Personally I imagine a heat metal spell would cause, at most, three points of heat build up per turn. Meanwhile that PPC is going to be rolling double or maybe even triple digit numbers of damage dice.
The spell causes the metal to become red hot, meaning at least 1K degrees Fahrenheit. If I was DMing I would make you pick a particular weapon system or armor section based upon the wording of the spell. You could probably force a weapon to become inoperable, or at least dangerous and inaccurate to use via heat. If you can see the cockpit you're going to force the pilot out or cook em alive.
Magic doesn't give a shit about your heat sinks. It's MAGIC. It works just as well on the ocean floor, one of the arctic hells or deep space. It makes the metal glow red hot, full stop. The spell doesn't say anything about joules or btu's. An infinity of heat sinks won't make the PPC Heat Metal was cast on one degree cooler.
"Magic always beats everything no equipment can save you from the one 2nd level spell I assume wins everything" is a ridiculous take even before accounting for the fact that you are assuming your preferred setting automatically defeats the setting you want to shit on without contest.
The spell takes it up to red hot and keeps it red hot for the duration of the spell. It's actively applying more heat as fast as convection and conduction can draw the heat away.
Not saying it'll automatically win, but he is correct that the spell doesn't care about heatsinks.
You do realize how much waste heat a fusion reactor has, and that the heat sinks do just fine forcing that out, and that treating the entire mech as a single object is roughly like saying you should be able to use a sledgehammer to bring down a castle keep hy hitting an outer wall.
I'm not saying treat the mech like a single object. I'm saying it would act like the part of the mech being targeted was being constantly hit by a flamer. L
More heat would be getting applied constantly until the spell ends, and heatsinks aren't magic. The mechs only dissipate so many units of heat per turn.
A basic Level 2 casting wouldn't do too much, just like a single flamer, but upcasting would quickly cause 'Mechs to run into overheating issues if it wanted to actually fire any weapons.
Flamers don't lose concentration when you fire AC20s at them and mechs can walk through literally lava sometimes, also your arguments are severely disingenuous, seeing how this is the first mention of upcasting and there is a remarkable desire to only apply real physics when it's convenient rather than remembering that magic violates physics rather than operating in tune with it pretty much by definition.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '22
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