Hi all, I apologize if this is more of a newbie question, but I'm still trying to figure a lot of this game out and I was wondering how you calculate ghost heat. I THINK I know what it is when I see people referring to it, that it's the extra heat generated by firing 'x' number of weapons of the same type in the same volley (if that's not it then please correct me), but I'm a complete loss as to how to calculate it out or know at what point it will occur. For example, I was experimenting last night with a Timber Wolf build that had a LBX20 and 6x MPLs, and I figured that the heat would be manageable with 15 heat sinks but grouping up 3 of the pulse lasers sent my heat through the roof and I was hoping to try and mitigate this stuff in future builds. Again, sorry for the newbie question, but any help would be appreciated.
Here you can find the Ghost heat summary for all the weapons. When you build your mechs you should try to aim at 1.3 heat efficiency in the mechlab, or 40% - 45% in smurfy's depending on your skill with heat management. your build has around 25% in smurfy's which means is way too hot for a short range build, try changing medium pulses to er-small, using those 6 tons for extra heat sinks. Below build looses one laser for 2 heat sinks and some armor from the shield arm.
Thanks for the chart man, that should be helpful. As for the build, I was mostly experimenting, so it's not a big deal to me that it didn't work, it's more that I was frustrated by seeing the heat spike out of control, all the same, thanks for helping rework it!
As the heatscale graph shows, your initial build actually doesn't have ANY ghost heat. You could even fire all six MPLs at the same time without penalty. The core issue is just how hot weapons are in general. Maddux has good targets to aim for in terms of heat efficiency as a goal, but remember that even builds with over 20 heatsinks can still easily run hot. By comparison to the initial and modified builds, even a build like this: would see large spikes in its heat from firing all weapons since 32 points of heat are added to your current heat balance by an alpha strike. Even as an elited variant, that's ~40% of your heat capacity per alpha, and by the time you fire again you will have dissipated less than half of that heat. Even three alphas fired with no delay would cause shutdown. Heat neutrality sounds neat, but in practice is hard to achieve at all and leads to builds with low burst and still-not-great damage over time.
There is also this reference that allows for simulation of heat performance of a specific build. Though you can garner actual performance from the information given by smurfy... It is another thing to actually see the comparison live. http://keikun17.github.io/mwo_heat_simulator/
