13 replies to this topic

[Bluesaint]

The 10 things you will learn as a Long Range Missle boat driver:

1: You and long range snipers are the most hated people on the battlefield.

2: It is your job to be the most hated person on the battlefield.

3: You will be killed by some twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and a dime bag [Redacted].

4: The only thing worse than getting caught by yourself by a twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and dime bag [Reacted] the Cataphract that comes to rescue you with a pair of Ultra AC5's. Friendly fire is amazingly accurate.

5: There is a magic number. I do not know what it is precisely, but I know it exists. At a certain point, when you are dropping salvos on an opponent, you will see a swarm of blue triangles, composed of mainly light mechs and a few liquored up mediums and heavies, attack your target like a school of hungry piranha swarming a helpless deer in the river. Someday, you will be the helpless deer in the river.

6: You will accidentally kill someone filming a video for their YouTube channel. They will hold a grudge.

7: Even though you might be driving a heavy mech, you are not a Jaeger. Repeat this until you learn it. This may take several days.

8: When looking at your mech it may appear you are driving a formidable war machine, but to your opponents, you are a pinata with legs full of candy.

9: Assault mechs are your friends. They provide larger targets for the enemy to shoot at, and are slow moving targets for you, as turning around or finding cover can take them several minutes.

10: As missle damage is diffuse, your kills shots are mainly accidental. The enemy's kills shots on you are entirely intentional.

Edited by GM Patience, 18 March 2015 - 01:25 PM.

[Tim East]

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

3: You will be killed by some twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and a dime bag [Redacted].

Some of those lights are really dangerous even head-on. My Locust can eke out almost 9 dps with its small pulse lasers, and Firestarters get 1-2 more.

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

4: The only thing worse than getting caught by yourself by a twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and dime bag of [Redacted] is the Cataphract that comes to rescue you with a pair of Ultra AC5's. Friendly fire is amazingly accurate.

I've seen a lot of this. I've even seen people shoot each other with LRMs, since most decent LRM boats are big enough for me to hide behind for cover from the rain.

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

6: You will accidentally kill someone filming a video for their YouTube channel. They will hold a grudge.

If you manage to somehow kill an ally with LRMs, my hat is off to you, Sir. It takes a special kind of stubborn to keep shooting at an enemy that is using your ally for cover, and there is no convenient way to make the missiles track your allies.

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

8: When looking at your mech it may appear you are driving a formidable war machine, but to your opponents, you are a pinata with legs full of candy.

So much truth. Love that candy leg-splosion so very much... If only the forums had a drooly emoticon...

[Pat Kell]

Awesome 1st post man, that's great lol

[mailin]

I actually like lurm boats. For the simple reason that when I drive my lights, or any mech for that matter, I ALWAYS lock my target. Because I favor short range weapons, this means that lrm boats generally will also lock my target because my target doesn't disappear. Then, while the enemy is trying to get away from the lrm rain, I am still firing on his legs to stop him. Usually it works amazingly well. The enemy gets legged in open terrain and the lrm boat has a solid lock so they let it rain.

Long range snipers on the other hand, I have no use for...

[Satan n stuff]

Tim East, on 02 March 2015 - 11:16 PM, said:

Some of those lights are really dangerous even head-on. My Locust can eke out almost 9 dps with its small pulse lasers, and Firestarters get 1-2 more.

Raw DPS is a poor measure of a mech's effective firepower, you'll want to know the burst DPS instead, which in your case would be 64DPS over 0.375 seconds ( 24 alpha damage ) , assuming you're using the 1E with 6 small pulse lasers.

[Tim East]

Satan n stuff, on 03 March 2015 - 01:37 AM, said:

Raw DPS is a poor measure of a mech's effective firepower, you'll want to know the burst DPS instead, which in your case would be 64DPS over 0.375 seconds ( 24 alpha damage ) , assuming you're using the 1E with 6 small pulse lasers.

If you want to use that logic, the burst DPS of ACs is even higher due to the time between your weapon being fired and your damage being inflicted being equal to the projectile flight time. So if you're point-blank and you AC20 someone and it takes a tenth of a second to hit them, then your burst DPS is 200? If I understand what you're trying to say right, that is. I don't think it's accurate to think that way though, because you need more than one shot to bring pretty much anybody down. The main advantage of having a high burst DPS over just a high raw DPS is the ability to mitigate enemy fire during the cooldown phase of your firing cycle, which for the SPLs is actually pretty short and therefore not as significant.

With all that said though, I do really like the DPS of the 1E. Being able to out-DPS an AC 20 (and come unfairly close to two for that matter for FAR less heat) without having to worry about ammo at all is pretty delicious. You do have to watch your heat if you decide to do an extended engagement though.

