you forgot atomic bomb.. you only have 1 in magazine, you fire it and it does 90% damage to all mechs on the field. Then 1% every 20 seconds from radiation, up to 2 % with implant. 

Why are y'all afraid to touch artillery?

Artillery is tricky. Our game designers haven't come up with how Legendary Artillery can be developed without breaking the balance yet. BUT if our team has any good ideas for how we can add more Legendary Artillery that meets the current balance, perhaps something new will appear someday. But definitely far from SOON

Yeah I saw your response to that post that was made in a similar vein to this one. But did you read any of my suggestions?

I think this hesitance is lame. I think your team has trouble thinking outside the box when it comes to artillery. Your team frequently releases new gear that breaks the current balance. But you're unwilling to risk doing that with artillery, likely because you are unable to think outside the box when it comes to artillery.

How about instead of trying to design an artillery weapon that fits the current balance without breaking it, since your team struggles to do that with any new weapon anyways, you instead design an artillery weapon and make it balanced later if you hav to.

Maybe the problem is not with artillery as a category or your team having trouble figuring it out but with how your team designs new equipment to begin with

well maybe they need to design 300 size maps for artillery weapons first then even gemini range implants will start to make sense, otherwise im not sure I ever seen anything bigger than 170 anyway.. Then we need to add zoom feature to sniper weapons, introduce wind, increase snipers range, oh is it another game already? Well maybe then artillery could be fun, otherwise i just dont understand why would somebody want it? 

I know!!! The new legendary artillery, it will have 5 shots, and it goes so fast that it can shoot through the floors.. when it's in the sky it looks like fireworks followed with rainbow colored flame. Then it explodes under the floor with 5m radius. We could put it on Lacewing, it will fly to the sky and shoot from the moon.

And im not sure why you ignoring my Nuclear bomb idea.. if you struggle to comprehend it doesnt mean it's not good.

Two words. JELLO SHOTS.

That is all.

I'd pass your suggestions on to the team

"How about instead of trying to design an artillery weapon that fits the current balance without breaking it, since your team struggles to do that with any new weapon anyways, you instead design an artillery weapon and make it balanced later if you hav to"

I wouldn't like that at all :-). You're saying that, since Plarium struggles to release new weapons with balance, they should embrace that fault and release any new weapon as is, balanced or not? Just so that a new artillery weapon, which not many people are asking for or care for, can get released?

When I read what you wrote, I realized I actually appreciate Plarium's caution in this regard. Nobody likes the fact that sometimes gear is released imbalanced. It's nice to see that, because it's considered a delicate enough issue (in terms of balance), a new artillery weapon is not being just blindly released. It's a good thing!

Papa makes a good point about why the current game format (map sizes, but also things like 5-per-side teams) probably makes artillery in general a hard thing to get right. When we typically think artillery, we think large scale destruction. Given how strong some weapons are, anything stronger would be too strong. Anything weaker would not quite be how we typically think of "artillery" and you could ask why it is needed at all.

In fact, when I first tried rocket mortar some years back, I was surprised to see that it needed a sighted ememy mech in order to be able to fire. I expected it to be a "ground attack" kind of weapon. But I eventually realized it would be wrong (IMO) for the kind of game this is.

See tha's what I'm trying to say though is we don't need to make artillery in any typical sense. Hell we don't even need to think of destruction in the typical sense. We can destroy the map to make certain areas of the map tougher to traverse, like with napalmer. Or we could have something potentially destructive like the shellshocker I suggested, but it's destructive capabilities would depend on the map you use it on. It would have a long range but actually be more effective on shorter maps.

But yeah why do we have to stick with artillery in a typical sense? Typical artillery is long range ordinance IRL isn't it? Weapons whose ranges goes beyond that of typical infantry weapons. But who's to say the infantry weapons in mech arena are anything typical? Many of the weapons in this game do things IRL weapons could only dream of doing. Artillery could take on a different meaning here. Something OP with no equal in range would certainly be a problem, but we don't have to make another rocket mortar.

It's not like I don't appreciate the caution I just don't get why they're cautious here and not elsewhere. I mean I think we all were asking ourselves what the team thought they were doing with burrow beams when they first released them. And none of us bought that the total shield bypass was a bug.

Also papa we all know the nuke suggestion isn't serious :)

The simplest explanation I could give to you why the MA team is hesitant to create new artillery weapons is that; Artillery weapons do not work as expected, so designing a legendary one is of little use as we have relatively small maps (some of these maps also have plenty of cover, rendering artillery useless) and most importantly, a mech with artillery class weapons means that it woud be in a backliner role, which most players would not prefer. Therefore, it will not draw enough attention of the players and all the hard work of the Devs will go waste.

well they could do an artillery of legendary type lets say it would shoot pod gun type of bombs that stick just give it some sort of bigger radius than fuse mortars.. Or we could do some small damage EMP or blind artillery.. 

Would not really break any balance, not much different from normal artillery.. 

The point is.. sort of.. why would you do it.. i was sometimes hate-ing pod guns for cluttering screen with green thingies that obscures vision, basically disturbs the game play, i think i got used to it now.. but i feel artillery is more like an annoyance of the game and not a cool thing.. i really dont want to add things to the game that will annoy me.. 

so making more type of it is really not something i would want the game to change over other more important things.. so id rather kill all such ideas before they even reach developers minds.. 

In proper teams artillery could be a great supporting tool, you clear the enemy control point, your team mates go in, secure it.. bla bla.. but still, i have mixed thoughts, mainly all against it and there are no proper teams like that for execution.. 

the only thing to say is that with 5k hangar and few mods the very advanced pink mortar with legendary implants kills me with one shot, but if we went to 17k fully modded hangars it would barely do any damage.. so sort of the weapon type would be very useful at the bottom and very useless at the top leagues.. because there is no legendary.. So it sort of feels that it needs to be added. 

