The lower stuff isn’t really sub-optimal though. I believe the CAR is one of the best weapons in the game, for its flexibility and lethality. The EVA shotgun is arguably better than the Mastiff too.
I still rock the grapple kit with Scorch and fear Ions more than any other titan. Tone’s are a pain in the arse, granted, but Ion’s laser, vortex shield, tripwires, splitter rifle (effective against titans AND pilots) as well as its devastating laser core, make it a constant threat. I’ve seen Ions solo win LTS!
Not really used Phase Shift much but it can be very disorienting for the user so its swings and roundabouts. I personally prefer Stim for the speed boost and health regen.
As for boosts: weapon amp, ticks and pilot sentries are all very useful. I’d argue that the later boost unlocks are less useful than the early ones for the most part.
I agree though that the MP can be brutal when you’re in the pool with a few aim-bot level players. I recommend the SP first to get a feel for everything or, failing that, playing it to take a break from the meat grinder. I mean, it’s awesome in its own right. I love the MP but, yeah, it can be frustrating at times.
@BrianRubin quick tip for the final boss: I main Scorch and had more trouble against Viper ;-)
The EVA is way, way better than the Mastiff, especially in PvP.
Agreed. The Grapple is probably the best alt perk, albeit harder to really use effectively than something like Stim… but once you get the handle on it, Grapple will let you move around WAY faster than stim, if for no other reason than it gives you two full uses as opposed to Stim’s one.
The key trick with the grapple, is to grapple the ground in front of you as far away as possible. Then, once it starts pulling you in, just jump once. It’ll launch you into the air, and once you pass the grapple point it’ll automatically detach, and you’ll just keep flying in that direction.
Once you get good, you can use this to sling yourself around corners, all kinds of stuff.
Also agreed with Ion. Ion’s the most versatile of all the mechs, and once you get the hang of how to balance her power usage, and how to control range, you can wreck most other mechs.
I think that the huge weakness in the SP campaign are the titan battles, particularly the boss battles. For a game that is so amazing with the mechanics of jumping, boosting, shooting, and wall running, getting in a slow mech isn’t as fun.
The game does an amazing job of feeling kind of open-ended on how you can approach combat encounters, but the boss battles just feel like you have to do the same kind of tactics over and over again. Hide in cover till your cooldowns are up, attack the boss, rinse repeat. Some of those got really frustrating, as the action slowed down considerably. Having basically never died on the ground as a pilot, I found the boss battles a huge difficulty spike in some of the cases. And when I did finish the boss battles without trouble, it was because I felt like I was cheesing the encounters with some tactics.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the game is on foot, but for a game that is based on Titans, it was disappointing that the boss battles and titan segments felt so weak.
As a fan of the titan combat, and particularly Last Titan Standing (did I mention that I also loved HAWKEN?), I thought the boss fights were a welcome change of pace and did a good job of introducing you to the different titan loadouts and, in some cases, their respective counters.
I’ve got to say, in MP it always amazes me to see players who are incredibly sharp pilots suck in their titans. It’s slower, it’s tankier, it’s more restrictive and yet they can’t perform in that space, weirdly. I feel that my strongest game is in my titan and I love stomping around lighting the place up with thermite. 80 hours in and only in the last few play sessions have I realised that ADS with Scorch gives you a thermite launcher arc. Frickin’ d’oh. Also: the run key while charging your rail gun as Northstar zooms your view in. Double d’oh.
Another thing about the boss battles is that each chapter introduced a new villain that you knew you’d end up fighting. It had a classic ‘showdown’ structure to it. I loved that.
What’s great about the titan boss fights is that they offer you the opportunity to learn and take advantage of more nuanced titan strategies you’ll need to learn for multiplayer. Things like how to preserve your dash, how to use each of the abilities, and even when to risk it and jump out in order to rodeo your opponent if possible.
Titanfall 2’s campaign is excellent not just in its creative ideas, but how well it trains you for multiplayer in general too.
Anytime I read that a single player campaign (excellent though it may be) is good training for the multiplayer, I have a much tougher time maintaining any interest in that game.
Oh, dude, I usually hate that too, but this game is special. The campaign is soooooo good you likely won’t even notice it’s training you for multiplayer. I certainly didn’t until I peeked into MP and saw that the different loadouts for BT were actually separate titans in MP, for example. Didn’t bother me a bit, since the campaign is just so good on its own anyway. Even if I never get into MP, I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth just out of the campaign.
For a lot of games, the single player feels like a tacked-on afterthought that’s just a glorified tutorial for multiplayer, which is pretty infuriating if you care about single player.
Yes, because it gives the impression that the single player is an afterthought, or that it exists only in service to the multiplayer. And that’s fine if you are mainly interested in multiplayer but generally that’s not what gets me to throw money down. Good multiplayer would be icing on a hopefully already great cake.
No it does not. The SP campaign was so good it encouraged me to go back and play the original Titanfall because their approach to FPS combat clicked" now.
I think this is a major misconception though, and one that limits your ability to fight effectively in the titans until you recognize their mobility.
Titans are FAST. Especially in PvP, you need to recognize that a titan basically moves faster than a guy on foot can possibly move, unless he’s stimmed. And use of this mobility is key to effective titan use, especially in LTS. All too often I’ve seen folks cluster up and not really move around, only to get absolutely gutted by flankers.
This is actually something that was done way better than a game like Mechwarrior Online… I think it’s largely because of the map design, where the maps are generally much tighter for the mechs… so having a ton of guys clustered together is not useful. (whereas in MWO, having a deathball of concentrated firepower was a primary guiding tactic)
In Titanfall, you want to be using mech’s mobility, and sprinting/dashing to get into flanking positions. You rarely want to be right next to your teammates… but rather, want to have overlapping fields of fire with them.
I played heavily on XB1 from October to December last year, and there were enough people to find a game most of the time, even in some of the more obscure game types. But an attrition or campaign map should be no problem. EA has this on the EA Access, the DLC packs are free now, and I recall there being between 2000 and 4500 players most of the time.
Yeah, what Brian (and plenty of others have) said. While the TF2 SP campaign is great at laying down the foundation for MP there’s a lot of very cool stuff that is unique to it and fundamental to it being such a tremendous experience in its own right. It strikes a rare balance between the two modes of play. Splatoon also comes to mind.
My newcomer friend and I were playing CTF together last night and he was on foot while I was in my Scorch. I was walking down the centre of Forward Base Kodai and he was running alongside me through the buildings. Grabbing the enemy flag he popped his stim and dashed back while I kept pace. He was vulnerable running alone so I told him to hop on my titan, at which point I sprinted towards our flag, dropping thermite in any potential doorways. It was really fucking cool and he loved it as he hopped off and planted the flag. So, yeah, titans are fast compared to pilots, even snails like Scorch and Legion!
Ya, this is a pretty good technique in CTF… Do it with Ronin, where he has two dashes, as well as the phase dash, and you can fly across the map.
The only way to really go faster is if you’ve mastered the grapple and hop sliding, as you can kind of create a sustained slide that’s faster than a boost… is way harder to do though.
