October – Melee and Close Range Weapons Overhaul

We’ve received a lot of feedback regarding GaoGaiGar and to a lesser extent Getter Dragon specifically regarding weapons that give 3 Hits on a Critical Hit.  The chief complaint being that these units can often stack many hits to the point where it’s almost impossible to resist them in melee.  As a result we’ve had to look over these units and this weapon type and consider solutions.

For those who exclusively play Gundam units the bottom line up front is that Beam Sabers and Heat Hawks are dropping down to 300 DMG per hit, Heat whips and Dragon Fangs are now a melee attack option.  Units with high crit abilities such as Sandrock or Minaret Gundam are having their weapons reworked.  For the Super Robot fans read on below the break.

To start let’s look at an example of GaoGaiGar using the Goldion Hammer.  It gets two bonus Critical Hits from using the weapon, they can use the Make it Count Skill for +1 Crit and Hyper Mode for another +1 Crit.  So that’s 4 Crits before rolling dice, and with Critical Hits being worth 3 Hits this would be 12 Hits.  Assuming they roll on average 5 hits and 1 more critical hit that’s 20 Hits total.

Which was intentional, the Goldion Hammer is meant to be a very powerful weapon, and in its show not only does it atomize giant mecha monsters it also tears through the moons of Jupiter.  Our first response was to make it more difficult to use and preserve its power, but there are issues with other units as well, this is just a preeminent example.

When it comes to these high crit weapons like the Getter Tomahawk / Scythe, the giant Scimitar of Minaret Gundam, the rending blades of Garada K7 or the Sudden Impact piston on Big O, all of them have a high degree of randomness and if someone gets very lucky and rolls several critical hits the weapons can suddenly generate a lot of hits. 

And that’s all part of the fun of a tabletop game, our issue is that these weapons were consistently stronger than their peers.  While all weapons were doing the same damage, some had higher armor penetration, some had special abilities, and the high crit weapons tended to have an overwhelming amount of damage.  The problem is there damage was often so high that their target could not muster a defense against them.

Our first series of playtests involved lowering damage on the High Crit weapons, similar to how we do it with Thrown / Close Range weapons like the Tomahawk Boomerang, Drill Missiles, etc. where those weapons do less damage than a Rocket Punch since they gain a potent bonus on critical hits.  We kept all weapons at 500 and left the high crit weapons at DMG 300.  It worked okay, but we still ran into overkill damage on GaoGaiGar.

Lower Lethality in Melee

We then tried a playtest series where all melee weapons were lowered in lethality which looked like this.

• Beam Saber = DMG 300  PEN 8
• Heat Hawk = DMG 300 PEN 5  Reroll 1s
• Drill = DMG 300 PEN 5  CRIT+1 PEN
• High Crit (Ax/Hammer/Scythe) = DMG 200 PEN 2  CRIT+1 Hit
• Blade/Speark/Staff = DMG 200 PEN 2  ATK & Finisher +1 or ATK & DEF+1
• Killer Blade/Claw = DMG 300 PEN 3  Blindside attack

This ended up being one of the more successful series of playtests and a lot of fun both in Gundam only games and SRW style games.  For Gundam only games this meant that a GM or Zaku would die in 3 hits instead of 2 and so with lower damage across the board ended up making Armor Penetration a lot more valuable since units were likely to survive the initial damage while the Armor Saves would determine if they lived or not. 

For the SRW games it meant that melee was less likely to knock a unit below half HP in a single bout and again made high armor penetration weapons something difficult to deal with since you wanted to avoid all Armor Saves period even through the damage was lower.  We saw some playstyle shifts due to the lower damage which we liked and decided to keep the damage at a lower value.

While dropping damage solved our overkill problem and severely limited the chance of one-shotting a 500pt unit, it still did not solve our problem where a high crit weapon could often generate enough hits that the user could essentially dump their entire melee dice pool into Defense and still guarantee a Finishing Blow. 

Eventually we realized that the ability which we liked could not be salvaged while maintaining game balance on the melee weapons.  Large number of bonus hits via Critical Hits was breaking the Finishing Blow system in a way that was not intended.

Here all the changes that will be implemented to ameliorate this problem.

