A[n Extended] Note on Clan Tech

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A[n Extended] Note on Clan Tech

PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 8:04 pm

BlueFlames
Posts: 465
Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 3:24 am
Location: SSX Vault 12
(Note: Because PGI has more managers than game designers, MWO's balance between factions is regularly in a state of significant flux. If you aren't reading this around mid-2016, then the game may have undergone large changes, since this was written, potentially invalidating parts or all of it. Just be aware of possible changes that have been made, if you are reading this from the future.)


As I work through my backlog of unmastered mechs, I moved from the Shadow Cat to the Loki, which means I've spent a bit of time acclimating to Clan technology. I tackle Loki builds in another post, but the broader points about the current state of Clan tech is worth its own separate post.

Some of this will read like a screed against the current state of Clan-IS balance in MWO, as it currently stands, but that isn't exactly the intent of the post. While I will say that I think PGI has swung the pendulum too far against Clan tech, it needed significant changes from the tabletop balance to work in a realtime gameplay environment, with teams of even size. What I've set out to do in this post is provide a heads-up to people used to piloting IS mechs of what they need to be prepared to experience, should they switch to using Clan tech for any period of time. That happens to involve pointing out the balance adjustments that have accrued over the years since Clan tech was introduced to MWO and how several of these adjustments interact with each other to amplify their net effect beyond the mere sum of their individual effects.


Heat Mechanics

In the last round of rebalancing, Clan heat sinks were given a tiny buff to dissipation rate and a significant nerf to capacity, as compared to their Inner Sphere counterparts. The changes to the Inner Sphere heat sinks were pretty insubstantial, so if you were piloting IS mechs at the time, you probably didn't notice a change.

Switching (or returning) to Clan mechs requires quite a re-adjustment in how you build and fight. Heavy, energy-based IS mechs, such as the currently dominant Grasshopper and Black Knight, can easily belch out three or four alpha strikes, before having to moderate their rate of fire to ride the edge of their heat capacity. Comparable Clan builds, despite having more heat sinks, will frequently overheat on the second alpha strike, and because the dissipation rate is only marginally higher, sustained rates of fire, once at the overheat threshold, are essentially the same.

The capacity differences in the heat sinks are further amplified by the fact that energy-based IS mechs frequently recieve substantial heat generation quirks, on top of the fact that many IS weapons with direct Clan counterparts generate less base heat to begin with. Firing a large pulse laser on a Grasshopper 5H generates 5.95 heat, while firing a Clan large pulse laser on a Loki generates 11.00 heat, and the Loki needs three more heat sinks just to match the Grasshopper's heat capacity. In a mid- to close-range brawl, that's huge.

The most direct trade-off for all of this extra heat and less ability to deal with it tends to be range. Going back to the LPL example, the Grasshopper is stuck with a 365m optimal range and 730m maximum (even the 5P's range quirk only extends that to 401m and 802m), while the Loki can poke from 1.2km and deal full damage within 600m. The Grasshopper can skirmish at mid-range, while the Loki can essentially snipe. The problem is, except on a few select maps, it's difficult to hold the range of engagement at 600m.

What a Clan mech pilot instead winds up doing is exploiting the omnipod system to use clusters of smaller weapons. This turns the entire comparison on its head. A Clan mech that might otherwise use ER medium lasers will instead use a larger amount of ER small lasers to make up for some of the heat deficiency, resulting in a mech with a slightly shorter effective range and a more managable rate of heat generation.

The drive toward clusters of smaller weapon systems is further driven by the differences in ghost heat. (Ghost heat, by the way, is a terrible and unnecessary mechanic that I will rant about another day.) Generally speaking, ghost heat triggers on large Clan weapons with one less weapon than the Inner Sphere counterpart, but smaller Clan weapons behave identically to their IS counterparts.


Durability Quirks

Possibly the biggest indicator of how effective an Inner Sphere mech will be is how much extra structure and armor it gets from the quirk system. Those extra hit points count for a lot, not just making you more durable in a close-range brawl, but giving you a large margin for error in all engagements. The general idea behind adding structure and armor to Inner Sphere mechs is that it will compensate for the added fragility of IS extra-light engines, compared to their Clan counterparts and allow more poorly-armed standard engine-equipped mechs to deal damage over a longer period of time, making up for their lower burst damage.

