Is headcapping too powerful?
- Thread starter Jade_Rook
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10/9/8/7 still creates incredibly powerful mech warriors.
10Pilots gives max evade or 10 guts best synergy for alphastriking, 9 for Master tactician, 8 or 7 between gunnery and depending what you do with Pilots or Guts, or if further back lower Pilot to this selection and boost Guts; point is it still gives you great access to many of the best traits.
Maybe the balance is nuanced between your suggestion and the two 10s and two 5s that it seems a few of us play.
Morale would be fine if Called Shot Mastery had a cost associated with it if actively chosen (needs a button) with precision Strike, say 30 Resolve without Called Shot Mastery and 60 (anywhere between 50-70) Resolve with Called Shot Mastery.
That is simpler than trying my alternative thought.
The alternative I though is removing the 3 accuracy boost along with a further 3 or 4 accuracy penalty when using Called Shot Mastery so ends up at 80% general hit chance meaning reasonable chance not all the stike will hit.
However this gets tricky when considering other influences that could take it back up to 95% such as TTS and being higher terrain, unless it can be hard-capped when using Called Shot Mastery to 75 or 80%.
This kinda makes sense because you are focusing intensely also with the combat systems for a particular shot over anything else so a higher chance to miss generally but more likely to hit the targeted location if successful.
I do not know the dev history but I can imagine part of it is to overcome RNG frustration that annoy many who are not core Battletech players when it comes down to how accessible Morale/Resolve are.
Separately it also gives a higher incentive to decide whether to spend a lot more on morale at financial time, a factor that can come into play throughout a lot of the game with events/Argo morale upgrade/decision how much to spend monthly/etc.
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Maybe, but no one said that toppling will be the same as headcapping. I just said, that if PS couldn't be picked, you could still get it via toppling. And with one Marauder for taking the Called Short and 3 more Mechs to topple one, you can still kill one mech per round.
Conversely, it makes no sense to field 4 Marauders, because you cannot get a PS for 4 pilots each turn.
Toppling, mind you, isn't all that difficult either - when you play for it and build your mechs accordingly. There are enough weapons dealing a ton of stab damage, melee being an option as well. A knockdown adds an injury as well, increasing chances to incapacitate a pilot without destroying the mech in the process.
No, it all falls back to the actual bonus you get with called shot bonus, called shot mastery and Marauder bonus.
Conversely, it makes no sense to field 4 Marauders, because you cannot get a PS for 4 pilots each turn.
Toppling, mind you, isn't all that difficult either - when you play for it and build your mechs accordingly. There are enough weapons dealing a ton of stab damage, melee being an option as well. A knockdown adds an injury as well, increasing chances to incapacitate a pilot without destroying the mech in the process.
No, it all falls back to the actual bonus you get with called shot bonus, called shot mastery and Marauder bonus.
But as you say it is still sometimes 1 round, sometimes 2 rounds, sometimes 3 rounds.
2 Rounds and it is just the same as coring in many ways (but there are quite a few builds designed to JJ Called Shot Mastery core behind and be an initiative faster), and the most favourable mechs (comes down to hardpoints and using rarity weapons) can core in 1 round from front; context is the armour set for enemy lance in game which is lower than what players set themselves and in PvP.
The key is to make it more likely to be 2 rounds rather than 1 round for a lethal headshot; in other words the best it should be with an optimal setup is 33% at best (more around Marauder discussion) for a lethal headshot to happen in 1 round, especially if Called Shot Mastery made the Precision Shot Resolve cost somewhere around 50-60 points - would mean Called Shot Mastery becomes an active skill with a button tied to Precision Shot.
That 33% is lethal chance with all weapons fired not each weapon and mostly comes back to the Marauder that is on everyone's mind; so needs tweaking to get to this.
The 18% chance to head hits in general seems fine, because the weighting favours coring.
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This scenario your still using a Precision Shot Called Shot Mastery to take the leg, then the equivalent of a free Precision Shot for a Prone mech; still 2 attacks and this case 2 separate mechs.
I think many are ok with this and maybe how a few play the Marauder with the build they create, others will go full extreme and no rules while others may implement other bespoke in-game house rules.
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Changed 2 rounds to 2 attacks.
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I disagree, long before HM I already soloed five skull missions with LLs + RF equipped assaults, and it was fairly easy most of the time. Even with ML+SRMs (although this wasn't easy). Having more mobility, better weapons and higher chance just opens some of the hardest missions as cheesable and makes the previously easy ones much safer to do. And before I pretty much never aimed at other location but the head, while right now (ironically) I core a very significant percentage of the foes, because due to the new weapons I may have enough raw damage.
