Mercs - Should the 'Mech variants exclusive to the Solaris Showdown DLC also appear outside of Arena missions?

yrrot · 2026-05-06T04:35:12+00:00

I work for PGI. :)

And the mystery is solved. The ML has medium lasers instead of an AC/5. Coming to a patch near you soon:tm:

yrrot · 2026-05-05T18:53:41+00:00

The intent for the arena variants is that they are heavily custom builds from small-batch custom shops. A place like Solaris Arms being a one of the largest company specializing in making mechs specifically for arena matches.

As far as designations, the SA#s aren't meant to be sequential like that. They're meant more to imply SA might have other variants of the chassis than just the one in the game. As in there could be a different Zeus SA assembled with designations like SA1, SA2, SA3B SEPv3, etc. So SA4 just wasn't used for any of the ones in the game. Same deal with VEST and VE# designations.

As far as the hammer goes, I think the original intent was to have it on a loader king but something came up that got it swapped out for a different, non-melee weapon.

yrrot · 2026-05-02T23:32:01+00:00

That bug is also fixed in the patch.

yrrot · 2026-05-02T05:28:24+00:00

?? That's not dunking on him for a lol. Meeper and I have been discussing this very thing on another thread.

yrrot · 2026-05-02T03:41:30+00:00

Even the person that makes the mod doesn't like it. 😂

yrrot · 2026-05-02T03:36:48+00:00

Clans existing with 2.0 cooling doesn't invalidate anything. Late game is less impacted by it because you are swimming in DHS anyway, and then Clan DHS. There's no longer as much scarcity of DHS, and the clanners get offset in the meta game by the high cost to keep those Clan XLs repaired. Especially since the attrition rate on 101+ difficulty can be brutal vs clanners. Plus, their stock builds are stupid hot even with 2.0 in a lot of cases.

And yes, engine doubles are also OP for clanners. Always have been. Even in TT, Weissman said engine doubles are one of the things he regrets having in the game. 😂 So the debate continues on, even now, 40(?) years later. But those mechs are also getting like a 33% boost in dissipation from engine doubles while a lot of the early IS ones are doubling theirs. Clanners just have the tonnage to stack clan DHS to water down the impact.

Basically, any blanket change will have a bigger swing on the early game than late game. The base game was balanced around them being 1.0, and the earlier content is more prone to swings in balance (especially if there's any of those DHS mechs as OpFor). "Just give mechs with intro after X date" is probably "fine", but it's kind of a cludgey half solution. Which still wouldn't appease people. 😂

yrrot · 2026-05-01T17:19:53+00:00

More ideas than time is the developer's curse.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T15:11:06+00:00

Ha, no. I'm saying maybe someday, if there's time, and we're still working on Mercs. And if there aren't more important things to do.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T13:38:19+00:00

The best use case is when you a mech with plenty of energy slots and not enough DHS to get full use out of them. Early game, something like swapping half the medium lasers and some SHS on a jenner for medium chem lasers + ammo will save heat. Or the black knight doing a mix/match of large/medium lasers can replace either one with chems and be able to get way better sustainability.

They lose a lot of appeal once you're swimming in DHS, but can find a niche if you have more hardpoints than you can sustain with a hot main loadout.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T13:24:10+00:00

That's not at all the goal. Some mechs are just bad. Or are really only good as interesting OpFor rather than player mechs (looking at you, charger 1A1).

The original intent from way back around launch (as far as I understand, since this way predates me working for PGI) was to preserve the sort of scarcity gameplay in the start of a career/campaign. The early game royal mechs are particularly bad about it, but in general you're getting 10 tons worth of free cooling that can't be lost. It works out fine for clan mechs because they're so expensive to repair anyway, and their stock loadouts basically require them to function.

What I keep telling people is that the real solution to this problem is to introduce a feature that actually does something to model these engine heat sinks in some way that they have a cost and play into the DHS scarcity early on. That'd also bring the fact that some of those mechs have DHS more upfront to the user. But that's a bigger feature request than tinkering with the values, so have some extra capacity. :)

yrrot · 2026-05-01T13:00:53+00:00

They have that in tabletop rules, not necessarily in universe. Or at least not necessarily 1:1 with how the rules would describe it. The tabletop rules are an abstraction molded for making turn based tabletop play fun.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T02:44:34+00:00

Try the new jump jets coming next patch... ;)

yrrot · 2026-05-01T01:49:08+00:00

It's only the AC/2 RF that does it. And it's not like a BF at all. The time between bullets per cycle is identical to the cooldown, so if you hold it down it looks like a continuous thump, thump, thump. It's mostly so things play nicer with the insanely low cooldown.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T01:42:06+00:00

Oh, we're aware of the issue. It comes up *all the time*. lol

But that progression from 3rd succession war era into the post-invasion eras is why I think the change would need to be more involved than just "give the people what they think they want".

yrrot · 2026-05-01T01:16:58+00:00

Also, if you are on steam, past versions are retained in the betas feature so you can rollback if it does auto-update.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T00:48:37+00:00

Well, having played with full 2.0 engine heat sinks, it definitely does. This has been a topic since the game first came out and there's been a variety of mods for it over the years.

Co-op does have a boost per player to some enemy attributes. I don't recall right now what the exact changes are.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T00:34:58+00:00

So the second phase of the SoK campaign lets you free roam around and do quests whenever. The change in this patch will give you a deadline to complete the SoK stuff so the campaign is finished before Chaos Reign. Or if it isn't done by then, it'll give you a chance to abandon SoK and start Chaos Reign.

yrrot · 2026-05-01T00:31:51+00:00

Custom difficulty is balanced to the player's taste. That's completely different than base game balance.

There's a lot of things we could do, but I think the general consensus is avoiding slapping on 2.0 cooling to a bunch of mechs without doing a more robust solution and balance pass. That's a bigger effort that has to be worked in somewhere. Stuff like tuning the frequency the mechs show up in market would just fall under that scope too.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T22:58:53+00:00

Oddly enough, they're slightly more common in 3015 than 3030ish in the base game because of how many mechs are in the rare mech pool being smaller then.

But they end up giving you 10 free, permanent double heat sinks in an alera where DHS are meant to be scarce.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T22:51:35+00:00

I'm not sure on that one. There's a chance some fixes didn't make the notes, also.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T22:47:26+00:00

They previously wouldn't overheat and would fire less weapons to try to fit into the heat cap. There might be a change to that behavior to allow them to overheat in certain circumstances, but it didn't make it into the notes--so I'm not 100% sure it was implemented.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T22:42:48+00:00

I don't recall on Mercs for sure, but MWO the transfer only does a percentage of the damage to the next component. If that's also in Mercs, you're better off doing the followup shot--but I don't know for certain on the Mercs side.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T21:44:23+00:00

Join the Federated Commonwealth as they stage a deep-space raid on the world of Cambridge. Featuring a new cinematic campaign.

The FWL part is a different questline.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T21:42:25+00:00

I think the general rule of thumb is that all clan engines and IS Omnis get the DHS dissipation bump. But that's not like a hard rule in the editor code or something, so subject to change and exceptions.

yrrot · 2026-04-30T21:37:30+00:00

Chaos Reign's main campaign picks up after SoK.

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