Clan mechs (typically) do not have this benefit of the quirk system. The effect of this is that, if you are caught out of position, you're generally going to get one good alpha strike before you die, where an Inner Sphere mech might have some hope of escape or at least a more prolonged fight. Because your margin for error is razor thin, you have to maintain better situational awareness, so that you don't get caught without an escape route, and when you do eventually become the focused target of the enemy team, you can basically expect your mech to melt.

When the lack of durability quirks is combined with the above heat considerations, you might see a problem developing. Clan mechs are supposed to benefit from longer-range weapons, allowing them to deal some damage, prior to being threatened by return fire. Because the heat mechanics drive Clan mech design toward smaller, shorter-range weapons, Clan pilots will generally find themselves in brawling range, where those durability quirks make a significant difference.

Essentially, as a Clan mech pilot, you need to arm for short range, and always push together with something tougher than your mech. My recent 1,000-damage match in the Loki only worked out because I was able to push with a super-aggressive Atlas that drew a bunch of hostile fire, while I was able to return fire with impunity. When the Atlas went down, I followed not thirty seconds later. If you don't have an Atlas to tank for you (or a hostile assault lance full of silly builds), then you just get the thirty seconds.


Extra Light Engines

Engine tech is one of the few places where Clan mechs remain outright superior to their Inner Sphere counterparts. Because you can't inflict single critical hits to engines, a Clan mech with open armor is significantly less vulnerable to engine destruction in MWO as compared to the same mech in the same situation in the tabletop game. You only suffer engine damage when a torso section containing engine criticals is completely destroyed. A side torso loss for a Clan mech entails the loss of two engine crits, versus the fatal loss of three engine crits for an IS XL engine on a side torso loss.

When Clan tech was originally introduced to MWO, those two lost engine crits entailed no consequences at all, leading to a huge power disparity, where Clan mechs benefited from the reduced weight of an XL engine, while still enjoying nearly all of the durability of a standard engine. That had to change, and it did, if only in a small way.

Now, one side-torso loss results in a small reduction in heat capacity and dissipation and a more noticeable ten percent reduction in top speed. Where before, I would have advised piloting Clan mechs as if they had a standard engine, now you do want to be a little more cognizant of where you are receiving damage so that you can delay the loss of a side torso, until you have no choice but to do so. This is mostly because that ten percent reduction in top speed will make you less able to maintain proper positioning, which will make you even more likely to become a target to be finished off. To maintain mobility, you may find yourself using an armored side with weapons to shield an empty but damaged side torso section. Just as the lack of durability quirks necessitates greater situational awareness, so too does the unique behavior of the Clan XL engine, since you need to watch your own status in greater detail to know how to most effectively spread damage.

Finally, if you're building a Clan battlemech, which allows you to swap out engines, unlike an omnimech, take the Clan XL. Until MWO starts tracking the status of individual engine criticals, the advantages of the Clan XL far outweigh the disadvantages. Yes, you die if you lose both side torsos, but there are very few mechs that are both heavy enough to mount a reasonably-sized standard engine and with sufficient hardpoints in its center torso and head to justify needing to survive the loss of both side torsos.


Laser Duration & Burst Fire Autocannons

If you're piloting an Inner Sphere mech, and you have a steady hand, you are going to be able to put damage exactly where you want to put it. Your large autocannons fire a single shell for full damage, and your lasers have short burn durations (further amplified by many energy-based mechs having duration quirks), minimizing a target's chance to twist vulnerable components away from incoming fire.

For lasers, this difference is most noticeable with the larger, longer-range lasers. The target of a Clan ER large laser has 1.5 seconds from the time that the beam starts until the time that the beam ends to shield vulnerable components and get behind cover to mitigate the incoming damage. That Grasshopper 5P can deal the full damage of an ER large laser in 1.06 seconds or use standard large lasers for a beam duration of 0.85 seconds. That means that not only does the target of the Clan mech have about twice as much time to spread and mitigate damage, but the Clan mech has to keep its head poked up for about twice as long as well, which makes the vulnerability caused by the lack of durability quirks more noticeable, even at range.

