Having played that map several times during the Public Test and again last night using 1.2 I can confirm!
Players will have to adjust tactics to be more mobile and seek cover.
Tanky McTank Face is no longer the go to strategy.
1.3 Ability Theorycrafting (post-stream)
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Players will have to adjust tactics to be more mobile and seek cover.
Tanky McTank Face is no longer the go to strategy.
In that case, would you care to explain how not moving is better than moving?
The way I see it, if you don't want to burn all your morale on Vigilance just to be able to shoot, you'd have to brace to get those 60%. So if you want to shoot, 40% is the non-Vigilance max, and then there is absolutely no reason not to move to get a couple of evasion pips. It's just a straight-up bonus you get from moving around, making standing still the sub-optimal choice.
Taking that to its logical conclusion, you want pilots with Bulwark and Sure Footing to maximise your defenses, leaving only Coolant Vent and Ace Pilot as level 8 skills - both of which are good choices and enables a lot of interesting maneuver tactics.
That's certainly a new take on the old "AC20 Headshots" argument.
The problem is that a Bulwark mech is going to get hit a lot more meaning that at any point when it takes a hit you'll expect it to have less armor overall. How much less? Well pretty much in the way the numbers predict, so it evens out. Note this is probably one of the reasons why early on everyone was commenting on how Behemoth seemed to be a headshot sponge, which is an issue going the other direction: Bulwark 'mechs get more pilot injuries.
Basically if there is any particular benefit of that sort, it's going to be a minor one that plays out in single percentage points: as I said, I've exclusively evasion tanked since day one and made it out of multiple ironman/honourman campaigns with minor casualties. Best advice therefore is not to sweat it too much, and just tailor your defensive strategy to what you need your mech to do.
If they're walking, they're not really turrets are they?
In 1.2, the best passive damage-mitigation tactic is to make sure you have the bonus from Bulwark every turn (i.e. stand still and fire), whether you were in cover or in an open field. If you absolutely had to move you'd jump and brace or used Vigilance so as to not lose Bulwark. The way Bulwark works in 1.2 gives you a strong incentive not to move (because you lose Bulwark if you do).
In 1.3, the changes to Bulwark means the incentive not to move is removed: As long as you're sticking to cover, you'll get the benefits of Bulwark. You can no longer turret in the middle of an open field like you can in 1.2. Also, the mitigation from cover is reduced by 5% (down to 20%), so it is vitally important to either have lots of evasion pips or Bulwark to get that reduction up to 40% (down 10% from 1.2). If you brace or use Vigilance in cover, you'll max out your passive damage mitigation at 60% -20% less than in 1.210% more than in 1.2 (thank you @Antagonist85 for the correction).
This means that Bulwark is no longer the no-brainer choice it is in 1.2, and since you're free to move why not pick up Sure Footing to gain an extra evasion pip?
The meta is very likely to be Bulwark + Sure Footing + (Ace Pilot/Coolant Vent), which in and of itself leads to the 1.2 tendency for static trench warfare being removed; the new Bulwark gives its bonuses just by being in cover, and Sure Footing gives an extra pip anytime you move. So why not move? Moving from cover to cover only increases your defenses by giving you some evasion pips in addition to the damage mitigation from Bulwark.
We've had this out before, so I don't think I'm changing your mind, but let it be known I disagree with the comment on Bulwark being a no-brainer in 1.2.
Again, all moot, because we're definitely on the same page on the 1.3 changes.
Letting the enemy come to you is good strategy full stop (within reason: do try and control it so that they don't join up with their reinforcements). That means I'm not sure why you're making it out to be a problem: if you're not controlling the engagement you're most likely losing the engagement.
I also don't get how you believe that there's going to be that much turreting: which is better, sitting in cover with a flat 40% DR, or sitting in cover with a 40% DR and 50% less chance to be hit? In the first you're taking 60% of the total damage output, the second you're taking 30% on the first shot (+6% for each shot after). In fact every evasion pip now becomes free damage mitigation compared to 1.2 Bulwark, so why not just take it?
