Heat Level Critical: Shutdown Imminent

Just a quickie – this was built as an extension of Signs and Portents 

The current notion of the community is that heat is generated too quickly, or dissipated to slowly. I explored this idea in Heat Levels Critical http://dbefored.blogspot.com/2012/10/heat-levels-critical.html. Simply stated, the heat dissipation system works on a ten second cycle, whereas most weapon systems work on a 2-4 second cycle (however, they generate in those cycles the same amount of heat that they should over a ten second cycle).

Double heatsinks (DHS) were expected by the community to help alleviate the problem by providing heatsinks that took up two additional critical slots, but that dissipated twice the heat (hence “double heatsink”). However, when DHS were released to us, it seems that they did not improve the engine heatsinks, which was not intended. Let’s assume that the pilot managed to fit ten DHS into their mech (which is quite a few given the critical requirement, especially if you also demand three critical slots). That should provide him with effective heatsinks of forty; enough to run most of the current high heat builds. However, due to this bug; the pilot only had thirty effective heatsinks. Thankfully they are fixing this problem in the next patch. Or are they?

With the change to DHS to a 1.4 coefficient instead of a 2.0, the efficiency of each DHS changes dramatically. While the engine will gain additional efficiency, it will only be the equivalent of four additional heatsinks, not the ten as was expected. At the same time the ten heatsinks you have fit on the mech above also reduce in efficiency, dropping down fourteen, an equivalent, a loss of six. The addition of four heatsinks from the engine does not compensate for the six lost from the DHSs on the mech itself. It would appear that any mech that has more than seven DHSs will LOSE efficiency after this “fix” is put in. This is pretty sad, considering many players analysis has shown DHS to be a bad option in a vast amount of situations (including some of the most heat intensive builds).


EDIT: In case it isn't 100% clear, I think these changes are stupid. Flat out miss informed. If the balance of heat was SO far off in TT to require 3x heat gathering, and 1.4 heat dissipation, how was the TT considered "balanced"? However, I want to wait and see before making a deeper dive into this topic. I do want to go on the record saying: stupid.