Truthfully, though, if you're sniping, you should probably be using PPCs and/or Gauss rifles instead of long-duration lasers. In close quarters, where you're using smaller lasers, beam durations will be shorter, making the effect of damage spread less noticeable. Those fractions of a second of difference in face-time, where you are unable to twist away from return fire are noticeable, though, particularly against Inner Sphere opponents, who may have an AC20 that only needs a tenth of a second to deal twenty damage to an open torso section.

Of course, as you look at shorter ranges, where the differences between equivalent laser systems become less noticeable, the differences between autocannons become more noticeable. The extreme example is the UAC20, which fires a four-shell burst, compared to the Inner Sphere's AC20 firing a single shell. Where the IS AC20 just does twenty damage to the component at which it's aimed, the Clan UAC20 is likely to hit the targetted component with its first one or two shells, before the rest of the shells in the burst (and the entire double-tap burst, if you are feeling bold) lands on the component that the target is using as a shield.

Since it's difficult to cluster lots of smaller autocannons in the same way one can with lasers, your only real option is to fire more bursts to blast through the sacrificial shield component. This means packing more ammo, running hotter in an effort to expend that ammo, facing your target more frequently to fire more shots, and hoping that your UAC jam rolls come up lucky--typically in mechs that have no UAC jam chance quirks. I think you see where all of these individual balancing tweaks are starting to snowball.


Notably Unaddressed

Obviously, I'm not going to touch on every single difference between Clan and Inner Sphere technology, but there are a few issues that may seem significantly in their absense. I'll give those brief mention here:


Non-heat-related weapon quirks

I've been indirectly touching on other weapon quirks throughout the post. In general, though, the non-heat-related weapon quirks tend to amplify the balance differences that I've been addressing. Search for mentions of the Grasshopper 5P in this post and consolidate those mentions here, and you're on your way to that general point.

Weight & slot requirements of weapons/equipment

In tabletop, the biggest advantage of Clan tech is that Clan mechs tend to have more space and weight available for guns, ammo, and heat sinks. In MWO, there are so many systems limiting the number of weapons on a mech, from hardpoints to ghost heat, that the benefit of weapons and equipment weighing less and utilizing fewer crit slots is largely rendered moot. For a while, the extra weight and free slots were filled with heat sinks, resulting in Clan mechs running cooler than their Inner Sphere counterparts, but the recent heat sink changes killed the benefit of that practice.

Free CASE

Built-in CASE provides a pretty mild benefit. If you've been running Inner Sphere mechs for a while, then you are probably in the habit of stowing ammo in locations that are less likely to be hit, and that's a habit that you should carry into building Clan mechs, free CASE or not.

Kodiak quirks

The Kodiak wasn't out and its quirks had not been announced, when I outlined this post, but in brief: The non-hero variants are an aberration that will have their quirks removed, around the time they release for C-bills. The hero, with its MASC might be unnerfable under the current design ethos, since the mobility provided by MASC outstrips most of the benefits supplied through the chassis' quirks. They have all the benefits of Clan tech, the benefits of battlemech customization and good hardpoints (which means it has no need of omnipods), and benefits from balancing mechanisms that were meant to bring IS mechs up to par with unquirked Clan mechs.


Conclusions

Basically, everything that has been done to balance Clan tech against Inner Sphere tech either directly makes Clan mechs more squishy or forces them into fighting at ranges where that squishiness is really noticeable. If you fancy yourself a regular Inner Sphere pilot, it may be worthwhile to take a Clan mech for a whirl once in a while to sharpen your situational awareness and heat management skills. If you're thinking of moving to Clan tech for a significant duration or switching back and forth between IS and Clan tech for a while, then be prepared for a period of adaptation, where your instincts for one tech base need to be shelved, so that you can get used to the other tech base.

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