As for sniping, that's always been easier with a couple of meaty tanks sitting up front spotting and opening up/taking advantage of opportunities: there's a reason 2 brawlers and 2 snipers is a *very* common lance loadout amongst veterans. That's precisely the kind of dynamic play the changes are designed to bring about.
Disagreement noted (again)
This, exactly. All other things being equal, being in cover with Bulwark and a few evasion pips is always going to be better than just being in cover with Bulwark. And with 1.3 Bulwark, there's just no reason to avoid picking up those evasion pips (as there was in 1.2 where if you moved you lost the Bulwark effects).
Disagreement noted (again)
Hah, pretty much.
It is like watching a Tennis Match with you two on this topic
Although I am rooting for @stjobe
It's not that @ThatGuyMontag doesn't have valid or sound arguments; he does, and I completely understand and respect his position. It's just that it's never worked for me, and I have to go with my personal experience before others' experience (as a fellow philosopher I think TGM would accept that position as well).It is like watching a Tennis Match with you two on this topic
Please, let's not make this personal. He has his experiences and draw valid and logical inferences from them, as I do with mine. Neither of us is "right" - or rather, neither of us is wrong in any absolute sense of the word. What works for him doesn't work for me, and that's just that. Diff'rent strokes.
Ohhhh no... you missed the teasing nature of my post. I should have added more emojis!
I very much like the 1.3 changes that are coming (after the tweaks). During my playthrough with the Public Test I definitely appreciated both tank types and generally speaking used both 2 x 2 in my lances. The tweaks are reinforcing both Evasion Tanking and Bulwark tanking. Which makes the ultimate tank BOTH.
The trials and tribulations of textual communicationOhhhh no... you missed the teasing nature of my post. I should have added more emojis!
Teasing acknowledged
Which makes sense, why would a mech pilot stay out in the open? They wouldn't.
It's worked for me as well since 1.0 and on. Though I am not the type of gamer that follows whatever the flavor of the month meta is to begin with. Granted I'm also not much of a multiplayer type of person either so that may have something to do with it.
BW+Eva will probably be very powerful but also Master Tactician. Because one thing I don't think I've seen mentioned is that the AI will be more deadly if you don't take defensive precautions but also more vulnerable in general, so a powerful focused salvo at a distance while in cover probably could offset the lack of +10% extra evasion. You can take Ace Pilot instead, so you go EVA+BW but I think a case can still be made for MT+BW, most of it when using JJs to manipulate LoS.
IMO focused damage gets and disabling a mech fastest as posible gets more important in 1.3, and on the same token Multi & Breaching Shot gets worse because most of the time you won't get as big an advantage as before.
So point one: played right, in the current build, the two defensive strategies are basically equivalent. Nobody should feel compelled to change away from the strategies that are working for them. That said 1.3 is clearly designed to favour my sort of strategies (though thankfully it's a lot more forgiving than the beta skills were), so people are inevitably going to have to start getting to grips with them going forward.
That's why I think it's worth wondering why evasion strategies haven't clicked for you. Having never seen you play I can't say why it's not worked for you, but I can say that the most common factor which can cause it to fail in my play is just being out position because an evasion strategy at core is an angles of attack strategy. If it's not working it's because I've picked the wrong angle of attack, usually one without enough of the right kind of terrain cover or one that's poorly supported by the rest of my lance, so planning my approach with evasion in mind is step one: I start doing this from the moment I drop.
Once I make contact, if I find myself at some point in a position when my defences are starting to fail, my first goal is to change that angle of attack, typically by pulling back towards my snipers and then trying to find a different direction to approach the enemy. Sometimes this can mean spending a turn not firing and instead repositioning towards a better defensive position, which typically happens when reinforcements appear on my flank. Having a feel for where to pull back tom and who to put into Guarded, is as much a part of the strategy as guaranteeing I have enough evasion pips.
If there is nowhere to reposition of course, and I don't think I can handle the enemy's firepower, it's time to think of withdrawing.
