Played with these changes quite a bit more—maybe a dozen drops, including a priority mission.
Overall, it makes combat a little more mobile, but also "messier" and less structured. And I think that there's a lack of cohesion to skill tree design overall, which I'll talk about at the bottom with a proposal for a reworked Guts, if you're curious. (You know your design intentions and systems better than me.)
Sensor Lock is still fine, whatever. On balance it's kinda a buff to the AI because they simply have more units (and more slocks) to throw at you. Sure, I can sensor lock nasty turrets or other units out of visual range and rain sniper fire on them, but those are largely fringe cases. Meanwhile, I only have four units, so 4v8 fights are frequent—which means any turn when I am not eliminating threats is a turn where I am losing in attrition terms. Past the early game, Sensor Lock just isn't that useful except on "off-turns" where I need to cool down or back off. And in those cases, I'm still going to prefer bracing in cover much of the time. I imagine it's powerful in MP. But in campaign contexts, it favors the side that has more actions and turns, which is almost always the OpFor.
Sure Footing is a mixed bag. The Entrenched is nice, fine, and the knockdown meta feels well and truly dead now: I'm still mostly seeing lights and mediums in my campaign, but knockdowns are already rare unless I'm purposefully hammering something to go down. My own mechs have only fallen over as a result of freak leg losses (because I, like most human players, am much better at tracking and mitigating stability than the AI). Losing the evasion pip on jumping is a real irritant, though; a lot of the most interesting tactical decisions in Battletech, for me, revolve around jumping cavalry or "assassin" mechs, and this is a minor nerf to them in many cases; I'm a little sad that they're frequently being robbed of a pip.
(Crucially, Evasion is still weaker than it should be be because overall pilot accuracy is too damn high, especially in the endgame. I'll talk about that a little more below.)
Fortify is fine, I think. It was never a great idea to simply Bulwark in the face of overwhelming enemy numbers (it always felt better to avoid damage and mitigate it, so I'd typically prefer to evade into trees than just sit still and fire, especially because it offers better heat management), but it was a nice passive for missile boats and snipers, which is actually somewhat counterintuitive. I like what this change does to encourage movement, and it also makes you feel that much more secure when you couple it with a move to Cover. (Guarded "overriding" Cover always felt strange to me, and this change addresses that.) It does encourage more aggressive movement and actions, which tends to lead to more flanking, more awkward firing arcs, and more close engagements; I've noticed I'm ending up in more chaotic fights where a handful of smaller AI mechs are bunched up in a small area making clumsy moves to try and get behind me, and I end up taking a lot of strange, suboptimal paths to swat at them. This is partly just a factor of my current game state and difficulty, where my all-medium lance is still occasionally running into swarms of Locusts during 4v8 encounters, but it's also a consequence of not being able to set up a Bulwark front line that your other mechs flank around. With the change to Fortify, that front line has to stay moving to mitigate incoming fire, and that leads to messier encounters overall.
Coolant Vent is powerful, but the Guts tree is still, just ... incoherent. I will say I really dislike the idea of Coolant Vent conceptually. And I really dislike how obscene it could be in multiplayer (I could see a "Sumo" meta arising, where it's all about setting up back to back Super-Alpha strikes). And I don't see myself taking it often because it feels ... off. It's also, on balance, a mistake to use and abuse in the early- to mid-game on harder difficulty settings, where sustaining any kind of an injury can have costly knock-on effects, even with careful roster rotation. Coolant Vent just feels out of place; it will be used less frequently that other Level 8 abilities; it's the only one with a "tradeoff"; it seems inconsistent with the lore; it's a bizarre order to give your pilots, etc. It's also odd that the AI doesn't have to concern itself with the strategic-layer penalty. And it also doesn't synergize with Fortify—which I'll talk about more now.
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I want to start by talking about why the coherence of the Gunnery tree—why it's so good and needed no tweaks—and the lesser coherence of the other trees, especially Guts. This is all with an eye to replacing Coolant Vent with something that makes more sense, in every respect.
So, Gunnery.
Every step of this tree makes you better at shooting, and everything you gain from it is complementary and coherent:
1. Your overall hit chance gets better and better as you progress. (In fact, it gets too good, especially in the endgame).
2. You gain the ability to shoot at more things, which empowers you to take better and more efficient shots.
3. Eventually, you gain the ability to shoot through Cover and Guarded in combination with the first ability you unlocked, which empowers you take even better and even more efficient shots.
It's the "shoot things better" tree! Everything synergizes! Consistent investment in this tree yields compounding gains in accuracy and firing efficiency. Those gains are intuitive, and they're useful in almost every single turn of the game. You will Multi-Shot, and Breaching Shot, often! By the endgame, you will avail of one or both of these abilities almost every turn. That feels good, because you have earned those abilities, and you are being rewarded for using them—often.
Okay, now let's look at Guts.