1. Weapons will no longer give bonus Critical Hits, Crits will instead be limited to the dice you rolled or the Make it Count Skill.
2. Abilities like “Crit Hits count for 3 Hits” or “Crit Hits deal+100 DMG” etc. will become momentum powered special abilities on certain weapons, for instance Giga Drill Breaker for 3 Momentum will gain Crit Hits count for 3 Hits.
3. The category of high crit weapons (hammers, Big O’s piston fists, drills, getter tomahawks, scythes, etc.) will be dissolved and those weapons will move to other categories.
4. Drills will move to the Heat / Sonic weapon where they reroll 1s on Attack.
5. Hammers, Axes, Scythes etc. will all move to the generic blade profile which will be diversified in the following ways:

• Scythe = DMG 300 PEN 4 Finisher 2
• Sword or Axe = DMG 300 PEN 3  ATK+1  Finisher+1
• Sword or Spear = DMG 300 PEN 2 +1 ATK, +1 DEF
• Hammer = DMG 300 PEN 2  +2 ATK

While updating all of these weapons we also tweaked a few other weapons with a lot of slots such as the Beam Trident and Glaive to balance them against the standard type spears.

Close Range Weapons

After finishing the overhaul of melee weapons we also need to do an overhaul of Close Range weapons since many of those are thrown version of melee weapons. It also gave us a chance to solidify the upgrade rules for these weapons and have them all conform to that standard for the eventual MechaStellar RPG rules.

First we did a balance pass on all the weapon types now that high crit effects were gone. Also while melee damage was lower, we then lowered the damage on the thrown weapons which opened up more room to increase their base number of attacks. This wasn’t too bad but we realized we still had to deal with an outstanding issue of the range 8″ autohit weapons being too powerful, and would become even more powerful even if we upped their number of attacks.

We implemented the R8″ / R16″ thrown weapons a while back as a way for melee units with their poor shooting accuracy to have some type of ranged combat option. The persistent problem was that these autohit weapons would either be balanced for Mobile Suits but too weak for Super Robots, or balanced for Super Robots and far too powerful for Mobile Suits.

Eventually we decided the best way forward was to convert the majority of range 8″ weapons to range 16″ weapons since we know those worked well, and to adjust the upgrade path for all these weapons which became a lot easier after removing the “No Crit Hits” rule from above. The remaining 8″ weapons, ones that didn’t make sense to be that long in range (an electrified whip or grappling arms) had their number of auto hits adjusted.

Both of those weapon types mentioned also got a mechanics change. The Electric / Freezing / Stun weapons didn’t see a lot of use but we did see a few edge cases where they could become absurd and so we wanted to build in some buffer to make sure they couldn’t easily shutdown a powerful unit with a swarm of stun units. To this end we had stun damage based off of a failed armor save so all stun / electric / freezing weapons now have an armor penetration value listed as 4S for example. So you roll an Armor Save vs PEN 4 and for each failure you lose 1 Action.

Similarly, we did the same thing for rocket anchors, grappling arms, typhoons and telekinesis attacks that either push or pull the opponent. They would be ARM PEN 4P, so for each failed Armor Save vs PEN 4 then you would move 2″. We also adjusted the upgrade paths for both of these weapon types to make it easier to spend upgrade slots to increase armor pen and range.

We’ll codify this change in the VER 9.1 rules.

Here are the baseline profiles for the new thrown weapons, with ones having more slots having upgraded stats such as improved range, attacks, armor pen or damage.

• Beam Boomerang / Rust Hurricane – R16″  Shots4  RF+1Hit  PEN8 DMG 100.  Enemy must reroll 10s on Evade
• Great Boomerang / Burning Punch – R16″  Shots7  RF+1 Hit  PEN 5  DMG 100.  Enemy must reroll 10s on Evade.
• Rocket Punch – R16″ Shots 2 Hits RF+5 PEN3  DMG200  [M-1] to Blindside
• Tomahawk Boomerang – R16″  Shots 2 Hits  RF+6 PEN 3  DMG 300
• Rocket Drill – R16″  Shots 2 Hits RF+4  PEN 6  DMG 300
• Flame Thrower – R8″  7 Hits RF+1 Hit  DMG 100  Overwatch VII  |  AOE 1″ Line
• Electric / Freeze / Stun – R8″  2 Hits  PEN 5S  DMG N/A  [M-1] Gain Blindside
• Typhoon / Rocket Anchor  R8″  4 Hits  PEN 5P  DMG N/A  Push or Pull 2″ for every failed Save.

Last but not least, a number of 8″ weapons where it made sense were shifted over to Melee weapons. For instance the Gouf’s Heat whip is now a melee option whose special ability forces the opponent to reroll 10s on DEF. Mechasaurus immobilizing attacks, Baron Ashura’s claws and Altron Gundam’s dragon claws were also shifted to being melee options.

On the topic of Melee options with the core rules update to VER 9.1 on the horizon we are planning on letting Skilled and Ace Pilots make a melee clash twice in the same turn by spending Momentum. So a Gouf player if they wanted to could lash out with their heat whip and later their heat sword on the same turn. Similarly a Gyan player could attack one unit, disengage from melee, then strike another unit.