I actually find the heavy bolter to be in a great place. People are actually playing Havocs/devs again. My only feedback on what needs to be changed is I feel it should do next to no damage at all to vehicles. Reason being is it's rate of fire actually makes it quite good at killing vehicles right now just due to how many times you hit, especially when more than 1 heavy bolter is concentrating fire. I feel the guns hard counter needs to be everyone jumping into a transport and driving through the shots in relative safety.
I'll agree that damage against vehicles needs to be brought down a bit. Right now it feels like the HB is destroying a tank as fast as a MM. That is to fast since it can be done at range. I wouldn't want it next to nothing though. It should be twice as long as it currently is though. In truth I think that the problem lies with the tanks armour more than the HB right now. 1 Melta Bomb and a full shot of the Melta Gun to the back armour will pop a Rhino. Even that seems a bit fast for my liking.
From my vague recollections of ancient table top, the HB was only a threat to the sides and frear of a rhino, and barely to the sides. In EC, we just deal less damage to more armored sides, and weapons have a binary switch for if they can damage vehicles. If there was a way to have the HB deal zero damage to the front, I think that would be an improvement. That said, it already takes a very long time to destroy even a rhino from the front. My quick kills ( ie before the second overheat) only come from vehicles withat rear armour exposed, ando I often close up if I can to get more damage. Yes, I can kill transports quickly, but theyre usually the ones that aren't defended, positioned in my LOS, with their rear armour exposed. I've had plenty zoom past with only a little damage from me. Thus, of course, doesn't address the issue of 5 or more HBs shooting at once. Quantity has a quality of its own. I would suggest we wait until something else is FotM, and the HB isn't spammed, and see how things look when there is only one or two at a time again.
TT wise the Rhino is an 11/11/10 so the str 5 HB can damage it from all sides, but it is very hard. If I'm firing at a Rhino in game I'm usually doing so from a higher elevation if I can. This means that I can focus on the rear armour and thus might be why I feel they go down to easily. A little over 300 rounds seems to do the trick. That seems like a lot, but that is basically 1 overheat and a half (if I remember correctly). Could be wrong though will have to test it and pay closer attention. Of course that is also taking into consideration that I am not distracted by other targets spawning out of said Rhino, or shooting at me to keep me from destroying it.
Food for thought (data from last Friday, after the patch). 12165 Heavy Bolter kills in total. Do read up on box plots first if you aren't familiar with them (hint: dots are outliers). Don't go on a tirade after reading the charts incorrectly (or reading too much into them)! The box plots compared to the ones I made in June seems to indicate that they are more effective at distance than they were previously; but I'd preferably like to see the medians higher. The above data in histogram form (all maps in one because I am so done for the evening):
Thank you so much for sharing. I'm going to give this a proper look on my pc at home. Sounds like you've earned a beer or two! Visit NZ and I'll make good on that.
The hotfix today seems to have brought Vehicle DPS back down to reasonable levels. Certainly at some point we could have "Kraken" ammo or something that reduces raw Damage done for more A.Pen, but for the basic unmodified, it feels about right tonight. Just imagine Hellfire shells... I can't wait until I can have a Wraithcannon...
Those charts are really interesting. On top of Michael's warning about interpretation, it's also worth remembering that this is just a record of the killing shot (I presume...). So someone who has just been beat down by an Assault and barely won, then gets clipped by a stray HB round, counts as a HB kill. Looks to me like, overall, about half the HB kills are made at 50m or less. My wild-arse guess eyeballing puts 150m+ kills at something like 20%. I can see why Michael wants to see those medians higher. The per map boxplots are fascinating, and really tell the story of how each map is designed. You can tell apart the close-in maps from the open-range ones, and even the ones that are mostly close in, but have some long range areas. Torias is the surprise: median kill range of less than 30m, but a loong upper tail and a whole bunch of outliers (bunch is the proper statistical term, I assure you). This one tells the most interesting story of all: it highlights how Torias may have many open areas and long lines of sight, but the capture points are all inside, and the majority of the combat revolves around those close-in spaces. To take things a little too far and perhaps read too much into these charts (Sorry @MichaelChan, I thought I would manage not to do this), if we take the upper quartile as the "Effective Range" as opposed to the "Maximum range", then Harkus shows us what the weapon is capable of in perfect conditions: 135m effective range. On other open-space maps, this is reduced to somewhere like 70m (so halved), while close-in maps give it an effective range of about 50m. Torias is the anomaly here: it's an open space map that the chart would categorise as close-in. Ignoring Harkus, the maximum range before getting outliers is 170m on Maggon. This seems reasonable to me. Those charts are telling me that the top end range of the Heavy Bolter is about where it should be, although Harkus remains an unfortunate exception, but that there should be more kills in the 50-100m band.
For Torias, actually a lot of the fighting is located naviagiting in the choked ravines and crates field between B and C as well as the B and C capture points themselves. Hell even attacking A, people will sneak up to mid/close range as much as possible because attacking it head on is suicidal. Attacking A to B is also suicidal unless you have tanks, and they are so easy to counter now. Torias doesn't surprise me one bit. IF Torias had a 4th capture point on the Landing Pad, it would completely change the metrics of the map (for the better I think), and likely introduce more Devastator based killing.
