pg1
1641
I know for certain some of the haters on the official forums play a hell of a lot so it’s a weird dichotomy. I know one of the guys who bashes the game constantly has something like 40 mechs, haha! He hates it so much he can’t stop playing. I’m also continuously impressed by PGI Erlam’s comments on reddit. He is actually engaging with people a lot and it’s sad I don’t think he could do so on the official forums (maybe if they changed to an upvote/downvote system).
I find jump jets in general to not be that useful. They are slow and when you land you lose all your speed. Another part of the reason is MWO doesn’t lend itself to vertical aiming that well. Also most of the maps are fairly flat. If there was a map full of large warehouses with shipping containers or something they might be useful. Most buildings are often too tall or have no space to move around even if you get on top of them.
How are you guys finding the Stalkers? I was going to get one but the slowness is putting me off so far. I prefer hit and run fighting instead of relying on armor to absorb hits.
Timex
1642
The stalker is slow as hell, but god DAMN it can carry a lot of guns.
I like the stalker. It is a real gunboat, I suspect any mech, competantly piloted, that can manage 90km/h should be able to stay out of weapon arc at close range, so they need protection moreso than the the other assaults; however the main purpose of the stalker seems to as a heavy/assault killer. It can easily go toe to toe with an atlas due to its phenomenal alpha.
It can also be a decent sniper, with the improvement to PPCs and those incredibly high mounted arm energy hardpoints, I can imagine a 4 PPC build working well. 2 PPC, 4 SRM6, and 4 MLAS also fits with 18 double heat sinks.
It’s a monster you don’t want to meet in a river city night dark alley.
pg1
1644
Offline Mechbay has been updated recently with the recent changes so I’m working on some Stalker builds right now in it. Also it looks like PPCs, ERPPCs, LPL, and ERLL are going to get tweaked in January. PGI has been doing great lately.
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/73536-weapon-balancing/page__p__1639491#entry1639491
HUMBY50
1645
I dunno, i always found jump jets good to have in a pinch. I’ve not been playing lights since they got rid of knockdowns though, it seemed too much of a free for all at that point. Can’t wait until they put them back in and all the ECM ravens/Commandos have to work a bit harder!
I’ve not played the stalker myself yet but haven’t found it that scary to face, perhaps as people get more used to it I’ll learn to fear it more!
Well, PPC Jenner is back in action, and all the fancy lightweight toys that weren’t around last time I built it give me some wonderful performance.
XL235 engine, for a speed of 105
ER PPC and 2xmedlas for armament, which is of limited use against other lights but handy against heavy
Endo-steel internals and double heat sinks, yielding almost-max armor. I might even be able to fit ferro-fibrous, which would give me weight for another medium laser, or maybe medium pulse lasers, or maybe jump jets.
Panther fit! I guess you’d move with main battle group and provide fire support; trying to scout you would get your lunch eaten in short order. I’d go for streaks for anti-light mech defence.
Would be cool if they added the Panther to the game. I always loved that mech, and the derivative Wolfhound.
Yeah, it’s not capable of beating another light (although the armor makes it a slightly more even fight), but it punches well above its weight class. I killed an Atlas through the back faster than the Stalker on the other side could kill it through the front, and using an ER PPC makes it marginally usable at close range. On Frozen City, at least, the double heat sinks let me fire the ER PPC at cycle rate, although it starts to overheat if I use the medium lasers, too. Lack of jump jets is annoying, but not fatal; I don’t generally have to make daring escapes because I try to stick close to larger, deadlier mechs.
Brawler lights in general are kind of an attempt to break the matchmaker, it seems to me—doing 300 damage off of a light mech when the utility Ravens/joker Commandos on the other team are taking a light-mech slot can swing the balance in my team’s direction.
ER PPC is not really for brawling. You’ll get way more use out of 4 medium lasers at just over half the weight, double the damage and less heat generation.
So-called utility raven should easily be able to deal 300+ points of damage with two streaks and 3 medium lasers (also while carrying ECM, maximum armour, and capable of 132km/h+ . My streak commando regularly depletes his two tons of alotted ammo which means he will have done close to 500 damage for the match, not counting the backup medium laser work.