The thing is that before it took quite a good commitment, you had to be actively looking for that, whereas now it's a LOT more visible. But the issue was already there.
And that's another thing. The possibilities the new weapons open up are not only about headcapping but also for CT core, because more efficient weapons will work with a lot more mechs than just the M3R. With a ANH you can have a 90%+ chance to CT core a 0% DR Atlas, and at higher than ML/SRM/AC20 range. That's higher than the headcap chance of the M3R at that %DR. And you can have a 80%+ to CT core at 20% DR, 50% to core at 40% DR if you go with a 3xUAC20++ ANH. And other mechs also can benefit from that increase in firepower.
What makes the M3R special is not so much the killing power alone but that combined with good mobility and survivability. But if you don't need that extra mobility and survivability because you play your mechs covering each other then that's not such a big advantage. While headcapping is the poster boy and it is more efficient in some cases you shouldn't forget about CT core.
It makes sense using four Mads. You can simply use two of them in rotation with the other two just being evasive. In fact this would work very well in biomes like Martian, where you need to downgrade your damage for extra cooling if you want to use your M3R intensively.
If you do that change my feeling is that LRM boating with +dmg will reign supreme XDD. And that's part of the problem imo, that whatever you do, PS should feel powerful and effective, you need to keep that in mind. If you make it so it costs 60 morale for a 30% chance to headcap with a top tier mech and up to the teeth with lostech then what's left for lower tier mechs with not so good weapons/equipment?. PS will be utterly useless and only moderately useful for CT core, why going that route when you can take your time with LRM boating and not worry too much about PS. Just fire them once in a while but without relying on them.
Anyway, my opinion is that there is not a good solution for a good game balance without a complete overhaul. At most what could be done is to add a few extra sliders in the difficulty selection screen for Precision Shot effectiveness, working as a divisor to the bonus so you can even completely remove it if you put it to the minimum. And another divisor for ++ weapons effectiveness, which would apply over the damage bonuses (only, not for the weight reductions), so for example if you set it to half power a ML++ will do 30 dmg instead of 35, and a ML+ 27.5 dmg instead of 30.
That is a good point, players in general have moved away from the multiple mass LRM boat tactics, and the challenge for balance is to find a middle ground for the various tactics-mechanisms to work together or compliment each other.
Which comes back to a more nuanced complex Called Shot Mastery where it has a capped 80% or 85% general to hit chance before location roll to give it some kind of penalty with its benefits.
I think majority will just want the Marauder changed in some form, which as some of us have mentioned still means coring stock mechs in 1 attack with the ideal mechs as a comparison (maybe it was meant to be that way),
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Less than that, as really you just needed someone fielding Donal PPCs, AC/10s from Kali Yama... a Gauss Rifle, and some patience. Throw in some Comm Systems for Resolve gain, run at max Morale, and you should be able to just tag the head of (or severely wound) a target 'Mech. Of course, there's still other ways of using Precision Shot than headcaps. Cracking torsos off from the side with Magna ML spam was a method for a while. Also fun is a simple replacement job of slotting Donal PPC++ and an RCA TTS++ system into an Awesome - it's a beautiful sight to watch 180 damage dump into a single location
And since the Campaign hands you a Gauss Rifle about 3/4 of the way in? Yeah, there's a significant chance a player is going to tend towards it after some time. And that was before a rebalance was meant to make the Lostech items more attractive. (Mission succeeded, by the way, if this thread's love for MPulse++ is any indication.) Knockdowns were not too much harder, if you were "exploiting" the initiative cycles and reserves. You could drop an Assault 'Mech, in Phase 1, then have a 'Mech in Phase 2 next round snipe at it. Bonus points if your goal wasn't to go for the head, but to try to rack up some more injuries through a Side Torso destruction. Focus down the leg from that side, and you could have three wounds without relying on much luck. For fun, LRMs from Delta or Zeus were very good for this - Zeus having the benefit of crit-seeking better too.
Another route, still, was using Flamers to "heat lock" an OpFor unit - shutting them down wasn't so hard in the right biome (though in Polar, good luck), Shutdowns also allow called shots, though it's harder to do since Flamers were given limited ammo for just this reason.
And Infernos made it more valid with 8 shots. This is something I do in my current career. I have a T-Bolt SE type with 3 Flamers plus Infernos for 60 heat and a Hopper with 4 Flamers and together they shut down basically everything. In desert or hotter biome the SE is enough (especially since I could equip it with another Inferno). In cold biomes both still do a great job in shutting stuff down.
