In an effort to find viable SDR-5K builds I am trying the following, which I term the “Heavy Locust”
endo-steel
ferro-fibrous
240XL engine
10 double heat sinks
4x machine gun
1x Large Pulse Laser
jumpjets removed
I just started playing, my first bought mech is a Hunchback with AC20. Any hits about how I should fit the loadout?
What’s a good Heavy mech for my second buy?
Razgon
1703
I am installing this as well currently, and suddenly saw you could purchase Hero Mechs…its it very much Pay to win?
No, at least not for this reason. The Hero Mech’s are like premium tanks in World of Tanks. They make more money. Most of them are meh, some are interesting variants, but none of them seem overpowered in the slightest.
It’s more like “get in a lance of four or eight and make sure you have lots of ECM to win.”
God, this is laggy, which is surprising given that the average mech speed is kind of slow.
Complaints about the network performance have been endemic since I’ve been playing, for sure. It tends to vary a lot with your connection speed though.
I do not notice the lag much though I have a good connection and I am geographically close to the servers. It’s clear they do very little lag compensation at this point however. They have said it’s their number one priority.
For your hunchback I think the default loadout is actually quite good with the exception that I would invest in double heat sinks and endo steel internal structure, and use the extra tonnage to add AC/20 ammo and upgrade the small laser to a medium. Another possibility is to use a Gauss rifle instead and snipe a long range. There’s numerous other wacky possibilities (3xAC/2 for example, or dual ultra AC/5 if you are a gambling man but they are tough fits.
pg1
1708
I hated the AC20 HBKs I ran. I had the HBK-4H and disliked it but still mastered it. Instead I end up playing the HBK-4P/4SP the most out of any other mechs. HBKs get a lot better once you put in DHS, Endo Steel, a 250-260 rated engine and out course max out their pilot skills.
I’d say slightly in the sense that paying will reduce the grind. Premium time bonus is 50% while Hero mechs are 30% (and they can stack). Most of the Hero mechs are iffy. Only two I’d say are good and only one of those offers something unique (3xUAC5 on the Ilya).
I’ve played 812 matches, have a lot of mechs and about 30 million CBills in the bank. I’ve only played regularly for about 5 weeks (I’d guess around 100 hours so far). You can probably grind out the whole game in a month of extremely heavy play or a few months of regular casual play. As more content gets released that’ll become longer but compared to a lot of F2P games I think MWO goes much faster. For comparison I’d guess MWO takes around 300 hours currently to unlock almost everything for free (frankly there are some mechs I have no interest in) while figures I’ve seen for Hawken is 1500 hours (with way less content to get) and 500 hours for Tribes Ascend.
What kind of pings are you getting in game? I don’t find it laggy on my end (average ping 65ms) but if I’m playing versus other players who ping 100ms and up I notice it. Having bad ping in this game is actually advantageous if you play a light as it produces an effect people refer to as “lagshield”. Basically high ping light mechs warp around and are near impossible to hit. Hopefully it will be fixed soon so that they only player who suffers is the laggy player, not anyone trying to hit them. However you can somewhat combat this by leading your targets. If you hit your crosshair will turn red confirming it but often the case with laggy lights is that you won’t do any damage for some reason or much less than you should.
My best tip would be use voice and play with guys on that in 4 man groups to start. There are some huge free voice servers with 200-500 slots. There are some listed on the official forums. I use this one - Mumble Server: credditmwo.com port 64738 (nick Fastidious, probably be on in a bit).
160ms, with Europe marked in the selector.
But it’s not even my own ping (I think), it’s that sometimes i see other mechs, lights usually, warping around.
pg1
1710
I don’t know why they don’t just release regional servers already. It wouldn’t fix the netcode but it’d make for a much better experience for everyone. I don’t know any FPS which I’d categorize as having a good experience past 200ms. Playable at 200ms? Sure, but not good. Even games with the best netcode you want under 100ms and ideally 50ms or less. You can go back and play the original Doom without any prediction (lagged movement and lagged aim running at 35fps) and as long as you have low ping it’s pretty damn great.
pg1
1711
Oh, and I forgot, any new player should turn this on immediately -
http://mwomercs.com/pennyarcade
It gives you one day of free premium time that will stack with the current XP bonus and stack with the cadet bonus! Major win.