I still maintain the problem with light mechs is XL engines and to a lesser extent endo steel, which allow them to mount heavy firepower without making the necessary hard sacrifices in armour and speed. A stock jenner had terrific firepower in it’s 4 medium lasers and srm 4, sure, but paper thin armour. With XL and endo steel it gets to carry the same or better firepower, mac out its armour, AND tack 30 km/h onto it’s top speed. Booo.
As a result there is no such thing as a brawler mech really. A pity.
Welp, they finally fixed jump jets, which dumps my industry-leading Jenner build from Sagat-tier.
Now I have to choose between vertical moblility, increased sensor range or missile defense instead of having it all. Though the introduction of ECM makes
the latter two choices mostly superficial in most games, so jump jets it is.
pg1
1651
I see a lot of light mechs do 300-800 damage. I’ve grouped with people who play various lights and hit that almost every match. Lights are strong currently because of various issues but damage output seems OK.
One thing I wonder about as I build Assault mechs (Stalkers) is it seems like design is hampered by critical slots. Why does every mech have the same number of slots (78)? That just seems wrong. Is that how TT does it too? You’d expect an Assault to be able to carry much more not just in weight but space as well. Yet it appears lights are the ones who are more likely to run XL, Endo, FF, etc. It seems backwards to me.
Tabletop works that way also yes. However in the orginal game endo-steel, XL-engines, and ferro-fibrous did not exist. The critical space system was simply a part of the mech design process and a way of determining critical hit locations.
The new tech stuff was tacked on later and somewhat counter-intuitively uses the critical space system to provide some kind of drawback.
You can rationalize it by thinking that endo-steel, being lighter, is harder to enginner at the higher weight classes due to the stress of carrying such a heavy weapon load. Ferro fibrous is kind of silly and pointless most of the time anyway. Double heat sinks are easy to imagine why they might take up more space, and XL engines requirements are mostly a balancing mechanic without a very good rationale.
If I were to redo these mechanics I would vastly tone down their effects. Maybe XL engines would be a 15 or 20% weight saving with a drawback like the engine has 3 or 4 less heat sinks included (lighter engine runs hotter, so good for scouts or mechs that mostly carry ballistics), endo-steel makes your internal structure 25% lighter but internals do double damage… ferro-fibrous takes 14 crit spaces but gives you both 12% extra armour per ton and 12% increase in max armour.
That’s just off the top of my head there are probably even more elegant ways to do it, so that new tech has a benefit and a cost that makes it an interesting choice in general, rather than just playing crit space tetris.
Janster
1653
Been wondering myself, why heavy mechs struggle with using upgrades, while light mechs can revel in them. A medium laser is a medium laser, it doesn’t get any bigger, no matter what mech you got…
Its a concept that’s great, since it also does this for damage, but bad when it comes to building mechs.
It’s a little counter-intuitive but it does make light mechs more viable on the battlefield. How scary is a jenner with a top speed of 120 and 128 points of armour? Not even half as scary as a jenner with a top speed of 140+ and 232 points of armour.
If the maps were a little more vast and scouting played a bigger role then beefing up light mechs for direct combat would be less important.
Timex
1655
The only reason that heavy mechs have a harder time fielding all of the structural upgrades is that they tend to be devoting much more space to seasons. Light mechs can’t really use their space anyway, since the weight restrictions limit them.
However, this changes with clan tech.
Honestly, I just do not see how they will possibly balance the clan tech. It is just so much better in every possible way.
MrCoffee
1656
It’s easy, everyone uses clan tech!
Lore-wise, the clan teams would be smaller. But they’d still win :(
My recollection is that lore-wise it wasn’t supposed to be balanced, at all.
The lore “balances” clan tech by making the clans inferior numerically to the inner sphere, and forcing them to adhere to a code of honour that prevents them from ganging up or focussing fire on one opponent, and having their commanders ritualistically bid to complete military objectives with the minimum forces, ths ensuring they are always outnumbered.
The lore is kind of silly. Of course once the inner sphere starts deploying their own clan tech level weapons all these code of honour requirements conveniently of fall by the wayside.
Battletech lore once the clans get introduced just gets stupid anyway. The pre-clan Machiavellian scheming of noble houses and technology in decay setting was much more interesting.
pg1
1660
That actually sounds like a great system which would work and fit into CW excellently. I’m curious to see if they can pull it off however.