Considering that the Flamers are standard ware and the SE could get another Inferno installed, you can deal 100+ heat easily with one SE alone (still leaving it's energy weapons to actually do damage), so you MIGHT say, that Infernos now greatly expanded all "cooking" tactics by allowing missile hps to be used in addition to supports.
I have no problem with this - that was the function of Infernos, when we weren't committing war crimes by setting other things on fire. Like forests. Or buildings. Or buildings in the forest.
... mild sarcasm aside, maybe the heat gain per round from external sources needs to be capped like in TT to prevent that? Though that cap is one of the reasons such tactics don't work very well in tabletop already. Hmm.
Except it does. When you have no bonuses, you're chance for a called shot to the heat is 2%. With a Marauder and 9 tactics, it can hit 35%, or 1 in 3. So yeah, I'd say that's a pretty unreasonable increase in percentage chance. Likewise, the ability to hits torsos gets insanely high. Sure, if you're on the left side, you aren't going to have an easy time hitting the right torso. But for the rest, yeah, easy. Now, maybe you want to be able to raise the chances to hit the right side from the left side. Okay, but then the odds of hitting any particular part, including the head, ought to be capped much lower than they are.
Without the tactics and Mad bonuses in play, the to hit probabilities are overall fine. Legs from the front could probably stand to be slightly higher, matching the arms like they do from the side. That would make the higher armor there have a bit more of a point (besides DFA), plus make it less obvious to put the ammo there, but that's a hold over from how the 2d6 hit chart in table top works.
Yeah, actually, it still is. You face an Atlas with that, and you'll do 145 damage to its right torso, without figuring in the mediums. At that point, fire from other mechs is likely to take out that torso. Sure, it isn't one mech doing it all, and you aren't flat out killing the mech, but it is still quite effective. And that's with the standard "this weapon set up is crappy" stock mech. You could easily improve the Mad's performance quite a bit, without + damage weapons. Also, the LosTech weapons aren't a huge factor either, as most of them aren't exactly great. HM weapons are another matter, and one whose design decisions are questionable enough that HBS is addressing it in 1.9.
Don't get me wrong, a bunch of the + damage perks are a bit on the silly side. LRMs and SRMs get a 25% damage bonus per pip, and are allowed to get two of them. Snub PPCs get a whopping 33% bonus per pip, which is just downright silly. AC/2s, Ultra 2s, and MLs, 20% bonus per pip. And when you compare that to things like PPCs, which gain just 10% or LLs, who gain just 12.5%. It definitely is a system that favors weapons that hit for less, and allows the players to gain a lot of power. For some reason, HBS locked themselves into having a + and ++ version of damage, and for having it increase by 5 whenever the original damage number wasn't very low to start with. Probably not the best design idea. And that all combines to just give players a massive damage boost regardless. But that's a whole other issue, a general one.
Also of note, I already called out a bunch of other things that help make called shots even sillier. Clustering, especially with an 8x and 4x multiplier, was a bad idea (and another thing that makes legs the ammo storage place of choice). SRMs shouldn't see the hit location percentages changed at all. LB-Xs, same deal. And of course, how easy it is to get high accuracy, due to things like no to hit penalty for moving, no medium range, and so on.
And yeah, all the things combine to make things problematic. Weapon damage scales up. You get bigger mechs, with more tonnage for weapons and the heat sinks to let you fire them. The weapons get better. Your morale increases, and you get get +resolve head gear, making it possible to use abilities a lot more, make them part of every turn, rather than something saved. But none of that changes that I shouldn't be able to target a location and have a 75%+ chance of hitting it, nor a 35% of hitting the cockpit. Heck, the latter means a (player controlled) Marauder would still be effective in the late game if all of its weapons did a single point of damage each.
But it does when that one thing is the main culprit, and as a single thing, makes far, far more sense to tweak than having to go through and re-balance half the items in the game.
But the culprit isn't Precision Shot. Precision Shot as such is fine, because it is a mechanism that SHOULD exist - after all, why shouldn't you be able to try and shoot at a specific part of a mech? Even the worst pilot might decide to aim deep in order to take out a leg or two.
So you have a basic mechanism that works, precision shot or not, by allocating hit probabilities to 8 mech parts (of which some may not available!). So precision shot or not, by firing from a specific angle you may greatly increase the probability to hit specific parts anyway.
