Stealth armor and OP machine gun lights

[Deviantdemigodz]

PGI please get rid of the stealth armor and lower the firepower of the machine guns you have totally unbalanced the game and taken all the fun out of playing larger mechs which have no defense against these little terrors.

Or the other alternative would be make all the assaults and heavy's x4 more agile and torso turn rate and give then 100 back armor.

TO be honest your taking all the fun out of battles by letting these little lights take out your back armor in 3 seconds and your dead.

Personally i have been tired of this type of game play for a long time you want players to buy your mech packs then you need to balance out all the mechs not just a few of them for more fun game play .

[Zyrrashijn]

LOL, we didn't have the habitual "lights op pls nerf" thread in a while.
Hint, Lights are the least powerful, and least played mech class. How about you try to shoot them? Or don't your LRMs lock properly on the little buggers? 😉

[uni790]

Originally posted by Zyrrashijn:

LOL, we didn't have the habitual "lights op pls nerf" thread in a while.
Hint, Lights are the least powerful, and least played mech class. How about you try to shoot them? Or don't your LRMs lock properly on the little buggers? 😉

I killed one yesterday with my timberwolf's LRMs, little bugger couldn't get behind me with the new agility buffs, and Clan LRMs work well enough to deal with them in close.

Yes, I turned one of my timberwolves into a clans catapult.. lol

The game has it's issues, but the poor lights aren't really one of them, the issues you wanna look at are, Gauss, PPCs, LRMs, you know the weapons that let someone sit in the back, in complete safety and farm thousands of damage, just by sitting there clicking things, I mean, heck my Timberwolf mentioned above came out of a match earlier with around 1200 damage done, and about 70 taken. That shouldn't really ever happen.

[Deviantdemigodz]

HAHA it don't work all the time and yes not all but a few lights need to be balanced again there way to OP and you know it of course if PGI was smart and took away there stealth armor they would not be to OP at all even with 12 op machine guns.


Here is my point yesterday were playing on Terra therma were winning we have a great firing line set up then out of nowhere 2 piranhas appear and kill me and 5 other mechs in like 2 minutes we lose the game and they took hardly no damage its the same with fleas.

Don't get me wrong i have supported PGI through all its crazy ideas and features since day 1 but after these types of games you just say dkfsdf;lda it and log off.

[NamelessOne]

Sorry you can't hit a light mech, or keep near medium mechs (who are excellent bug swatters).

Situational awareness, teamwork, and a decent aim is all you need to squash lights. The fact that 6 of you got rolled by 2 mechs with total hp less than the CT of an atlas is amusing to me though.

[uni790]

Although, I will admit stealth armour really should have a drawback for how powerful it is, the tooltip says it prevents cooling down, but it doesn't, just tried out a laser stealth armour flea in the test grounds, and it wasn't too hard to keep it cool, even with the armour active, and one of the MG versions wouldn't even have that problem. It really should be shutting off most if not all the mech's heat sinking, as I'm assuming that's how the stealth is working, removing the heat signature so there's nothing to lock on to, if it's still losing heat, then there is heat there to lock on to, as it must be venting it, thus no reason why one can't lock it.

Just my worthless two cents though.

[NamelessOne]

They cycle the stealth on and off. At least I do. And the piranhas don't even have ECM, let alone stealth. But they move 150 kph and have alphas approaching 100 damage.

[Harukage]

Stealth armor already have plenty of drawbacks. Weight, heat generation and switching off your own sensors. There is also very few light mechs that really need it, as it greatly limits your weapon loadout, and fast skirmisher is still a fast skirmisher even with just ECM, or when you are mindfull of your own teams movement.
Also no, lights are not OP. Situational awarenes, team cohesion and experience are.

[Dyex]

They are balanced situations really.

-If a Light is in focus of an Assault it will take it down in seconds. (OP dismiss that as not a problem worth noting)

-If an Assault is in front of a Light it can't focus, it will take it down in seconds.

They are both often carrying firepower that will make short work of the other.

[AtomStrange_]

Lights have to put in WORK... to get their XP/CBills/Match Score, unlike slow massive tonnage with massive alpha strikes.

If anything should be NERFED it's the amount of Assaults allowed Per Match, the TTK rises when there's less Assaults One-Shotting Light/Medium Mechs.

[Deviantdemigodz]

Originally posted by Atom Strange:

Lights have to put in WORK... to get their XP/CBills/Match Score, unlike slow massive tonnage with massive alpha strikes.

If anything should be NERFED it's the amount of Assaults allowed Per Match, the TTK rises when there's less Assaults One-Shotting Light/Medium Mechs.

:bigfrog:

I agree with you on one point it should be 3A 3H 3M 3l per match like it once was and if there is not enough of each type of mech make a fill in match.

Friend in lore and TRO light mechs never had the firepower of a Assault like in MWO this game is the first to unbalance mechwarrior this way M2-M4 light mechs were more cannon and had to work in teams to even think of downing a heavy assault in a game. Now in faction play they were played like light should be scouts and raiders against lone mechs mostly mediums.

If any mechs need buffs it mediums so more people play them light mechs are used as leg huggars now as well because they know assaults and heavy's cant bend down to hit them.

