Developer Diary #1: MechWarrior Ability Revision



Hi everyone! It's yr friendly neighborhood design lead, Kiva, with the first of what will be a regular new feature: Developer Diaries! We're asking members of the BATTLETECH team to write about their ideas, upcoming features, and particularly interesting aspects of their work. For our inaugural Diary, we're talking about some previously-teased revisions to MechWarrior abilities, particularly good old Bulwark.



One of the things we’re always on the lookout for is player consensus on “right” ways to play the game. When we design game systems, one of the first things we ask is “What decisions can the player make in this system?” This is because game systems are superfluous if there’s a single outcome and a single path to that outcome. We may as well just move your playing pieces for you, if there aren’t choices.



When we saw the consensus developing that the MechWarrior ability Bulwark was considered mandatory for all pilots, and its higher-level companion Juggernaut was considered useless, we started paying close attention to conversations about both, and started planning. We’d always expected to tune the MechWarrior abilities post-launch, and here was the first indicator that it was time to do so.



The initial proposal, which we very nearly patched in 1.1, was to simply reverse the positions of Bulwark and Juggernaut. Bulwark would become the higher-end Guts ability, and Juggernaut would become the lower-end one. We kept talking, though, and we decided that the real issue was that Bulwark was, relative to almost every other ability, too effective and useful. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! But moving it to the high-level ability slot would severely restrict the choice space for MechWarriors. Everyone would have Guts as their primary skill focus, which would be a step backwards -- at least under the original design, pilots would pair Guts with the top-end ability from some other tree.



So we scrapped that plan and went back to the whiteboards. We wanted to make Bulwark a useful ability for tanking damage, but we didn’t want it to lead to stagnant, immobile gameplay. So we did what we always do: prototyped it over and over, playtesting each time and taking notes and getting back together to talk through those notes.



This spread into a complete revision of the whole ability space, because once we start trying to fix something, we can’t help but notice everything else around it that might be broken, as well. For a while, every single ability was drastically different, as we experimented through a variety of possibilities.



Ultimately, however, we ended up leaving most of the abilities alone, or making minor tuning changes to them. Personally, I’m a fan of leaving well enough alone, and for abilities that were essentially working as expected, resisting the urge to tinker with them is a virtue.



So here’s a high-level description of what we did change:



Sensor Lock: it’s a one-trick pony. It’s useful, but nobody’s bringing a sensor lock pilot along because it’s exciting or interesting to use the ability, and after you get within line of sight range, you basically never use it again. To add post-contact utility, we added the same debuff that PPCs give a target. If you sensor lock someone, you place two stacks of Sensors Impaired on them. If you pair that with some PPC fire, you can utterly ruin someone’s shot accuracy for a short period. It’s still not competitive with actually firing your weapons, but it shouldn’t be; and now, at least, you might hesitate a moment and ask ‘what if I sensor locked right now?’



Bulwark: we did so many things to this poor ability, trying every possible combination of movement and positioning and action consumption and effectiveness that we could think of. For a while it was a new ability called “Fortify” that had radically different behavior that promised to fundamentally alter the flow of combat. In the end, though, we realized that the problem was simple: Bulwark encourages stationary firing platforms. So that’s what we tried to fix. Bulwark no longer gives you the Guarded state for free when you don’t move. Instead, it makes the Guarded state far, far more powerful. You still need to Brace (or use Defensive Push) to get Guarded, but once you have it, you’ll be extremely difficult to damage.



We also made Guarded stack with Cover, so that by bracing your Bulwark pilot in a forest, you can almost entirely negate incoming damage. This -- hopefully! -- brings cover back into the tactical space as an option for positioning your ‘Mechs, and makes destroying buildings a more reasonable use of a firing action, to create places to stand that grant the near-invulnerability of Bulwark + Cover.



Coolant Vent: poor Juggernaut. It seems like a good idea on paper, but in practice manipulating a target’s initiative isn’t all that interesting at the high end of gameplay, when many of the targets are Assault-class ‘Mechs with the lowest possible initiative. Combined with the necessity of melee to trigger it -- in a tree whose other ability requires standing still -- it was second or even third tier. So, sadly, we cut it, and mourned its loss.



Coolant Vent replaces it with something more aggressive and exciting. When you trigger this ability, you manually shunt coolant out of your ‘Mech, right through the cockpit, in a way guaranteed to make your MechTechs and MedTechs cringe. Coolant is nasty stuff! By doing this, you increase your heat sinking for that round by +100, effectively guaranteeing you’ll end the round at 0 heat. But, in trade, you take a pilot Injury.



This is the top-end Guts skill, so we know you have plenty of health to spare on these pilots; are you willing to trade infirmary time, and increased vulnerability to being incapacitated, for the ability to Alpha Strike with your Black Knight round after round? We put a safeguard in -- your pilot isn’t willing to vent coolant if it will actually kill her -- but aside from that, you’re able to spend your health to push your damage output to its limits.



Sure Footing: The problem with Evasive Move is that it was so rarely relevant. With a fast ‘Mech, the extra evasion was superfluous; you were typically near the evasion cap already, just from ordinary movement. With a slower ‘Mech, you weren’t ever getting enough evasion out of this for it to feel worthwhile.



We’ve been gradually trying to address the knockdown meta, without pushing too far in the direction of devaluing knockdowns. Sure Footing seemed like an obvious replacement for Evasive Move, in that context. When you move, if it’s an ordinary move -- that is, not a sprint or a jump or a melee charge or a DFA -- you become Entrenched automatically. Sure Footing pilots advancing and shooting are extremely difficult to knock down, and in larger ‘Mechs, it’s nearly impossible without breaking their Entrenched state first.



With all that said, we’re not carving these new abilities in stone. We’re releasing them to you in beta form, because we know that you, collectively, are far better able to find the exploits, weaknesses, and failure states in this kind of design work than we are. We’re going to be monitoring this thread carefully for your feedback, and we want to hear from you. This is a significant enough change that we’re not going to push it to Live without getting your feedback. So please take the new abilities for a test drive and let us know what you think!