The issue here in this thread is headcapping, that is, if you think about it, the probabilities for hitting the head, which are in general 2% and probably accepted by everyone. Factors that change this are:
Called Shots
Called Shot Bonus
Called Shot Mastery
Marauder Called Shot Bonus
All in all the best you can get is 35%. If you take a CSM pilot and equip the Marauder with 3 UAC 5s you will deal 2 hits on average, and that's that. The Marauder has 3 ballistic and 4 Energy hardpoints plus another two Supports, so with the right lostech stuff you can have up to 12 chunks of significant damage (with UAC5s and lasers). So even with 18% you will have 2 hits on average, 1 UAC5 and one other, and that will be enough damage as well to headcap a mech as well (this would look different, though, without the new array of weaponry).
Keep also in mind, that PRECISION Shot isn't quite the same thing than a regular Called Shot. You get a regular called shot when the opposing mech is immobile, and your general hit probability is quite high because of that. With precision shot you may have generally less favorable probs, due to evasion pips and so on which will reduce the probs. If you take a precision shot on a moving target and you have, say, 75%, only 3 of 4 shots hit the target at all (9 out of 12, which means 3 head hits instead of 4).
Now. A Mech that comes with that inherent advantage is obviously intended to work as an executioner, which means, it is SUPPOSED to allow this. Following the general game tendency to allow very specific game difficulty configuration and keeping in mind that 1.9 will offer a difficulty setting that allows playing without the lostech weapons (or most of them) - how should things work?
Imo, 35% as best probability is too high. I think it should be at most 25 (24) %, but also at least 20 for the Marauder. So the tweak *I* would suggest, is reducing the best headshot value from 18 to 16% and reduce the Marauder bonus from 100 to 50%. A 24% headshot prob for the Marauder would still be enough with all the new weapons (but the regular headcapping prob isn't that bad either when you can field mechs with good weapons), but without the weapons, even a 24% capability may not be enough to actually destroy a head with one strike.
Lastly - as has been said, using a Marauder to headcap mechs isn't the only tactic available to beat missions (thankfully so). If headcapping in general becomes "invalid", it just cancels an option. So the aim must be to make headcapping doable, but not easy.
So you have a basic mechanism that works, precision shot or not, by allocating hit probabilities to 8 mech parts (of which some may not available!). So precision shot or not, by firing from a specific angle you may greatly increase the probability to hit specific parts anyway.
The issue here in this thread is headcapping, that is, if you think about it, the probabilities for hitting the head, which are in general 2% and probably accepted by everyone. Factors that change this are:
Called Shots
Called Shot Bonus
Called Shot Mastery
Marauder Called Shot Bonus
All in all the best you can get is 35%. If you take a CSM pilot and equip the Marauder with 3 UAC 5s you will deal 2 hits on average, and that's that. The Marauder has 3 ballistic and 4 Energy hardpoints plus another two Supports, so with the right lostech stuff you can have up to 12 chunks of significant damage (with UAC5s and lasers). So even with 18% you will have 2 hits on average, 1 UAC5 and one other, and that will be enough damage as well to headcap a mech as well (this would look different, though, without the new array of weaponry).
Keep also in mind, that PRECISION Shot isn't quite the same thing than a regular Called Shot. You get a regular called shot when the opposing mech is immobile, and your general hit probability is quite high because of that. With precision shot you may have generally less favorable probs, due to evasion pips and so on which will reduce the probs. If you take a precision shot on a moving target and you have, say, 75%, only 3 of 4 shots hit the target at all (9 out of 12, which means 3 head hits instead of 4).
Now. A Mech that comes with that inherent advantage is obviously intended to work as an executioner, which means, it is SUPPOSED to allow this. Following the general game tendency to allow very specific game difficulty configuration and keeping in mind that 1.9 will offer a difficulty setting that allows playing without the lostech weapons (or most of them) - how should things work?
Imo, 35% as best probability is too high. I think it should be at most 25 (24) %, but also at least 20 for the Marauder. So the tweak *I* would suggest, is reducing the best headshot value from 18 to 16% and reduce the Marauder bonus from 100 to 50%. A 24% headshot prob for the Marauder would still be enough with all the new weapons (but the regular headcapping prob isn't that bad either when you can field mechs with good weapons), but without the weapons, even a 24% capability may not be enough to actually destroy a head with one strike.
Lastly - as has been said, using a Marauder to headcap mechs isn't the only tactic available to beat missions (thankfully so). If headcapping in general becomes "invalid", it just cancels an option. So the aim must be to make headcapping doable, but not easy.
