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What would it take to balance Clan standard (not improved) Heavy Lasers? Pick one. Add comments in this thread.

Who says it's unbalanced as it is currently?

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Karagin-

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Pretty much all weapons, to my knowledge, are balanced with BV. Other parts of the BV calculation may be more suspect, but the weapon calculations are at least based on facts.

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Rick
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* There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. *

They aren't unbalanced.

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I agree.

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F: Other. Take a heavy laser, rig for the proper weight and lift evenly at the center of gravity. There, balanced. (/yardbird)

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Be careful what you wish for. I might let you have it.

You bring up an excellent point. I agree. My poll probably would have been more accurate if I had used useful instead of balanced. Your point seems to run counter to TPTB (see below post from the official site):

<<Ask the Writers / Re: Why are IS pulse lasers so disappointing?
« on: 03 March 2013, 20:49:46 »
Hello,

On the bell curve of a 2D6 dice mechanic, a -2 to-hit modifier is hardly a "tiny improvement", and the ranges of 3-10 hexes are still outside of punching and kicking distance.

Making pulse ranges competitive with standard ranges would have obviated the need for standard lasers. It has long been an established policy for us to only introduce new weapons that do not render older ones completely obsolete.

Well, except for when we introduce deliberately nerfed technologies that were intended to show what was ALREADY rendered obsolete anyway.

Thanks,

- Herb >>

There are numerous examples of new technologies which render the older versions obsolete like Clan SRMs, Clan LRMs, etc which are based on the Inner Sphere versions. In any case, BV should balance things out, even if it makes another weapon or equipment obsolete, right?

Obsolete to one side, but not the other, case in point, Clan LRMs, would be something Inner Sphere should have copied in full long time ago, same with the Clan Laser weapons and other things, thus anything pre-Clan Invasion should have disappeared from the Houses arsenals by 3070 and yet it never happen. So in this game the word Obsolete doesn't have a true meaning and the only thing unbalancing a weapon is how munchkin folks get with combining things, ie the Pulse Targ combo of old...

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Karagin-

Darkness is a friend of mine. Sometimes I have to beat it back, or it would overwhelm me. Shirley Meier

[url]http://karagin12.livejournal.com/[/url]

The Wookiee, he's not wearing any pants!

[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/mil-army.gif[/img]

There are numerous examples of obsolete technology even just within the Inner Sphere technology base. The Inner Sphere Ultra AC/5 and LB-10X are two examples which come to mind; What percentage of people would use a standard AC/5 or AC/10 instead if given the choice? If you want to break it down to the point where a particular piece of technology isn't obsolete to everyone, including any far flung planet, then that is beyond the scope of usefulness to this thread. Also, if the Battle Value (BV) is correct, then is "munchkin" really relevant?

Your point is not correct given that the UAC and LB-X series can not use some of the new ammo types that have come out give how they function. Is it realistic, indeed it is not, but for the game it works to balance out new vs old.

At the same time why would anyone continue making non-ER lasers? Well even with double heat sinks the heat issue is still a concern thus the standard lasers continue to play a role in use on mechs and vehicles.

We can go round and round on what makes one thing obsolete or not, and what brings the items back into play in the BT universe.

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Karagin-

Darkness is a friend of mine. Sometimes I have to beat it back, or it would overwhelm me. Shirley Meier

[url]http://karagin12.livejournal.com/[/url]

The Wookiee, he's not wearing any pants!

[img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/mil-army.gif[/img]

IMHO, when Herb says certain weapons have been "nerfed", he means that they've tried to eliminate "super-weapons", forming some drawbacks to balance the advantages. Otherwise, no one would ever use the older weapons. But you asked about "balance", and Herb wasn't really discussing balance. In this case, balance is done (or can be done) using Battle Value, which has exacting, precise calculations. Now, I will say that those exact calculations presume certain basic skills, which are not always (okay, not ever) constant. Thus, a Pulse Laser is far more effective (that is in improving the average damage per fire) with a poor gunner than a good gunner. And the BV calculations don't/can't take that into account, but rather use average values (some would say too highly skilled of values). Because of this, for average pilots (who uses those, these days?), Pulse weapons are more powerful than their relative BV would indicate. But with complexity the way it is, calculations have to stop /somewhere/.

"Balancing", by making more powerful weapons heavier and bulkier have nothing to do with actual game balance; BV does that. You could make Gauss Rifles weigh 1 ton and take up 1 crit, and designs using them /should/ still be balanced properly by BV. At least, that's what BV is supposed to do.

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Rick
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* There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. *

I think they are balanced.

What I don't think is that they are USEFUL.

I don't like their +1 modifier.

For the same reason that I like the IDEA of the Heavy Gauss Rifle, I like the idea of the heavy laser as a prototype weapon. Something that was used for a while because it was the best anybody could do at the time. In the same way that the Prototype weapons in the Fourth Succession War are flawed. I like that those Prototype weapons are the same mass and size as later finalized models, so you can swap them in say that your new build 'Mech from the Fourth Succession war has them. But in later play, you can replace it with a real Gauss Rifle.

I wish they had done the same thing with the Improved Heavy Gauss Rifle and the Improved Heavy Lasers. Make them the same size and tonnage...just...fixed. For the Gauss, straight 20 damage. For the lasers, maybe less damage but no penalty to hit.

You see, for a game, I want as few special rules as possible. Games move faster when all the weapons are easy to understand and quick to use. That's one thing I don't like about LBXs. Too many die rolls. I love Streaks though. Pulses I'm happy with due to just one mod that makes it better.

What I don't like is weapons systems that require a paragraph or three of special rules to tell you how they work. Tell me their damage, their range, their heat, and their ammo. Then let me roll. Thank you. Or if we're playing QuickStrike, tell me damage and range and let me roll. Thank you very much.

Heavy Lasers are no where near the worst offenders in my book. But I don't like any weapon that can't target an enemy as well as other weapons can. I want to play BattleTech, not WiffleTech. I want to drive my enemies screaming before me, to hear the lamentations of their women as I empty another salsa bowl, and generally have fun smacktalking. So Heavy Lasers are not my favorite weapon. Though I have played them, and they can be fun. They just are not a "standby" weapon that I would want on any 'Mech, like the ML or the CERML.

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On the 2D6 curve, any penalty is significant. +1 to hit in CBT is a big deal. I have played entire canon games where no hits were scored in the time limit. I remember many times back in the day that it seemed like every game ended up in a point blank slugfest just from people being frustrated trying to score hits with Gunnery 4.

This actually has been one of my bigger issues with dice RPG's in general: the frustratingly high failure rates, especially of less experienced characters. It's a drawback of dice rolling games as a whole. I remember so often feeling like I HAD to munch out my characters because they would fail almost automatically at things that in my mind should have been easy successes for the character I saw in my head. Very few people want to play a bumbling idiot who puts his group in danger, let alone spend a whole afternoon just trying to score one hit in CBT. This is a big part of why I eventually threw out the rules and began writing stories and running my games much more as RP sessions than rolling dice.

Sorry for the off topic rant, but I think it's relevant not just to heavy lasers, but CBT and gaming as a whole.

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Be careful what you wish for. I might let you have it.