13 replies to this topic

[Krakenfingers]

Hi. I have only been playing for a few days, and I need help with my Medium mechs:

Here is the Hunchback. It has the engine of a Trebuchet.
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...a72ac6185fc2792

It used to have 2SRM6s but they forced me into suicidal close range. The current build fills the empty space with 5MLs and it is loaded to the brim with standard heatsinks.

This is the design I like the most:
TBT-7K

I've unlocked all the basic skills on it. I sometimes get 340+ dmg games on it. The most important part is the right torso, to protect the 20dmg/shot PPCs. However, it generates 20-30% heat with one shot of the PPCs, so I use the near-heatless AC5 in addition. The armor is oriented to saving the right torso.

I've currently got 1.5 million Cbills in the bank. By the end of the week, I hope to have about 5 million. Around next week, I'll build this:

DRG-1C

It is relatively cheap and uses the engine of the Trebuchet to be a Gauss sniper at long range and a relatively powerful 4 MPL shooter at close range.

What do you of my current builds and my objective? Can you give me some suggestions and/or advice?

PS: Do NOT ask me to buy a 4.9 million XL engine or 3 million worth of upgrades on each mech.
PPS: Do NOT remind me I just spend all (5000) of my GXP on a 4x zoom module that actually costs a stupid 2 million to install.

[Krakenfingers]

Anyone?

[Omi_]

Quote

PS: Do NOT ask me to buy a 4.9 million XL engine or 3 million worth of upgrades on each mech.
PPS: Do NOT remind me I just spend all (5000) of my GXP on a 4x zoom module that actually costs a stupid 2 million to install.

Beyond this, I don't know what to suggest. At least take Double Heatsinks? It's only 1.5 mil each.

[aniviron]

Sorry, Hornsby is right. Without double heatsinks at the very least, you're not going to be combat effective. Almost every mech needs endo steel as well; ferro fibrous is not that widely used though. XL engines are only common on a few types of mechs, but not Hunchbacks or Trebuchets.

But compare your builds to something more optimized. This is what you said you're running in your HBK-4SP. Here's what I run in my HBK-4P.

You'll notice that my build has a slightly lower heat efficiency; but not by that much. My build, however, has almost twice the up-front damage of yours, deals quite a lot more damage per second, even taking into account the lower cooling efficiency, has more armor, and travels 9kph faster.

Double heatsinks are such a huge upgrade, there is not a single good build in the game that doesn't use them. They're just mandatory. Here's what your build can do just by getting double heatsinks. It has nearly the same cooling efficiency, moves the same speed, but has more armor, does more damage, more damage per second, and has a longer range thanks to the large lasers.

I don't think anyone is really going to be able to help you that much more if you won't get double heatsinks. There's just not very many builds you can make that use single heatsinks. Single heatsinks are bad, and there's no amount of tweaking in the mech lab that will make a mech that uses them good. You can scrape by without an XL engine, without ferro, and sometimes even without endo steel, but double sinks are mandatory.

[Zordicron]

Here is the Treb, all I did was put DHS on it. Used free tonnage to up your armor, and add some DHS. 28% heat went to 40, and you have like double armor on legs and actually full on torsos now. Went back to STD armor, which isnt that expensive. No change in weapons or engine or anything expensive really, just DHS.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...cedc73e565bfd0f

Edited by Eldagore, 18 April 2015 - 08:05 PM.

[Zordicron]

Here is your dragon with DHS applied. Notice the armor, and 2 more tons of ammo, and whopping 45% heat now. No other changes besides DHS upgrade.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...7e6a962f573da12

EDIT: also, if you mount ML instead of MPL, it isnt too hard to fenagle the STD 300 the mech comes with instead of the 250 from your treb. Requires ferro and endo to leave some tonnage for gauss ammo, and runs like 2% hotter(ONOZ!) There is a significant speed jump from the 250 to the 300, and the turn rate and torso twist is going to respond a lot better also. You wont lose that much dmg, heat is similar, and you gain a little range on the ML for cost of a tiny bit of duration. IMO, the speed jump from like 67kph to 80 kph is a world of difference without even considering the turn/twist increases.

Edited by Eldagore, 18 April 2015 - 08:17 PM.

[grendeldog]

Cross posted from the thread in the New Players forum, because I don't know if you saw it.

Krakenfingers, on 16 April 2015 - 01:30 PM, said:

Here's my current build, quirk-orientated. I found myself often sniping from 800-1000m and running away from engagements as early as possible, and changing position at after 2 poptarts.

TBT-7K

The engine comes from my Hunchback 4SP. Since it was more of a brawler build, it needed the bigger engine.

HBK-4SP

Can you help me complete the Hunchback build and maybe optimize the TBT7K?

Note that I'm only making about 600k a day and I don't want a super competitive 14 million CBill/one month of grinding worth of upgrades right now before I settle on the 'best' mech for me.