It's also likely you can miss every single shot - in fact, probability of 33-35% says you're more likely to only land a single hit out of all those weapon shots, or none. A 1-in-3 chance is pretty decent on the surface, but it's still a gamble. A % chance to hit is still a chance and not a sure thing - a 50% chance is a coin toss, which still can end in favor against you. People tend to overlook this, because they will remember more interesting/spectacular results than misses. They're going to remember the time they won a big score over how much they lost getting there - that's how gambling makes money, after all.
Given the current accuracy %s, I'd say taking the head off the possibilities of "what to fire at" nudges the player back towards the torso... which can certainly destroy the 'Mech through coring it out. However, when that's done salvage takes a significant drop in quality compared to headcapping. You're free to "delete" 'Mechs with impunity, but you're not winning as big a reward. You thus are playing it safe, and taking a lesser reward for it.
Reducing the %s alone won't do it; 1-in-4 is still "too good". 1-in-5 rides the edge, but people will still take that chance. (Because they were doing so before the Marauder hit, and making it happen.) A combination of reducing the % chance and removing Precision Shot from being able to hit the head? I'd say that combination is ... more likely the solution which is the most elegant and effective. It won't stop anyone from abusing Precision Shot, but . . . I mean, when we're looking at the armaments strapped onto the MAD-3R through custom builds, it's clear people are not actually playing with the units as they were originally designed. They're building custom machines which don't resemble the base forms in any way, which is BattleTech in a nutshell.
(And why, as someone said, custom 'Mechs are pretty much banned at tables.)
I disagree with taking head out of precision shot. I mean, in the end no one is forced to do anything they don't want to, and insisting on the devs "fixing" things is just forcing everyone into something.
Headshots are just ONE way of taking out a mech, and precision shot is just ONE way to use moral - if precision shot doesn't offer anything anymore people will just pick Vigilance. If headhots are not possible, than they will remove legs or make sure injuries mount or find other options.
There is nothing wrong with Called Headshots as such.
Headshots are just ONE way of taking out a mech, and precision shot is just ONE way to use moral - if precision shot doesn't offer anything anymore people will just pick Vigilance. If headhots are not possible, than they will remove legs or make sure injuries mount or find other options.
There is nothing wrong with Called Headshots as such.
In principle, I agree here. There isn't anyone ruining the game except the player, and again - this is parity for the tabletop experience as well. (Because there's always the stories of the people who decide "anything goes to win" and brings something like 45 Savannah Masters to a 10k BV2 match. Sure it's legal, but it's still a crap move. You know, kinda like original Street Fighter II cabinets having That One Kid who only ever played Guile or Ryu. Or Clanners.)
However... given the considerable pushback for suggesting "maybe the better way of doing things isn't necessarily the most efficient", and pointing out the whole Solo Maruader is literally just dunking on the game for no other reason than to dunk on the game... I'm all for taking a shot at a light touch balancing things out a little differently. As we've seen before, HBS does listen to the forums and may agree with some sentiments which may be "entirely the players' own fault".
On the other hand, proving something CAN be done, doesn't mean, everyone is playing that way all the time. If you just reduce the Marauder prob, maybe someone does it again, but I doubt people would forge a career on it.
On the other hand if you can field 4 Marauders with 4 CSM pilots, you will quite probably beat all missions anyway, headshots or not.
On the other hand if you can field 4 Marauders with 4 CSM pilots, you will quite probably beat all missions anyway, headshots or not.
This is . . . very inaccurate in both directions. But it's not worth going into, despite me disagreeing with it. Let's just say:
And you all can move on
I got other stuff to get done today, primarily seeing if I can continue the subjugation of the galaxy in Stellaris.
With the introduction of NARC and it's stacking, mass LRMs have come back imo. Ever used a 4 NARC++ SLDF Griffin and a LRM boat? With +2dmg LRMs, that's about 56dmg per missile. With 80 tubes on a BSK, that's enough overkill to split some off via multitarget.
You can also mount the NARCs on another mech, a BSK or KGC can mount enough additional firepower to severly damage one mech, multitarget another one with NARCs. The LRM boat can then multitarget-kill both most of the times, the damaged and the NARCed one. That's 2 kills per round without the use of any morale, on the contrary: It generates enough morale that you can kill another 2 mechs with called shots on your remaining 2 lancemates. That's 4 kills a turn. Maybe just 3 if you are unlucky, but it can be done every turn. And with your other mechs having a tac9 pilots and/or a marauder, you still get decent salvage out of this.
LRM-spam is just dead for the stab-dmg
Hopefully NARC and TAG Stacking are addressed under BATTLETECH Free Update 1.9 :bow: