5 replies to this topic

[MajorRage]

Edited by MajorRage, 13 March 2014 - 12:58 AM.

[Mahws]

Oh man, low ELO, I forgot how fun that is. So many people not running poptart Victors.

So, some pointers:

• PPCs have a minimum range of 90m, under that range you do no damage so most of your shots on that spider did nothing at all. ERPPC have no minimum range (at the expense of greater heat), so if that keeps being a problem for you you might want to consider swapping for one of those. I'd also advise moving it to your shoulder, means you can fire over terrain easily and pop only your head over a ridge to fire off shots.
  
• You've probably already noticed, as it's a bit more obvious, but LRM also have a minimum range, for them it's 180m.
  
• AC/2 are not a good weapon to take as a main gun, especially on a fast mech like a dragon. They do put out decent damage, but it's over time so you're likely to spread it over the entire enemy mech, instead of on one point. Or like in the case of the spider, miss half your shots because you have to keep the aim over them 100% of the time. They're best used either with two or more, and/or one big slow mechs that can stand still and slug it out at short range like an Atlas.
  
• That little light on the left hand side of your centurion's cockpit is your missile door indicator. Centurions, Catapults, Stalkers and Kintaros have missile doors. When they're closed it takes an extra .5 seconds to fire your missiles, but you get an extra 10% damage resistance. When you're on an Australian ping that .5 seconds really counts, so you should open them at the start of every match, which you can do with the (IIRC) backslash. You actually did it by accident in your video.

And as a final note, this is probably not something you want to hear, but the Dragon is not a good mech. And I say this as a person who's mastered four of them, have ~100,000XP on my Flame and enjoy using them more than any of the other mechs I own. They've got a massive center torso, difficult hardpoints to work with, low slung arms and are the lightest heavy, meaning that once weight class balancing comes in you'll be paired against other bigger, heavier heavy mechs on the other team. They don't have a lot going for them.

With that caveat out of the way, they're great fun and you can do some really interesting things with them. The 1C is great for an energy build (I run mine with two PPC in the shoulder, two ML in the arm and a butt-load of heatsinks) as with its high placed shoulder mounts and quick speed it makes for a good ridge sniper, and the other two can be fun either boating small ballistics (two AC/5 or 3xAC/2) or Gauss, AC/10 and LBX10 fast heavy hitters.

Dragon's are great at using their speed to get to where you can do the most damage and hunt down the enemy team's wounded. But to do any of that you're going to need to make a pretty expensive investment in an XL300 engine (or bigger, I run mine with an XL320 and XL350 mostly) to have the weight to fit decent weapons on it, which will set you back a whopping 4,900,000 Cbills (9.5 tonnes lighter than a standard 300 engine, but you die instantly if you lose a side torso, like that Catapult at the end of your video). So ask yourself exactly how much you like playing those dragons, and if the answer isn't "a lot" maybe consider selling most of them once you've got your basic and elite skills unlocked.

Edit:
Oh, and if you haven't already shift some of your back armor to your front. You really don't need more than 10/12 on your back torsos and as much as you can get on your front.

Edit2:
And compulsory link to smurfy: http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/
All the information you could need and you can click on any of the mechs to open up an online mechlab where you can experiment with and share builds.

Edited by Mahws, 18 March 2014 - 12:32 AM.

[Steinar Bergstol]

The Dragon was, in fact, my first mech back in closed beta, and I still have a bit of a fondness for it (plus It's a Kurita made, so I'm required by law to like it ). Its strong point is its speed and fair agility, but it's a mech which takes practice to get comfortable with because of that big CT. You _will_ get your "nose" shot off, particularly until you've gotten quite a bit of practice in it. That said, with that big bulletmagnet of a CT does come an advantage: Tiny side torsos which makes this mech a perfect candidate for XL engines. In fact, the Dragon is one of the very few mechs where I would recommend putting in an XL since it doesn't really make the mech much more fragile than without one.

[Iqfish]

You should press "R" to target enemies.

[MajorRage]

Edited by MajorRage, 31 August 2014 - 10:28 PM.

[Mahws]

Not bad! Always good to see some solid dragon gameplay.

Just on the off chance you don't know, as of a few months ago Autocannons no longer do damage out to 300% of their range, so that Awesome you were trying to nail with your AC/20 at the start wouldn't have taken any damage if you did hit him. They do 100% damage at their range (270m for AC/20) scaling to 0% at 2x their range (540m for AC/20).

Definitely hit the AC/20 the hardest, you really need to get into knife fighting ranges with it now.