Every step of the Guts tree makes you ... better at surviving? I guess? But these things are not complementary or coherent:
1. You can take more injuries, which is sort of useful? But in practical terms it's not, because it doesn't mitigate the effect of injuries; MedBay upgrades do that. I've played Battletech for over 100 hours, and I have never had a pilot die from taking too many wounds; they've always been headshot or had their mech cored. I guess more injuries would have delayed the, oh, four or five wound-related ejections I've been forced into across those 100+ hours, but again, those are fringe cases; compare with Gunnery's accuracy boosts being felt almost every turn. So being able to take more injuries is not that interesting or useful, tactically, because there is no benefit or reward from it if you are playing well, and any penalties are overwhelmingly felt in the strategic layer. The introduction of Coolant Vent means there's at least some sort of synergy here (more injuries means more potential uses of Coolant Vent, albeit with increasing penalty), but for the reasons I outlined above, this feels bad and weird! And judging by this thread, I'm not alone in that feeling.
2. You reduce recoil and gain overheat thresholds. These are sort of good? They're fairly invisible gains to the player, and an increasing overheat threshold actually ... reduces the need for the Level 8 ability you earn in many cases, which is counterintuitive. Also, the weapons that can benefit from the recoil mitigation are also ones that generate less heat! That's kind of weird, too.
3. Less chance to die when incapacitated is a buff to a random roll good players will rarely see—and it's also nuked by the Lethality difficulty setting, which I have turned on. It does synergize with increasing wounds, I guess, but on the whole it feels kind of tacked on. A "what else can we add?" bonus.
4. Bulwark helps reduce incoming damage when you use it. That fits the tree thematically, but it doesn't help you use the recoil benefits or overheat thresholds (the original Bulwark did, because it let you maintain fire while also getting a defensive boost, which was a nice synergy!). It also, again, reduces the need for the other stuff.
5. Coolant Vent helps you fire more aggressively (at a cost), but it doesn't complement Bulwark at all, and in fact they compete as heat mitigation strategies. Also, most of the other elements of the tree don't support Coolant Vent—or make it any less punishing in the strategic layer.
What might a synergistic Guts tree look like? Let's take the idea that the trees are reducible to internally consistent and coherent concepts. Gunnery: helps you shoot better and more efficiently. Piloting: helps you dodge, outmaneuver the enemy, and stay on your feet. Tactics: helps you manipulate the battlefield and flow of battle (this one is kind of incoherent, too, but less so than Guts).
With that in mind, let's say Guts helps you do reckless, high-risk things and survive!
1. Move the recoil benefits to the Gunnery tree, where they make more sense. To compensate—and also because it's sorely needed—nerf Gunnery accuracy buffs: make it +1.5% each level rather than 2.5%. I assume there's a fear about making early-game play frustrating for beginners if pilots miss all the time, but it will be good for the game as a whole ... especially in the late game. The differences actually curve appropriately, so it's a -1% accuracy nerf at level 1, but a -10% nerf at level 10! This will help make firing decisions in the late game non-trivial.
2. Keep the increasing wounds and overheat threshold increases. Then maybe make MedBay stays proportional to health lost from maximum! E.g., a pilot who finishes a mission with 5/6 health will have a shorter MedBay stay than one with 3/4 health, even though they have both suffered "one injury."
3. Keep the less chance to die when incapped buff, even though players on higher difficulty have effectively opted out of this passive.
4. Move the DFA damage reduction from the Piloting tree to the Guts tree. It's a damage mitigation buff for crazy pilots who do crazy things, so Guts is its true home! Also add a -10% DFA damage bonus earlier in the tree. I have some other ideas for Piloting, but this post is already too long.
5. Keep the new Fortify as is. It's a damage mitigation tool for pilots who want to dive into the thick of things and occasionally opt to spend a turn eating incoming fire. That works with our concept!
6. New level 8 ability: Heavyweight. Mech gains Guarded when they make a melee or DFA attack. Yeah, you heard me. Here's an ability that synergizes with everything else in the tree, including the level 5 ability. In the spirit of the old Bulwak, a a Mech within melee range of an enemy can now opt to (physically) attack and brace (minus the Entrenched bonus), more or less. They can throw themselves into more dangerous situations, mitigate lots of damage, worry less about exposing themselves to fire at the end of their turn, avail of the Fortify bonus more often, and even DFA more often. But the melee "requirement" means they have to be in the middle of things, being demonstrably "gutsy"; it's wasted on backline glass cannons.
And the other passive benefits of the tree are all complementary.
And it's an interesting tactical decision, because a counter melee may strip that Guarded and leave you exposed. Plus Breaching Shot is still a counter. Plus you still have to worry about Stability damage (less so if you take Sure Footing/Fortify/Heavyweight, which would be a fun, cohesive build!). But also you have to make choices each turn about where you want to be standing, what defensive buffs you want to have, what your heat level will be, and which weapons you will or won't have fired. And you're making those choices many times a battle. And there's no strategic-layer tradeoff or downside. Oh, and it's equally useful in singleplayer and multiplayer.
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With these changes, Guts would be the tree for MechWarriors who like to charge into battle, fight on the front lines, shake off damage, make high-risk, high-reward physical attacks, and scare the living daylights out of less gutsy MechWarriors. Everything in the tree supports this, and the gains from the tree compound in ways that are intuitive: you continue to get better and better at doing all those things as you progress.