But if we add it, it will 100% not stay in high end matches and be taken to lower level games by SP droppers and will be used just like nuclear weapon but worse with one mech like Arachnos or whatever demolishing all enemies. So until they fix matchmaking this is not the option at all!!! If they matched players by SP+Win rate then i would not mind if SP droppers took it and were killing each other, they deserved some beating for their sins. But until matchmaking is changed, NO.

The only legendary artillery i can suggest until than is that it will go stronger or weaker depending on SP power. So lets say you take it to 2k hangar its power becoming like normal mortar (lets say base is 10k hangar so 2k will be -80%) and if you take it to 18k hangar its power becoming +80% so its a useful artillery in grandmasters top500.. i will accept nothing different for right now.

Again you are thinking within the bounds of what we have in game. Like I've been saying I'm not necessarily saying plarium should make another rocket mortar. In fact that's the last thing I want to see. And it doesn't have to give it a status which takes any level of control from opposing mechs.

The potential problem you named where it could be great at low SP (even broken) and falls off at high SP is also a potential problem for every new weapon. Because devs they're not adding new things with lower SP brackets in mind.

That goes back to my response to night fury. It's not artillery, it's how devs design new weapons. Try thinking outside the box. Maybe you could come up with an artillery weapon that wouldn't annoy you. 

Also just because something could be annoying doesn't mean it shouldn't be added. Loads of stuff that's annoying to some is also fun for others. High coverage weapons that do a lot of damage and EMP and blind status all do take away from the game in my eyes I won't lie. But devs don't have to make any of that for a new artillery.

The weapon could also just perform well nowhere and just exist to be fun, which I think devs are also afraid of doing.

so how your shellshocker is not going to be bad if SP droppers use it? the difference for artillery is that it hits basically anywhere on the map, you dont even need to see enemy to do it.. and its just stupid.

Shellshocker should be powerful at any SP depending on the map. And it's not likely to be powerful on many maps at any SP because of how it works, as it depends on chain lightning to do most of its damage. As thundertechno already said lots of maps have plenty of cover. Shellsocker would only be effective on two arches and maybe container city. And it likely shouldn't be overpowered there either having the same minimum range as RM of 45 meters.

You could perhaps get more out of it if you stuck it on blockhorn. But then you also have blockhorn's weakness of lack of mobility.

And not requiring a direct line of sight could make it unfun to play against I've considered. But at the same time it wouldn't be worse than weapons we already have. Like there's the entirety of the guided weapon category, which at low SP they're all quite powerful that fall off. Artillery used to be a fine counter to it before the pilots update. And then the artillery weapons always had this major weakness of their minium range where if you got within the range then it was rendered useless.

If it's still OP at lower SP for whatever reason devs could have weakened lower energy variants and/or they could have it deal less damage to those it hits based on their distance from the point of impact like how disc launcher works.

Just saying the rocket mortars weren't OP and in need of being NERFed to begin with. They only became a problem after the pilots update brought implants which let you increase its radius by up to 50%.

But before that it was fine. It annoyed some people cause it could one shot up to 225 meters away and could fire in an arc so it went over obstacles, but it rarely actually killed at super long or even generally long ranges, and it rarely ever put much of a dent in fast moving mechs. It was really most effective at taking out tanks in the mid ranges. You could get kills against fast mechs and stuff but it required a great degree of finesse. And its major weakness of having the 45 meter range was easy to take advantage of. It was never an exceptional weapon, just a really good one in the right hands that could also be beaten by most anyone using other kinds of weapons. If we took away the rocket mortar radius implants and bumped its damage proportionally with legendary mech HP bumps with the grade update and made it bypass shields it would be weaker than when it came out despite damage scaling up proportionally with other things simply because of the reduced radius since mechs that have been released since are a fair bit faster in each of the categories.

All I can say is that if they can release a weapon that shoots critters, they can release a weapon that shoot food products. Imagine: Jello falling from the sky. Who wouldn't want that? Everyone loves jello.

i

i think this can be migated by making it a weapon that has 2 modes. for example if you hold the trigger it'll fire 2 barrages, 1 that adds the weaknesss effect while the other is pure damage, kinda like embergun.

however if you simply pull the trigger, you fire a deadly load of wide spread explossives in front of you.

by making the weapon this way we have a artilery weapon that isn't too over powered but can also be used in maps that are tighter. 

Really good suggestion, but the main issue with artillery remains the same. Playing with an Artillery weapon means you'll be staying at the back and raining explosives at opponents (as per the definition of artillery weapons, you'll be having a very long range and it targets the area around the mech, and not the mech itself. They also have a min range within which the Artillery weapon cannot fire, which is considered the weakness of Artillery) 

The main reason why players choose a PVP shooter is that they want to be in an active position, while artillery weapons would make the user very passive which is kinda contradictory. Though there are also players who prefer passive builds, the reason why Mech Arena thrives despite the issues it has is just because of mechs/weapons which force players to be active for most of the time. The overall experience in using an active build (accoring to my perspective) is more fun and rewarding

I'll not deny the fact that there are several passive mechs/weapons in the current meta, but active builds are widely celebrated throughout the Mech Arena community for a really long time due to some unknown reasons (I suppose most players feel the same way as I do when using an active build) 

If the Devs really thought about a Legendary Artillery weapon, they'd mostly probably retain all the firing mechanics of Artillery type weapons, reduce the minimum range to 20 or 25 meters, put passive debuffs (like a smokescreen or something more creative) just to check whether the new weapon works or not