The Hotfix

What it addresses:
The insane amount of damage missiles started doing including splash damage and something weird that caused said splash damage to spike through the roof.

How it used to work:

(Note: I'm going to use the term 'secondary component' below but you can read it as 'a component that did not get hit directly but is taking splash damage')

All missiles used to have a 4.0m splash damage radius that took into account the percentage of the volume of secondary components engulfed in the radius.

With the advent of smaller/tighter component groupings on the smaller Mechs, an issue arose where too much splash damage was being spread across those Mechs. Basically it turned into a hot mess.

What does the hotfix do?
A number of things. First off, it reduces the splash damage radius from 4.0m (for both LRM/SRM) to 1.8m (LRM) and 1.3m (SRM/SSRM). This obviously reduces the amount of splash damage caused to secondary components.

Any location directly hit by a missile takes the full damage. Any secondary component hit by the splash damage radius takes splash damage based on how far the location is from the center of the explosion.

We also added a scaling factor of 0.4 to the amount of damage done to secondary components. From the impact point to the outer radius of splash damage, this factor of 0.4 drops linearly to 0.0. This means that if somehow magically the point of impact is so close to the secondary component, the maximum damage it would take from splash is WEAPON DAMAGE * 0.4 (that is 40% of weapon damage).

But Paul, you said you'd REMOVE splash damage!!!!
I know I did, but here's the kicker and yet another part of the mystery of missile damage. We tried removing splash damage and it did exactly what you think it was going to do. Pinpoint on target damage. Cool right? Yes... but...

Doing this exposed a problem with the grouping/clustering of missiles. We now have a high percentage of any incoming missile targeting the CT. This is BAD.

Now our primary concern as to what is happening on the live servers is to curtail the incredibly high damage levels of missiles/explosions. To make the missile explosions/damage feel like they should and to keep the damage spread across a Mech, we kept the above mentioned splash damage work along with the following damage changes to missiles:

LRMs drop from 1.8 damage per missile to 0.7 damage per missile.
SRMs drop from 2.5 damage per missile to 1.5 damage per missile.

DO NOT HIT REPLY TO FREAKOUT YET!

It is at these levels that missile combat falls back to a level that we AND the community felt was right for a long period of time before the badness appeared. I'm going to ask you to help us test these values by FEEL. Not by playing SpreadsheetWarrior.


Missiles are STILL a very big threat to the target but just aren't doing these chart topping damage numbers.

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS MESSAGE:
This is a TEMPORARY fix to quell the damage done by missiles at this time. We are fully investigating the damage model AND focusing on the grouping of missiles and will update as soon as we can on how any changes will be managed/implemented.


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