Okay, so here's two builds, both of which I have considered and played, and alternate between them (though my Hunchies are getting neglected in favor of mastering Grasshoppers at the moment).

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...f6b7c65ce561bac

This is the build that I played the most. It's hot, but I have mastered my Hunchbacks and thus get double basic skill bonuses, and besides, the HBK-4P(C) is my favorite Hunch, and that build has 9 medium lasers that teach you trigger discipline and heat management quickly. So this build has two SRM-6. I suggest that you stick to SRMs on the SP, but that's my own opinion only - I have seen LRM SPs before.

I will approach this build and the next as follows, by looking at them and not explaining what each thing I put in there does, but rather WHY I put each thing there. That is what you need to learn - spoken as a two month old pilot who can now play quite competantly.

Look on this page in the quirks section for the Hunchback, and then find the SP. It's about halfway down the page. Quirks are not the end all be all of mech building, but they can give you some really good hints as to what will be useful. You'll see there's a 20% missile cooldown quirk, and then an ADDITIONAL 20% cooldown quirk for SRM-6 in particular. That means yor reload time without any bonuses or modules will be 60% of the reload time for a mech that uses SRMs without any quirks.

Now, you'll notice this build has double heatsinks. Here's the deal: double heatsinks dissipate 1.4 heat per second, and take up 3 times the space (2 times the space for clans). So if you just look at the amount of critical slots occupied, double heat sinks would need to dissipate 3 heat each in order to make up for their being 3 times bigger in terms of critical slots... except that every engine has heatsinks inside that do not cost tonnage. And when you upgrade to double heatsinks, the ones in the engine now dissipate 2 heat instead of 1. For no extra critical space or tonnage. So it works out that double heatsinks are basically always more useful than single; I have not seen a build yet that works better with single heatsinks even though I have actively looked for such a build for my own amusement.

Heatsinks are more complicated even than that because they each add to your total heat capacity as well as to how much you can dissipate per second. And I didn't take the double heatsinks being a third the weight into that calculation either. There's threads that do that and mathematically prove the superiority of DHS; this thread is not the place for that.

I always aim for at least 30% heat efficiency in the smurf-lab. 29% will do here, because you should always be aiming to elite and then master your mechs, and that will provide double basic skill bonuses.

Now look again at those quirks. Notice there's quirks for -10% medium laser heat generation, as well as -10% energy heat generation. Since medium lasers are energy weapons, that means they produce 20% less heat. Yet I chose to dump a 2 medium lasers and a small laser and put in three medium pulse lasers instead... why would I do this? If you look you will see that there is also a -25% laser duration quirk. This means all lasers will do their damage in 3/4 the time that they would take to do that damage when carried by mechs without this quirk. And here's where I get back to quirks being helpful guidelines but not the absolute law: I have found the SP works best when it can get in, dump a buttload of SRM and laser in some hapless mech's lap, and then get out immediately, to get back in cover and plot the next go around. It can brawl if need be, but that's not its most excellent role. So I choose to forgo the medium laser heat reduction quirk in order to make use of medium pulse lasers, because they already do greater damage over less time, and then my -25% laser duration quirk reduces that already short period of time by a quarter. So the point is to show your face for as short of a time as possible; every moment you can see their guns, their guns can see and shoot you. So in this case I prefer to get in and out quickly.

And that brings me to the engine. In case you didn't notice I put in a STD250. First, this means that you'll have 10 internal engine heatsinks - divide the engine rating by 25, and that's how many heatsinks are in the engine. Unless of course the number is more than 10, in which case youll have to pay for any additional heatsinks - single or double - in C-bills. But you don't take on any weight or critical slot penalty for those heatsinks. Complicated and ridiculous to wrap your head around at first, no?

Anyway, that's ten engine heatsinks, which is good because you'll need that to help dissipate all the heat on this mech. Also, this gets you up to 81 kph - 89.1 kph with the elite skill named 'speed tweak'. And as I mentioned, for me personally this mech is about getting in, dumping damage, and getting out, so I want that speed. I was getting SLAUGHTERED with the stock engine - when I upped the engine I suddenly was effective.

Now, there's not a lot of stuff taking up critical slots on this mech, say compared to my HBK-4P, which has to squeeze 9 lasers in. So as I played around in smurfy-lab, I tested how much I could get into it with endo-steel enabled, and then how much I could get into it with ferro-fibrous armor enabled. And this is important to think in this order, because for ANY mech, endo always frees up more tonnage than ferro - but ferro and endo BOTH take 14 slots. Hence, if you're going to sacrifice slots for tonnage, get the most tonnage possible for those slots, which endo does. Only then think about whether you need yet more tonnage in exchange for still fewer slots, and if so then enable ferro.

And it's not that expensive of a build - 1.5 mil for double heatsinks, 750,000 each for endo and ferro, less than a mil for the medium pulse lasers, and 1.5 mil for the engine. It rarely gets cheaper than that to outfit an Inner Sphere mech in this game.