Enidigm
1712
I have a medium laser hunchy. I’ve been satisfied well enough with it. Mainly I just hide behind Atlases and shoot at whatever they’re shooting at. 8 medium lasers is 40 damage, which is pretty decent. Although I liked the Cataphract and Centurion in the table top, what I’d like to have I think is a Javelin or Quickdraw. I actually wouldn’t mind an Urbanmech. It seems like engagements are either at melee range or at long distance due to the shape of maps; I don’t see much reason for stuff like Large Lasers or AC-5s. So stuff like the Hunchback works; just pike up the short range killer burst damage stuff.
The commando makes a passable javelin-alike. I ran one of my commando variants with dual SRM 6 and a medium laser. It did pretty well harassing heavier mechs.
Addendum: I think I mentioned it back a few pages but you can easily turn a raven 4x into an urbanmech. And while I share your disdain for the AC/5 the large laser is an outstanding weapon in mwo.
Janster
1714
I actually think some of the weapons have ridiculously short ranges. Only 300 for large pulse…and large laser isn’t much longer…while the extended laser is nice the heat is impossible to cope with. The only real long range weapon with any damage is the ultra ac5 , this excludes missiles tho.
What am I supposed to do with that page?
Enidigm
1716
Does the LL do better damage than the table top? It was barely 50% more than a medium.
Large lasers do full damage out to 450, and still do noticeable damage at 600.
The gauss rifle has longer range than an ultra AC/5 and all autocannons can hit and do quite good damage well beyond the listed range. Given the map sizes the AC/2 has practically unlimited range. The PPC is also a good long range weapon, doing full damage at 600m.
Due to the decision to implement diminishing damage after the normal max range almost all weapons have considerably longer ranges than their tabletop values, with the exception of SRMs which detonate at 270m regardless.
It’s funny how I understood the variants of mechs, after playing a few matches. At first in the beta, I was fooling around with the trial mechs so I didn’t think twice about it, but now that I’m buying new mechs and trying different laodouts, I know why.
Because, having already weight restrictions AND slot (volume) restrictions, someone could think it’s already enough to control what you can put in a mech and still be balanced. And it’s true, that’s enough.
The reasons variants exist with different hard points is purely economical! People could buy 2/3 mechs and with that be set for the rest of the game, if they could do missile, laser, ballistic loadouts, and whatever hybrid they would want, to heart’s content. So they introduced variants, where you have to buy three or four times the same mech if you want that variety, with the extra of having to buy the pricey upgrades (double heat sinks, ferro armor, etc) for each variant again. Genius.
Gotta love F2P design.
pg1
1719
It used to be if you were logged in on the MWO site you could click some button at the bottom and it’d add 1 day of premium time to your account. I already did it long ago so I don’t know if it still works but people keep saying it does. If it doesn’t work anymore that sucks.
I’m sure there’s some truth to that but it’s awfully cynical. The only grind part of the game I seriously dislike is that you need to get basic in 3 variants before you unlock elite. Once you get 3 mechs at elite in that weight class it will unlock master (much more reasonable). Yet at the same time past MW games suffered from too much customization where you could do wacky stuff because they didn’t have hard points. That’s fine in single player but it doesn’t quite work in multiplayer as well. I actually think the limits in MWO force more builds and add lots of variety to the game. If hard points weren’t there it’d be much more likely we’d be reduced down to much less viable builds as everyone boats the same best weapons on every single mech.
I’m not sure I agree, with both weight limit and slot limit, as I said, it should be enough to be sure they are balance in multiplayer.
And how putting more restrictions about how to build your loadout gives more build variety? Supposing the weapons are well balanced, they should have the same variety, or even more. If you need hard templates about how the builds have to be done to have variety, then maybe you have a balance problem.
Even if it was true, they could have given all the variants when you buy a mech, just one mech with a variant selector in the loadout menu. But no, instead of paying 5M credits, you have to pay up 20M for four variants. That’s not cynism, it’s realism: it’s a F2P game, they have to put slow, long grind so people say “fuck this shit, I better pay $30 for ingame credits and be done with it” AND put enough paid content so people with more money than sense (the “whales”, ex. $120 founders) pay extra bucks to compensate the people who will pay for free.
In fact, it almost worked for me: I was looking how much money would cost to buy a Heavy mech and upgrade it.
