3 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

Maximize Your Impact – How to Make the Most of Your Minutes

Hiya!

After a recent bit of discussion in Follow the Fracking Atlas – another thread you should read if you want to learn how to improve your numbers and your payouts in MWO – I decided to try my hand at writing a short guide on a subject relatively few players really seem to get. More experienced/advanced players understand it by instinct, and the best of the Super Pr0s actively know what I’m talking about and take it into account with their ‘Mech designs, tactics, and team compositions.

What is this mystery subject? Impact.

Your impact in a match is how much you actively affected the outcome of a match, and it’s a concept that extends across all competitive games. You’ve all seen examples of it – someone who ‘carried’ a match, with six kills and 1k damage at the end of it, had a disproportionately heavy impact on the match while all of his teammates, in turn, had a disproportionately light impact on the match. That Carrylander won the match pretty much by himself and you all know it – but what you might not know is how, or why.

Well, now you will!

The first step to maximizing your impact in a match is to understand that all matches in MWO are time-limited. No, I don’t just mean the match timer on top of the screen, though that is a part of it. What I mean is that any given match is only going to last for so long. Maybe three minutes, if one team just straight-up omnoms the other. Maybe fourteen and a half, if the fight is a long, bitter struggle between beautifully-matched opponents. But in either case, you only have so long to affect the match. You don’t have time to dilly-dally, screw around in the outskirts of the map, or be indecisive. That Carrylander won that match for you because he knew exactly where he was going and what he needed to do when he got there. He kept his idle time to an absolute minimum, and because of it he mauled every face in the room and walked off with a fat paycheck.

I’m going to propose three tips for you to follow to do the same; learning to follow them without dying all the time will be hard, but pushing the envelope and getting swatted down for it is a faster way to learn than cowering behind a rock, actively minimizing your impact. You’ll catch the hang of it eventually, and when you do you’ll be much more dangerous, and a much bigger help to your team, than the guy throwing indirect LRM fire from 900 meters because he’s never learned better.

1.) “If You’re Not Shooting, You’re Not Helping”
This one’s ripped straight from FtFA, and for very good reason. This right here is the crux of this entire guide. This is the main reason that Carrylander walked away with all the loot and all the girls, and you’re stuck in the ‘Mechbay waiting for repairs.

In MWO, the primary means of winning all existing game modes is to destroy the enemy’s ‘Mechs. You can cap base in Assault or win on resources in Conquest, but both objectives are generally only possible after the enemy has been thinned out. Damage you deal to the enemy cannot be recovered – they can’t put armor back on their ‘Mechs, they can’t restock ammunition they use on you, they can’t reduce your Conquest resource counter or undo base capture progress. The same, of course, goes for your side.

The more time you spend actively damaging the enemy, reducing their available resources of armor, ammo, and time, the better your chance of winning. Any reasonable chance you have to take a shot, do it. You always want to do more damage than you take in any given exchange of fire, but even worse than taking it in the pants is to never exchange fire at all. At that point, as far as your team is concerned you’re as good as dead already. If you deal 20 damage to an enemy and take 50 damage…that’s 20 less damage your team has to do in your stead.

2.) “Move Only as Much As You Need To Shoot”
One of the biggest ways newer players manage to waste time and hurt their impact on the game is by over-maneuvering. If you’re maneuvering around the fight, you’re not in the fight, and thus you are not shooting. As we’ve established, this means you’re not helping.

There are times when you want to avoid the enemy for a few moments – they’re in a strong position, they have you outnumbered, you’ve been NARC’d, etcetera – but taking a two-minute detour to circle wide around the enemy’s position with the notion of shooting them in the butts and Turning Things Around almost never works as well as you think it will. Mostly because this is two minutes you’re giving the enemy to power-play your team with a numbers advantage; the extra damage they deal to your side while you’re absent from the fight will almost always more than outweigh the surprise damage you deal to their rear parts.

If the enemy is in a strong position, then maneuver only as much and as long as you need to in order to try and force them out of that position. Get your guns back into play as quickly and as often as you can – remember Tip 1. Not shooting? Not helping.

3.) “You Are Not Allergic to Bullets”
Armor is a resource that exists to be used. It’s something Void mentioned in FtFA, but it deserves expounding on, because this is also one of the biggest failings many newer pilots go through on their way to (eventually, hopefully) becoming Robadasses.

A concept very closely related to impact is pressure. Pressure is your ability to influence the enemy’s decisions in a manner which benefits you – when two ‘Mechs meet in combat and one eventually runs away from the other, it’s because the first ‘Mech exerted more pressure on the second than the second could tolerate. Some pilots, particularly newer ones, fold very easily under pressure; the minute they start taking damage, they’re out. I am, in fact, guilty as charged – I can’t stand getting shot and by default will do whatever I can to not get shot in a particular match.

Fight this tendency.

If you’re in a position to deal more damage than you take, then you’re in a strong position and you need to hold it for as long as you can reasonably do so. You want to push them; letting them knock you out of your position with a few points of laser damage means they’ve prevented all of that potential damage you could have done, and thus conserved resources they can use to clobber you and your team upside the brainpans when they’re the ones in the strong position.

Your armor does you no good if you don’t let it do its job. When you’re in a position to bring the hammer down on someone and all they can do in return is whack you with a screwdriver, then press your advantage as hard as you can, and ignore the armor damage you’re taking. I guarantee that if you let the other guy get away with chasing you off for token damage, he’s not going to be so nice when the hammer’s in his hands.

And there you have it! Three basic guidelines for making sure you’re doing as much as you can to help your team win a fight. Remember – the more you, yourself, can do, the less slack there is you have to rely on your team for. Even if you’re never one of those Carrylanders grabbing six kills and 1k damage at the end of a match, you can be one of the two other guys on your team who did 350+ damage with a couple of the extra kills. At that point you did your part – and if you did your part, there’s no reason you ever need to feel bad about a match of MWO.

[Mark of Caine]

Great tips and a great read.

1 suggestion though: Would you be able to provide some in-game examples for all three tips? Maybe even videos of matches where this occurred?

Even though I've been playing close to 2 years, I always welcome advice and concrete in-game examples.

[Mootrix]

This is a great post, very clear and obvious when you read it.

I would see this as applying almost entirely to Assaults and Heavies, 1453 R, I assume you pilot these.

For mediums and lights manoeuvrability is key but points 1 and 3 still very much apply

[1453 R]

@Caine: Unfortunately I’m unable to capture any video myself. That said, all you have to do to see these points in action is watch any competition-level match. I guarantee any such match is going to be full of people doing everything in their power to maximize their impact in the match, since that’s rather the point of competition-level play in the first place.

@Mootrix: I’m actually primarily a medium pilot with a good side helping of light and some dabbles in heavy and assault. I find these particular tips and goals to be pretty universal throughout the game – how you go about them differs according to your weight class and loadout, of course, and mediums/lights have to be more careful with 3 than the fatties (and the fatties, conversely, have to be very cognizant of 2 since it takes them so much longer to get from Point A to Point B ) – but the general idea applies to everybody. You always want to be moving forwards, not backwards. Never give up ground you don’t have to, or fail to take a shot available to you. And, of course, always be angling to make shots available to you.

Edited by 1453 R, 30 April 2014 - 04:18 PM.