Heat weapons were nerfed, abandoned and left to their fate. And IMO, this is the best way to deal with them.
First of all, they were absolutely useless in PVE. Thermal shock not only had no noticeable effect on NPCs, it lowered your effective DPS.
Second, the only effective way to counter it was heat sink spam. You're out of heatsinks = you're toast. And this hasn't changed - sure, we're able to synthesize heatsinks now, but one hit will disrupt the process.
Let heat weapons rest in peace.
Letting broken things rest in piece(s) isn't really my style. If something doesn't work, I try to figure out how to fix it. That's the point of like, most of my forum interaction.
I think the OP idea is quite good.
What I think would work well overall is having shield boosters taking heat damage in priority i.e :
- With the OP proposal, if one does not take action, the boosters will start to fry and shutdown.
- If one is spamming SCB's => boosters get fried, so you trade shield points now! vs lower maximal value later.
As an aside I think the following could be beneficial :
- Reverb effects damage boosters, then shield generator. => change reverb from all or nothing to something more gradual.
- Add a boot time to boosters.
- Change phasing effect to allow to target and damage shield boosters through shields (but nothing else).
Love the ideas. Since boosters are the core of the shield stacking problem, I'd love to see more things that attack them. This would also be a fantastic change for reverb. Gonna post some of this to the suggestions forum later, of you don't mind.
How is it plausible for a weapon to know what it’s hitting and produce varying effects?
Or did I misunderstand OP?
Easy lore explanation: the heat weapons are emitting some particle that excites "shield plasma" and causes it to emit heat. The more shield plasma present, the more heat generated.
Lots of "punish stacking" but where's the balancing "punish heat user"?
Not that any of this actually belongs here, because it's largely meaningless against NPC's.
I believe I hear the PVP forum calling this one home.
In my positional, the heat user is punished by having lower DPS on their weapons (as per the various heat specials), thus being less effective against targets with less shielding. Targets can have less shielding by a) not stacking shields in the first place, b) from taking damage to their shield, and opting to not fill it all the way back up with SCBs, c) powering off some shield boosters to lower how much shield they have.
Since the heat generation only works on shields in this proposal, someone stacking lots of heat weapons is disadvantaged once the shield is smaller or gone. Trading good anti-shield pressure for reduced anti-everything-else
As for NPCs, I see no reason they can't take heat damage. Some NPC builds do include boosters, so heat would be moderately effective there. If FDev made higher-ranked NPCs mirror good player builds it would be useful. It sound like wing assassinating missions will do just that, so FDev is taking steps in that direction.
I think heat weapons need to decide whether they are there to punish silent runners by saturating them with heat to force the ships to either open vents or burn through their heatsink reserves, or whether they exist to fry existing hot running ships. The two different things require a very different set of methods as the silent runners are punished by flat heat increases, while the hot runners are fried by multipliers to heat generation or anything that inhibits their ability to vent heat. To be honest, those two things are different enough that they could even be split into two separate effects to do different things.
Ultimately, I feel that heat attacks should never be a weapon in their own right, but instead something that is more of a debuff/disable effect. If they would struggle to simply cook a target on their own, but could instead push a target onto the self-cooking threshold where the choice is on the target as to whether they wish to take thermal damage. Similarly, if they were to apply large amounts of heat to cold targets but provide little help against a hot runner, the responsibility would remain on the target as to whether they wish to open the vents or face heat damage.
The last issue I see for them is that they are effectively an isolated game mechanic that doesn't interact well with most things outside of specifically engineered modules. Heat in general is an underutilised mechanic I feel, it's this really cool thing that is basically shoved into the background unless you go out of your way to work with it. Even something as simple as making a ship's heat vents a core internal that we can replace would help a lot, giving players an actual module that would let them choose a whole set of important aspects for their ship, as different versions could be optimised for visibility, heat flux, heat capacity, cost and weight. Bring heat related mechanics into the core setup that can be interacted with at large would give thermal weapons a whole set of proper mechanics and counters to work with, as well as making Frenotx's work on ship heat capacities much easier.
This would explicitly be against attacked shields, and have no effect on hull or closer-to-factory-spec shields. Hull tanking / silent running has more than enough counters as-is. As for it being isolated, I'd agree. That's why I suggest having counter play to affect the SOURCE of the heat, not the heat itself. If the heat is a problem, drop a heat sink. If you don't have any heat sinks (or don't want to spare any), power down some boosters to decrease the incoming heat load.