[happy mech]

try to use the hunchback, trebuchet, or kintaro, those are missile boats

[Satan n stuff]

Tim East, on 03 March 2015 - 02:22 AM, said:

If you want to use that logic, the burst DPS of ACs is even higher due to the time between your weapon being fired and your damage being inflicted being equal to the projectile flight time. So if you're point-blank and you AC20 someone and it takes a tenth of a second to hit them, then your burst DPS is 200? If I understand what you're trying to say right, that is. I don't think it's accurate to think that way though, because you need more than one shot to bring pretty much anybody down. The main advantage of having a high burst DPS over just a high raw DPS is the ability to mitigate enemy fire during the cooldown phase of your firing cycle, which for the SPLs is actually pretty short and therefore not as significant.

With all that said though, I do really like the DPS of the 1E. Being able to out-DPS an AC 20 (and come unfairly close to two for that matter for FAR less heat) without having to worry about ammo at all is pretty delicious. You do have to watch your heat if you decide to do an extended engagement though.

That's PPFLD, you'd normally measure it by adding up the damage of everything you can get to hit the same spot reliably. In both cases, what you're really after is how much damage you can put in one spot without exposing yourself too much. Since this is highly skill dependent when using lasers the total damage alone isn't a good indication of that.

[dragnier1]

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

8: When looking at your mech it may appear you are driving a formidable war machine, but to your opponents, you are a pinata with legs full of candy.

[Koniving]

Tim East, on 02 March 2015 - 11:16 PM, said:

If you manage to somehow kill an ally with LRMs, my hat is off to you, Sir. It takes a special kind of stubborn to keep shooting at an enemy that is using your ally for cover, and there is no convenient way to make the missiles track your allies.

Enemies record youtube videos too.

[3xnihilo]

Bluesaint, on 02 March 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:

3: You will be killed by some twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and a dime bag [Redacted]


8: When looking at your mech it may appear you are driving a formidable war machine, but to your opponents, you are a pinata with legs full of candy.

Yes, yes, I love me an lrm boat pinata

[Sonny Black]

Quote

3: You will be killed by some twitchy light mech with a wiffle bat, two rocks and a dime bag [Redacted].

Wish I had a dollar, for every time this has happened to me!

[Tim East]

Satan n stuff, on 03 March 2015 - 02:40 AM, said:

That's PPFLD, you'd normally measure it by adding up the damage of everything you can get to hit the same spot reliably. In both cases, what you're really after is how much damage you can put in one spot without exposing yourself too much. Since this is highly skill dependent when using lasers the total damage alone isn't a good indication of that.

Which is why I'm saying that you can't really say that 6 SPL does 64 damage in less than half a second. It doesn't.

What it does do is burn fast enough that it is ALMOST like using a PPFLD weapon even though it isn't one.

I'm pretty sure I'm not properly understanding what you are saying.

Satan n stuff, on 03 March 2015 - 01:37 AM, said:

Raw DPS is a poor measure of a mech's effective firepower, you'll want to know the burst DPS instead, which in your case would be 64DPS over 0.375 seconds ( 24 alpha damage ) , assuming you're using the 1E with 6 small pulse lasers.

Burst DPS should be 24, since that's an alpha and a lot of people tend to do "one and run" tactics with this beast anyway.

[Satan n stuff]

Tim East, on 03 March 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

Which is why I'm saying that you can't really say that 6 SPL does 64 damage in less than half a second. It doesn't.

What it does do is burn fast enough that it is ALMOST like using a PPFLD weapon even though it isn't one.

I'm pretty sure I'm not properly understanding what you are saying.


Burst DPS should be 24, since that's an alpha and a lot of people tend to do "one and run" tactics with this beast anyway.

You're absolutely right that it doesn't do 64 damage in one second, I never meant to imply that it did, however the DPS of the laser burst ( 64 in this case ) is a good metric for how focused your damage is going to be. It's not all that relevant if you can get a full burn on target, but say you're taking a shot at some light mech and you only get 0.1 seconds on target, you'll know you dealt 64*0.1=6.4 damage.
Since full damage bursts against very agile targets aren't common, this is very important. In an actual match you're not going to have these numbers, but knowing the number for your build will give you a good idea of when you're dealing significant damage.

For lasers:
Duration gives a good indication of how easy it is to deal full damage. Here lower means better.
Burst DPS ( formula: (1/duration)*damage ) tells you how focused your damage is going to be, meaning how much damage a fraction of a second on target is going to do. Note that as far as I'm aware lasers deal damage every 20th of a second.
Then there's all the regular stuff you can see in the mechlab, range, damage, heat, etc... I don't really need to explain that.


For the whole build or specified parts:
Max DPS: tells you how much damage you can deal over time if you stay engaged.
Sustained DPS: ( both found and tuneable to specific fire groups in smurfy weaponlab ) tells you how fast you can deal damage when you're already running hot.
Both are very important when brawling, and the latter is a major factor in determining your max damage output for a given match.

Just for fun:
To compare your mech to the alternative build, 6 medium lasers, it would have a burst DPS of 44.44... meaning it's about a third less focused, but given the increased alpha damage ( 30 ) it will hit harder on a full burn while being harder to hit for full damage with due to the longer burn time. Aside from that, there´s the significant increase in range and the massive increase in heat generated, all tradeoffs that may or may not be worth it depending on your preferences.

Edited by Satan n stuff, 03 March 2015 - 03:08 PM.