Another issue is that evasion is only really an effective strategy with jump cavalry: the need to be in cover and the speed hit you take there means that moving typically doesn't give you enough pips to be viable. That said, one of the benefits of the new skills is that Bulwark makes simply moving into cover a lot more viable as far as defenses are concerned: it's still better to use jump cavalry, but I can imagine the new skills being a benefit for certain types of mechs.
You missed the main point... there is a map... lets just call it a map of total doom which happens to be a Desert Map with Water.
In 1.2, the strategy with a Bulwark pilot would be... stand in the water and just fire... turret mech. Evasion tanking is sketchy at best on this map.
In 1.3 Public Test, standing in the water and Bulwark tanking is a recipe for getting your brains blown out. Get out of the water on the Desert Map! Find some cover. Move!
1.3 > 1.2.
Bulwark was overpowered in v1.2, which is why I suggested these changes months ago and, ether the developers saw my suggestion and agreed with me or they arrived at the same conclusions I did:
It is not that evasion strategies "have not clicked" with anyone, everyone uses them in Roguetech.
It's that, with evasion being able to be diminished, it being random and with the opfor having a 2, 3 or sometimes 4 to 1 advantage, it is clearly inferior to bulwark in v1.2. All it takes is one sensor lock or a few units with LRM's to completely remove your evasion bonus and deal you tons of damage. This is not the case with v1.2 bulwark, which maintains that sweet 50% bonus (which stacks with minerals and viligance movement, as an aside) no matter what you do. You also don't have to move, so you can keep that perfect position on the enemy or high ground, without having to then give it up on a later turn to keep your evasion high.
Running through cover should have been better than it was, now it will be. Standing out in the open should be bad and now it will be. That's what makes this change great.
I know the map you're talking about. standing out in the open SHOULD get your brains blown out. No mech pilot in the lore of this IP in the history it's been around would ever do that if they could help it. So honestly I don't see what the issue is.
Respectfully, that's not true, because there are plenty of people who say the exact opposite including myself, Havamal (who is fairly circumspect about it, but has mentioned it more than once), @mjbroekman and now @SpectralThundr as well as the long strings of people commenting on the skills beta post who pointed out how they didn't like the changes to Evasive Move (something that's incidentally also been addressed in the latest reveal). You don't get to just casually dismiss all of those experiences because it's inconvenient for your conclusion, especially as the maths doesn't support your assertion: in theory and in practice the strategies are equivalent.
The idea that some strategies don't "click" may or may not be true, but it's the only possible explanation I've got left for why some people are successful when using evasion (in my case overwhelmingly successful to the point that Bulwark was repeatedly a wasted skill on my frontline) and other people can't get it to work. The idea that this may have something to do with how people use terrain however *is* directly relevant to my own experiences: evasion stops working for me when *I* don't use the terrain properly. If that's where it fails for me, there's a good chance that's where it's failing for everyone else.
And I couldn't give a fig for Roguetech. I do not like the design strategy there, so I'll never play it and what happens there will never have a bearing on how I think about strategy in *this* game. Permanent evasion in particular is a frankly hideous response that makes evasion strictly better than bulwark and guts what I find fun about the current approach, namely that every defence has a strategic counter outside of "fire and pray".
As for HBS's response, they're responding to people's complaints, and that is an eminently sensible thing to do. That does not mean that people's complaints necessarily reflect reality: the Steam reviews are a frankly tedious case study as to why that is. This is especially true given how loud people are about this one issue. Ultimately it doesn't really matter too much to me, all that's happened is that my strategy is now even *more* powerful than it was, while becoming now the only game in town.
Finally on @scJazz's example of desert with the big puddle of water, I've won that mission every time I've played it using an evasion strategy, as well as other similar situations: the desert map with two lakes separated by a dam in particular springs to mind because it needed some fun use of sprint/vigilance to get out of (I remember spawning in the middle of that lake, or at the very least needing to cross it under enemy fire). The main trick there is the trick you need to use everywhere when you're facing a large empty space: setup your snipers to provide covering fire and try to minimise your time in the firing line. Initiative manipulation can do wonders for just that but experience tells me it's more than winnable whatever strategy you use.