I've noticed lately that damage numbers on my games seem to be very low. I'm used to seeing the winning team have probably 2000-3000 damage between them, but lately the matches have had the winning side with 1200 or less (on 8-kill victories). I'm not sure if this is from damage not counting towards the score or people getting cored much faster, but it's something I've noticed.
Hrmmmmm, I'll have to pay attention to this. I did notice the patch before the LRM patch caused me personally to do less damage but that could just be my shitty skills (shrugs) I dunno. Something to look in to for a root cause maybe?
I'm not talking about my damage, I'm talking about group damage. Sometimes it was low, sometimes it was high, but I think I've seen a lot of wins lately with nobody breaking 300.
Potentially, it's actually the reverse of what you are suspecting and a result of people playing bad defense. You're seeing games with 8 blown out center torsos (or single side torsos with XL engines in them) and little other damage applied... the general result of not knowing how to stay alive under incoming fire... especially in a high-damage pinpoint alpha meta...that is my suspicion.... The other side of that coin is that the winning shooters are very accurate and very efficient...
While I haven't noticed a big change in the damage amounts, I have noticed the game has gotten more brawl-y than it was before. PPCs and the like are still the best weapons, but I haven't seen any 10 minute snipe-offs in days.
Warchanter, that's a good point. I know I rarely aim side torsi unless they're already injured. Honestly I think CT needs an armor buff.
Yeah, maybe. Worth noting also is the possibility that a lot of pilots are leaving the default armor values alone, which generally loads more armor in back than what is really needed. Smurfy's automatically balances armor values to 2/3rds up front and 1/3rd in the back when you initially select max. Not sure about the game doing that until I can get home to look, but if so I would think that's probably sub-optimal for most builds, especially as you build faster with XL engines and such. For something like an Atlas, yeah OK, you're going to get a lot going on back there... but for mechs with good speed and/or high (+upgraded) twist-X values, 80/20 or even slightly more in front offers better survivability I would think... My Cats for instance all go 69/15 on CT front/back... Smurfy's will load it in at 56/28 which is the automatic 2/3 & 1/3 split... 69/15 is a (roughly) 82%/18% split... so compared to the standard smurfy's CT loadout I have (again, roughly) 23% more armor up front on my CT...(69 vs. 56)... and going 82kph with a tweaked 300XL and about 144+ deg of twist-x, there ain't a whole lot I'm letting get behind me...
I think it's natural. Your ELO is probably rising, as well as others similar to you that are probably also rising - thusly more and more people are actually putting their aim and damage where they want. No need for giant damage rounds for every player on each team. Pinpoint, sync dump on a target, and move on.
Might be in part due to missiles (including SRM) only having 5cm of splash right now (effectively no splash).
Splash damage wasn't showing up in the charts anyway. Soy, based on some of the people I've spectated, I really doubt high ELO is the reason.
Not sure if this is being seen by others, but I have been experiencing more head kills than usual. And my aiming skills at longer than 650m is questionable, I can hit the broadside of an Atlas but not with deliberate accuracy. Yet I have popped at least 4 heads at 800m. Met Soy twice in random drops, never actually got any damage on him as he popped my head twice at range. So that would be 56 max damage for two kills.
Really? I saw Zak on the NGNG stream test his splat cat damage of x6 SRM6 and it did 60 damage in a single shot (previous to the latest splash damage change). I'm so confused now.