Next, we have this build. This exchanges the medium pulse lasers for Artemis on the SRMs. Now, artemis does something different for SRMs and LRMs. This post is already really long so I won't get into LRMs here. For SRMs, it makes their spread tighter. This means that when you shoot those 12 SRMs, their damage will be spread over less space, doing more damage to fewer mech parts (arms, torsos, etc). I choose the top build because I don't object to the SRM spread without Artemis. But others like the tighter spread, so we make sure we use those laser quirks anyway - by using all medium lasers we can ensure that we still take advantage of quirks while using less tonnage.

In this case, when I play with the addition of ferro, it is NOT worth it. I would prefer to take an extra heatsink and an extra ton of ammo. Notice however that I have taken a point of armor off of each leg in order to put the torso front and back to maximum. Ferro makes armor less heavy in exchange for taking up slots, and when I disabled ferro, I had .93 of a ton left. By taking a point off of each leg, that allows the torso to stay at full armor whilst still giving me that last .7 of a ton to put in that last heatsink or that last ton of armor, however you want to look at it.

With Artemis, you're looking at 360k C-bills I believe. but you don't need Ferro, which is 750k, so that's actually a cheaper build overall.

It is worth pointing out that these two builds are not the super min/maxed meta builds. You can find those on the metamechs forum. These are just two builds I have tested out and enjoyed a lot.

What I hope is that you can start to see the process behind designing a mech fro this post, not just getting a build but the idea of HOW to build.

Cheers. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask. As was mentioned at the beginning, the MWO community is really cool, really nice and well-behaved, and eager to help people who appear to want to learn.

[NUJRSYDEVIL]

Pretty much all non-assault IS mechs are going to need that expensive XL engine in order to get the most out of it. Especially mediums. You're going to have to drop money on the DHS upgrade for pretty much every IS mech too, SHS just don't cut it. Case in point, run a AC20/SRM Centurion with one SHS and then one DHS, there is a world of difference.

[Mad Dog Morgan]

Double heat-sinks should be made less expensive or an innate feature.

[sycocys]

Coming from a very experienced 4sp pilot -

A. DHS - if you are using single you may as well have small lasers on it.
B. 5 ML - 2 SRM4 w/artemis
C. Standard engine (without looking I believe a 210)
D. Endo and I think FF (again not looking at it, rig hasn't changed in over a year)
E. Go kick some peoples faces in.

This mech is pretty much the ultimate brawler, combining speed and survival ability with fast pinpoint damage. Unlike the other HBKs you can shred this down to your left torso and still be able to fight.

[Hotthedd]

I love my HBK-4SP.

Double Heatsinks are imperative.
Double Heatsinks are imperative.
Double heatsinks are imperative.

If you have a STD 250 engine, use that one. If you upgrade to Ferro Fibrous, you can add 2 SRM6s and decent ammo. (You could even upgrade to Artemis, but it cuts into your ammo)

Edit: I actually run mine with a STD 275, 2 SRM4+A.

If you have the engine, you might want to try it.

Edited by Hotthedd, 23 April 2015 - 02:36 PM.

[sycocys]

SRM6s even with artemis are like firing birdshot unfortunately. 4s are dang near pinpoint with artemis within 50m out of the barrel, cycle faster and require less ammo.

Just hopped on to see what I actually had in mine since its been so long that I've changed it -
STD 235, Endo, 5ML, 2srm4/artemis, 7 DHS, 3 tons SRM ammo. 2 points shy on full armor.
Adv Sensors, ML/SRM range, SRM CD, Radar Derp modules.

The ONLY modifications I'd personally consider on this is one less DHS, and dropping to a STD 225 to add a BAP and possibly switching out Radar Derp for Target info gathering. More sensor range and faster info make your life much better. Bap is probably enough, but the 4sp is fast enough to hide from most missile lobbings anyhow.

[Voivode]

Above all else double heat sinks. The game is basically unplayable with single heat sinks. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

EDIT: It's honestly hard to judge the builds based on them using SHS. You have so much tonnage locked up into heat sinks that the damage is gimped just to get modest heat efficiency for the HBK-4SP and poor heat efficiency for the TBT-7K.

I built these sticking with the engines you have. There are upgrades but the honest truth is without them you are going to experience low success rates. I also adjusted armor amounts and distribution as those weren't great either, especially on the legs. On the TBT-7K I removed Ferro Fibrous as it takes up 14 crit slots and offers little in weight savings.

HBK-4SP

TBT-7K

Edited by Voivode, 23 April 2015 - 10:40 AM.

[HelBound]

Here is what I run on my 4SP. Recently bought 3 hunchbacks and am levelling the chassis, somehow I just never got around to them.

HBK-4SP
-XL250
I don't really have issues with the XL here my 4J has one as well. Just twist away the damage, the XL gives you the speed to manoeuvre around damage. Running a 1.3K/D atm and nearly through elite.