I thought the function of plasma was to overheat engines and do minimal damage, not do huge damage to infantry and buildings and tanks. Who the fuck even thought that would be a good idea. Seriously.
I'm sayin', heat to target is just a bad thing. It's a bitch to balance and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the tank combat.
The damage plasma does is technically the same as it was in 2.4. It was just scaled up so it was a high damage/slowfiring weapon to help justify the heat, at least that was what I think spartacus was trying to do. The only goof he did was he forgot about how long the overheat system was, so it when it was 3 sec fire the overheat system didn't really affect it at all. He kinda corrected it, you won't have the same damage output you did before now that it fires a tad faster at lower damage.(It still has the same damage output as it did in 2.4.) Still, plasma's overheat system is poop and I don't like it really. It was alright when it was only 10, but 20 still feels too much, I feel like it slows heavy combat down.
I dig the new plasma, you have to mind the heat a bit more often now, instead of only when nukes fly about (and those are relatively easy to dodge).
I see heat kinda like damage. An enemy can damage you. You can do things to manage this damage. If you get too much, bad things happen and your "fun" ends for a while. An enemy can give you HTT. You can do thing to manage this heat. If you get too much, bad things happen and your "fun" ends for a while. I know I'm abstracting a bit, but the point is that the enemy has a way to affect you negatively and HTT is just one more way.
The problem is that it "feels" different. Not being able to shoot isn't fun. It is usually frustrating. And really confusing and frustrating to newer players. The idea of heat management is something I see quite a few people struggle with, but it gets even worse when that control goes out of their hands. They don't know how to handle it. Even vets have trouble with it, and for good reasons. The only thing they can do is not shoot and try to dodge, but that's a crap mechanic. That or get bio deisel. Honestly I'm surprised spartacus, you're all about not hiding stuff and making it easier for new people but htt is one of the worse things in regards to tank fights.
As long as things are communicated properly, then it's not so bad. I mean, we do have a bar in the lower middle of the screen that maxes out when you're overheated. That isn't perfect, but it's not that bad. I've said it before, if you care about heat to target, get absorbant. It ends up nullifying all heat to target (and then some). It's a hard counter that ends up softly countering A LOT of other things as well. I don't know what more you could ask for.
I feel like it is more of a case with how much plasma heats you by. Thinking you can fire when you have like 60% then getting hit and entering overheat state because you thought you could fire is bit crap. That's the unintuitive part. Especially because no where does it say how much plasma heats you by besides the scripts, so it wouldn't surprise me if only 10 people knew the exact value. I did forget about abs, I remember it being a lot less cooling before for some reason.
I think for plasma to actually work we'd need a dual bar and two different heat systems - one that worked per normal, and one that stacked up over time. In fact, if we had an additional bar it needn't be all about heat but could be used as a threshold bar. Where if you went over certain amounts (e.g. 25%, 50%, 75%), you'd take more damage from weapons and suchlike. Actually would be kind of radical if you had a bar like that for other weapons. Where like if it was filled, normal infantry weapons could harm the tank Would be kinda hard to convey to others though.
It definitely was a lot less when absorbant was cheap. It used to turn 10% of damage taken into removed heat. Now it does that with 30% of damage taken. I haven't tested it with every weapon because it's a pain in the ass to test (requires 2 people), but I'd imagine that it oughta nullify heat to target as long as every weapon's HTT is no more than 30% of its damage. For example, Plasma cannon does 95 damage and 15 HTT in the current patch. That's only about 15% of the damage, so it falls within the 30% requirement.
I don't like the idea of absorbent being almost necessary to counter plasma. I can understand if it was like plasma was decent against all other armors and bad against absorbent, but it's more like plasma wrecks the shit out of all the other armors and gets the shit wrecked out of it by absorbent; that's an incredible extreme to push both plasma and absorbent to.
We do the same with rails. They do more than 50% more dps than ranged without much more heat and you can take two of them. I had honestly forgotten how devastating rails are until tonight's slaughtered game where my five plates of compo got shredded down to only one in just seconds. Again, poor absorbant called into action to mitigate the problem. And besides, both the HTT/s and the HTT/shot of plasma cannon were decreased in the current release. On top of that, we've got a tweak to the heat system incoming that would ensure that users of HTT weapons feel every bit of heat that they dishing out (since no weapons have HTT greater than heat). Between all of that, I just don't see a tremendous issue.