[Watcher Rat]

The problem with attaching lore-based reasoning to MWO (or comparing it to other MechWarrior/BattleTech games) is that MWO is the only PVP-centric MW title out there. Yes, in lore, in makes sense that 2-3 light mechs would need to team up vs an assault, because the lore is based around table top gaming - just like a D&D encounter would have some smaller opponents based around a strong leader in a combat situation, BT TT encounters would often operate in similar ways. However, in a direct shooter, even if you force a 3/3/3/3 (which they tried once in a PTR, it had...problems, mainly due to populations of lights being low even then), you have to have every mech be capable in some way. If it takes 3 lights to take on a single assault, then no one wants to be the sacrificial lambs in the light mechs making up that first 3, since the risk vs reward just doesn't work out.

The balance in MWO is that the Medium and Heavy mechs are your traditional all-rounders in most cases, mixing mobility, armor, and weaponry in a way that lets them deal with the widest range of situations. Assault mechs have lots of weapons and armor, but traditionally no speed, save for some notable exceptions like the Gargoyle, Battlemaster, and a couple others. Light mechs sacrifice armor and heavy weaponry to operate as either scout snipers or strike fighters, and as the antithesis of assaults, they operate also as their peak counter in a lot of situations.

To put this in the perspective of another fandom, remember the first Star Wars? The X-Wings attack the Death Star, and someone notes "they're too small for our turbo lasers", which forces the Empire to send out TIE Fighters instead. The Death Star is a massive, literal world-ending threat, but it can't deal with these tiny fighters on its own. That's your light mech analogy; the difference in MWO is that an Assault who sees a light coming can utterly erase them with a single volley.

Originally posted by Deviantdemigodz:

PGI please get rid of the stealth armor and lower the firepower of the machine guns you have totally unbalanced the game and taken all the fun out of playing larger mechs which have no defense against these little terrors.

Or the other alternative would be make all the assaults and heavy's x4 more agile and torso turn rate and give then 100 back armor.

TO be honest your taking all the fun out of battles by letting these little lights take out your back armor in 3 seconds and your dead.

Some notes that I couldn't get past from the OP, if you were to make assaults and heavies so agile that they could easily torso twist light mechs, honestly, you might as well delete lights from the game at that point. It would become impossible to run them in any sort of viable situation, since anything that's not a long range light like a Raven *has* to get at people's backs to have a chance, especially vs. the tech that mechs run now. You talk about taking the fun out of the game, but literally making an entire weight class of mech arguably obsolete seems...well, bad faith, at the very least.

It's also been noted that the most notorious of backstabbers, Piranhas, can use neither ECM nor stealth armor. The Flea can, and the Pirate's Bane Locust can run ECM (though Stealth Armor is a bit more annoying of a fit), but neither of them can front load DPS the way a Piranha can. And the Piranha, both because of its 20 ton frame, and it's hitbox profile, is also terrible at absorbing any form of return fire. It's a feast or famine mech that will either collect kills, or die immediately if spotted too early.

Stealth Armor does have its own drawbacks too...if you're using laser weapons (which many Fleas running it would be), then you're going to build up heat very quickly and have extremely nerfed dissipation until you withdraw and disable the armor, which means you must either choose to reduce your DPS to zero, or run without the armor engaged, which means you're more likely to be targeted.

It's also not perfect...and I suspect you've never tried running one of these "OP light" builds, or you would know that you learn really fast who's running seismic sensors in a fight...nothing quite wakes you up like flanking in a 20 ton mech, and seeing some heavy or assault suddenly whip around and look behind them for no apparent reason when you are 190 meters away.

The TL;DR version of this is that even the most powerful lights have serious drawbacks, and they are both intended and balanced around the drawbacks of their direct opposites on the field. This is why nascar kills assault mechs more often than not...and removing that means removing the efficacy of anything under 40 tons.

[JC]

Play a light hunter for a while, learn to counter them. when you go back to your heavier mechs you will do better. :)


A stormcrow or huntsman are awesome for this task. Same with a streak treb+ a pair of ERML's. It's fast and has JJ's.

[Watcher Rat]

Originally posted by NamelessOne:

They cycle the stealth on and off. At least I do. And the piranhas don't even have ECM, let alone stealth. But they move 150 kph and have alphas approaching 100 damage.

Also, I should note, even the nastiest Piranha couldn't get a 100 point alpha ;) Before the patch added ghost heat back in, they could run 15 micro pulse, which pre-nerf was a 45 point alpha with a quick enough recycle to be a 90 shot total moments later...but that's why GH came for those ;) They can put out a nasty 40+ alpha still with the right setups, but the recycle isn't quite as deadly.

Still, they don't absorb damage well compared to, say, the Flea or Locust, so they pay for that damage with their lives if they're not careful.

[Chillidoge]

Main thing with lights is they will take advantage of your lack of situational awareness especially when using heat vision. If you know a stealth light is around (you see it, it has been called out etc) you should try to sight it with either no vision or night vision if possible (snow maps won't help for this).

Another thing that helps a lot is having lasers on your arms so you can reach down and shoo them away when they try to get under your firing line. MGs are best at defeating exposed parts, so try to face your armoured parts to the enemy and it'll keep your weapons and vitals intact for a bit longer.

Lastly, and this is hard because it relies on the rest of the team, but try not to let yourself be singled out. Looking at the minimap will help you figure out where you are in relation to the team and their likely movement over the next 60 seconds. If you're at the back, move up toward the front where possible, without rotating past your own teammates.

Good luck!

[Rezada]

never had any problem with the balance of light ( i am a assault player ), its very hard to play well and any error can kill you instantly