClanMechs like the Timberwolf (Somehow a 75tons Shadowhawk) and the Direwolf (Ultra Firepower Destroyer), which have obviously a lot of advantages against their same weighted IS counterparts (e.g. Orion and Atlas). Weapon-wise it is analyzed in several forums that Clan Weapons especially the Lasers are far too powerful compared to their IS counterparts.

If you are a smart pilot/engineer you would min-max with these advantages the better ClanMechs. In Premades with all of such smart pilots/engineers you quickly get huge advantages against IS Mechs. Try to beat a Pop-Tard Timberwolf or a Alpha Monster-Direwolf with a IS Build in the same Weightclass. You can't beat it. That's fact.

The only chance which you have to beat them are - rightly said - "certain tactics". Just like A Master of Arts could beat any Newb with a single Chopstick or A Troop of Veterans could beat an Army of heavy gunz-armed Cadets with bare hands in "300"-Style. But still i would agree, that Clan-Mechs have several Advantages against IS-Mechs.

Meta IS 2AC5+2PPC vs Meta Clan Gauss + 2ERPPC, what you chose if you could chose? You would be a fool to chose the IS Loadout weight-wise.

Lasergunner IS 2ERLLas vs Lasergunner Clan 2ERLLas, what you chose if you'd had the option? I know your answer already.

Dakka IS 3UAC5 vs Dakka Clan 3UAC5.. Ok, the IS would have some more "pin-point" without the Burstmode, but look at the other stats:

Name Damage Heat Cooldown Range Max Range Slots Tons Speed Ammo/t DPS HPS EHS Impulse Health Costs

ULTRA AC/5 5.00 1.00 1.66 600 1,200 5 9.0 1,150 30 3.01 0.60 7 0.040 10.00 400,000

C-ULTRA AC/5 5.00 1.00 1.66 630 1,260 3 7.0 1,150 90 3.01 0.60 7 0.033 10.00 400,000

You could analyze all the other weapons for the stats. If you have Advantages over almost all of them, plus recognizing the Hardpoints-Advantages and the Advantage of having ligh-weighted/high-speed XL Engines without the same risk of Death by ST-Destruction, you could only say that ClanMechs aren't OP as a Pilot, because you don't max out the full advantages of your Clan-Tech Options, or as Enemy in IS Mechs, because of your Skill-Class Matchmaking (some people call this ELO). What do I mean - There a lots of Clan Pilots out there, which are horrible in Builds-Engineering, most times because they don't know smurfy or mechspecs or any similar min-max-site. Add in their mediocre Pilotskills and voilà - you get the feeling that Clanners aren't OP.

Play 12 IS Mechs VS 12 Clan Mechs Pugs/Premades, like PGI tested recently and read the forum comments about the results. If most of such Matches were tending to total annihilation results for the IS, then there must be an obvious reason.

I wouldn't say that all Clan-Mechs are OP, but generally compared Clan-Tech is OP just like it was intended in the Books/Lore. Solutions to balance Matches with this Tech-Imbalance? Only via Weapon Nerfs (which is against the original Idea equals Crap imo) or via Team Ratios like 12v10 or 12v8. PGI will stay with their tradition, so prepare for further Nerfs in the soon future.

But good tactics is correctly a crucial skill to overcome any OP stuff in a team based game.

 

Unless you don't own any clan mechs then it is absolutely less fun. I'd say that my MWO play time has gone down about 90% since clan came out. It's just no fun being stuck with the handful of mechs in my collection that are still competitive and getting pounded by OP clan mechs all the time.

I played a lot last weekend because of the event and it was like pulling teeth a lot of the time. Oy.

 

challenge weekends are always a bitch because the arti's come out in full force and the group pros play solo - you can get in trouble quick because even as pugs, they know the proper way to dominate and already have an organized strategy that works that the other group 'solo pugs' know.

 

Oddly, I've found the opposite lately...except for during the Clan vs IS crap "event" they did, I've been piloting my Ember a lot...and I broke out my CTF-3D which I never mastered too, and had an absolute blast, and racked up a ton of kills and damage doing it. I've found that a lot of people piloting the clan mechs easily underestimate what the IS mechs are capable of, and that adds some vulnerability. Is it simple to win? Naturally not, but it's hardly impossible. The main times when it's glaring is when they turn on Clan vs IS, but when the teams are mixed, it fails to be as much of an issue, since both sides have players with access to the tech.

That said, having Clan vs IS be a 100% thing is going to mean bad things for this game. Either Blagg's prediction comes true and we have massive nerfs being thrown around (making the clan "tech" a pale shadow of what it's supposed to be lore-wise), or IS teams will be going into matches with large number advantages. I don't think 12v10 is enough of a difference, but 12v8 might make balance rough as well. This is made doubly difficult by the fact that the PGI nerf bat is already swinging...so if clan weapons get nerfed AND team size gets changed, things could sway rapidly in the other direction. The problem here isn't a "just desserts" for the clan players, but that the constant imbalance in one direction or the other will cause people to put the game down, thus ending our most recent attempt at the MechWarrior franchise.

I can't tell you for sure what the solution here is. Some people think CW will magically fix everything (it won't), some people want massive nerfs to magically fix everything (they won't), and some people want PGI to focus on mechanic changes, rather than nerfs to magically fix everything (and PGI likely won't). It's up in the air right now...if PGI can figure out the right way to balance the game, things could be salvaged...but moving too fast with Clan vs IS will murder this game right away.

 

Ok.... I learned a lesson yesterday in a legue drop against a clan-team.
A pure clandrop vs IS with the same tonnage ist extremely fubar.
Although we managed to win one round w/o losing a mech, and had two ties, the rest of the matches were somehow uneven because Locusts and Commandos were matched with Ullers.
No matter what we tried, we felt the raw power of the clan machines.

So.. I decided to rethink my former statements.
An average team with almost the same tonnage piloting clantech has some serious advantages against a pure is-team, as long as the numbers (mechs / tonnage) are evenly matched.

But I still think that in PUG-Games Clantech, although the effect is palpable... does not make much of a difference.

I'm really curious to see if there will be 2 lances against one star in the future.

 

Already switched from cERLLas to cLPLas? At the beginning of the "Invasion" everybody talked bad about the Large Wubs compared to the ER Pews, i guess now with the latest ER Pew.Nerf the Large Wub seems to be the new best Hit-Hard-at-Range-Laser.Option (if you have limited Energy HPs).

Name Damage Heat Cooldown Range Max Range Slots Tons Speed Duration DPS HPS EHS Impulse Health Costs

C-ER LRG LASER 11.25 9.00 3.25 890 1,780 1 4.0 - 2.00 2.14 1.71 18 - 10.00 400,000

C-LRG PULSE LASER 11.80 8.00 3.25 600 1,200 2 6.0 - 1.30 2.59 1.76 18 - 10.00 350,000
[hr]

btw.. do you guys have any lag/disco issues since last patch like this here?

 

Yeah, Blagg. I've had a game or two that had a bunch of dc's including me and a ton of lag when I was connected. Thought it was my ISP until I saw the final screen and realized it must have been the server because over half the players had been dropped. Seems spotty though and it hasn't happened regularly.

On the Clan vs. IS: I have a bunch of IS and recently broke down and bought a set of Warhawks. Maybe this isn't true of the other mechs but the Warhawks have much more vulnerable weapons than my IS mechs and I am regularly without an arm and at least half of my firepower. If you take out a Warhawk RT then you probably got most of the ammo too because the LT is full of HS. As far a raw firepower the WH is definately ahead of my Victors and Stalkers but I've ended up weaponless in my Warhawks way more often than in any other mech (maybe bad builds but options are limited).

When playing mixed PUG (which is all I do) you have to know the weaknesses of the mechs you are facing so you can take advantage. Basics are true for both IS and clan like legging lights, culling a mech from the pack and focus fire. The guys who pilot IS need to figure out some mech specific tactics that give them the advantage sort of like the "Thatch Weave" from WWII that allowed lousy US Wildcats to have a chance in a dogfight against Japanese Zeros.

PGI is going to do what they are going to do and I'm not going to worry about that. You can quit if you want to but I look at this as a challenge. I think I'll start a thread where people can post tactics that work for them against specific clan mechs. Here's the first one: if the Dire Wolf is looking at you then you'd better move.

 

You got that right. Every Mech has a weakness... and imho the Warhawk is very vulnerable. At least in yesterdays drops it was always the Warhawk that fell quickly. While the others (Ryoken, Adders and Kitfoxes) where hard to kill. It makes a huge difference whether you play mixed tech with some pugs to spare, or you play in a legue match with tonnage limitations and pure tech on both sides.

I'm positive that there will be some balancing. The league I play is already rethinking the dropcalculator after the first results (almost every match was won by Clan-forces with a 2:1 ratio).

 

You took the two worst and lightest IS mechs out and lost against mechs almost double their weight....

Why on earth didn't you use Embers, Jenners, Raven 3L's and Spiders 5D which are all good mechs and the same tonnage as the Uller (35t)?

With similar pilots a mixed team of the mechs I listed will easily win against your team of locusts and commandos without having any Clan mechs in sight.

Not arguing there aren't many op clan mech comboes but the above is not even a remotely good balance test.

 

We did, because the droprules are like that.
We HAD to drop with a Locust, because the die-roll named a 20t Mech. Since there is no Koshi, nor Dasher, this meant a Kitfox for the clans.
Toldya the league council is rethinking their pairing methods....

 

That's just cool. I may have to break down, dust off the headset and join a proper unit.

The point still remains. You were crippled in (at least) your light much change. Yet, you still rolled them in the first battle and fought to two ties. That would make me think that equal tonnage at high skill levels may be fairly equal (I do say fairly, the clans are meant to be more powerful)

This makes me think of a flaw in the limited Clan vs IS testing they just did. The clans skew heavy. If you enforce the 3x4 rule there clans will naturally have a weight advantage. Would the results be different if they more strictly matched tonnage? Also, do we have more data than 90% clan win in the test? Like the average spread? I'm not even sure I'd mind if the spread was 2-3 mechs. Obviously we don't want stomps.

 

This thread is getting really interesting. The one im following more

 

Ahhh just 1 Locust sorry I presumed from your post you meant you had a team of locusts and commandoes.

 

I freely admit I have certain problems with the Clan vs Is and Clan vs Clan and IS vs IS balance ... mainly that I suspect it will never happen as it reduces the game to rock scissors paper which is incredibly repetitive.

Lets be honest last night I averaged 2.1 kills per battle - nothing exceptional but nothing too bad. I'm sure a lot here did better. But here's the rub ... I was in Awesomes in every battle except 3 and at the start of the evening they just had the basics done so aren't even anywhere near optimal. Those battles included a lot where where my dual ERLL/tag/dual LRM 15 or energy boats were routinely killing 3 clan mechs in a match. Not all wins in any way and some were very frustrating like the one I personally killed a DWF, DDC and TBR with my dual PPC/dual ERLL/3ML trying to hold their front up..... to find we had only 4 kills vs their 11 as I died.

Lesson... its not just direwolves and timberwolves that are OP atm.

 

I have clan mechs, and I still enjoy playing IS. Piloting a FS/Jenner is fun. I did repeated 800+ scores in my jager with 2-3+ kills during last few days - but it's probably the only mech which i'm really skilled at piloting, and it really feels like paper these days. It's harder to play but possible. Like i said somewhere else, Clans are overpowered, but not gamebreaking. Too bad it means that the weaker IS mechs are cannon fodder right now.

 

Seriously though...

...what type of crack smoke are you people under.

95% of mechs in this game have always been fodder.

What the fuck is so different now that it's IS vs Clan, what, it's more difficult now to justify using shitty mechs when the threshold has been upped another arbitrary notch?

Of course the shit is unbalanced, it's supposed to be. I keep reading people posting stuff that essentially reads like "so tired of Timbers, they're too powerful" yeah NO SHIT. They're supposed to be. That what the fuck happened in the lore, gz on seeing how it was viscerally in the game. Step it up or get shit on, that's what ComGuard did.

If any argument about that shit should be made, it's regarding the prevelency of those type of mechs. Only true ballers should be in them. Not only that, but those mechs should even MORE powerful than they currently are. That'll give you the rarity (the 'oh shit!' factor of encountering), plus the sinking feeling that you have to play flawless or you get shat upon.

 

Thats fairly untrue.

They werent at all cannon fodder, they were bad specced.

And do u know why i know this? Cause they all mounted the same weapons, so if u failed in a same weight, it was YOUR fault, but there was no problem, u returned to the mechlab and tried other thing. U can argue that some are more flexible, cause they have many hardpoints or from all weapon's types, or whatever (position, protection, etc...), but again, they were mounting the same weapons, u just needed a tactic to carry that firepower whr it should be deployed, just that.

About Lore: Do u know the difference between books/movies/stories and this? They have happy endings, or at least open enough to let a happy chance to carry on. Not cause for real it would end like that, but cause a person decide it must be that way. The super-weapon get hitted by the hero and all will be fine.

Here we arent gonna have a trillion IS mechs to face a few Clan ones, or some resort to old misterious great technology, or whatever. Here we are STOMPED by a stupidly overpowered mech, so when it comes for CBills, just wonder: 5+ Timber per team in each damn match. Here we came to enjoy a game, not to save the fucking galaxy......Its THAT simple.

And im not even gonna speak about the possibility u opened in the last parragraph to give them to super-meta-players and making them MORE powerfull....How? Adding a special module that reflects dmg to enemies? Cause its probably the only thing that can be made to make the Timber more powerfull that it is currently :angry:

Proves? Sure, lets check the diff between the TBR Club of 1000+, 32 replies in 2 months, vs the ON1 Club of 1000+, 4 posts in 6 months. They weight the same..................

Trying to defend the Timber doesnt need a HUGE and DEEP nerf is like saying the sky is red. Take out the red glasses and see the sky as blue as all ppl can.

 

You still don't get it.

Compare the Phract or Victor to the TBR, not the fucking Orion.

Good lord...

...and yes, 95% of mechs and variants are shit. That includes builds that people make. That's just the fact. I don't care what build you make and think it's good, I or any other legit player would take a massive dump effortlessly on whatever piece of shit is out there unless it's one of the relevent meta tryhard builds you can count on one fucking hand.

You don't roll into a league or tourny match with a fucking derpass mech.

I'm not trying to shit on, or anyone, I'm just saying... people get very sentimental with mechs in this game. I was lucky in the sense that the mech I liked was a meta mech and I could build something legit in it. Otherwise, shed the single tear and move the fuck on, humbly. Especially now that Clantech is on the shelves.

It's also sad that you missed the point about Clantech imbalance could potentially be solved by prevelency. This is a game design notion I brought up to highlight that everything doesn't have to be related to raw data discrepencies between Clan/IS. The point I was making - if they [best clan mechs] are rare, then they wouldn't be in every match, would they. That alone balances things from the 'game play experience' perspective, cuz it translate to a TBR *not* shitting on you every round. The point is that you can actually balance things from a macro perspective without having to tweak the actual numbers [dmg, torso degrees etc]. You started blabbing about special reflect mods or who the fuck knows what, and clearly didn't get this bit. Think beyond the numbers, if not, not worth my time responding when you can't do that, no offense.

As far as lore? Dude. TBRs weren't ubiquitous. They also shit on everything. Now, hmm... lets think... the only thing in MWO that is rare, and shits on everything... are top players. Put 2 and 2 together or something, do your homework, run the numbers... it makes sense. Is it the best solution, the actual solution, no. But taking top clan mechs off the shelves and only handing the keys to guys who earn them makes sense lore wise, it makes sense balance wise, it gives incentive for a CW-type of ladder to obtain right to piloting those mechs, etc... there's a lot you could do around that with regards to balance, immersion, and carrot sticking the playerbase. It basically requires no fine-tuning of numbers, either. I can tell you haven't actually considered what I said, and that's fine. Read this and soak it in and consider it, or don't, point is to think critically about stuff instead of from a biased point. I don't play this game, I have no agenda. Do you? Nuff said.

 

Guys, cool down. Not worth to fight each other. Fight PGI better.

tldr: 12v8 and let Clan-Tech be a bit OP. That's fine.

IS Mechs must be in the majority, otherwise it is logical that Clanners dominate almost every match. 12v12 (ISvClan) with Weapons-Nerfing was never a good Idea. To have a perfect balance you would need to nerf Clan-Tech back to IS-Tech Niveau (wtf!). That's not what was intended lorewise. But running two Dragons (Flame & Fang) against a Timberwolf would be somehow fair.

 

Definitely plausible and feasible, something like the simple "12v8" concept can be smoothed out and find a sweet area for it that pacifies most.

But there will always be people who cry that Clantech is better, when it's like... dude, it's supposed to be, if it wasn't, then the game wouldn't even make any god damn sense.

I'm not sayin Auriga was... just, there's always that lingering whiff in the air of cry. It could be 12v1 Timber and someone would still cry, since they "fight Timber every round" etc.

Everyones got complaints, and yeah, throw them at PGI they actually deserve it. I'm not saying take huge shits on them or rail on them with any passion (cuz if so, its like, get a life), but, they deserve their hands put to the fire. This is their bed, they shit in it, now they lay down in it. *does the thumb-across-throat move* GO TO SLEEP, PGI! GO TO SLEEP. hear: