Umm... I think the problem is the meat rather than the metal. That's ok, lights have a high skill floor (which you're above IMO) and a stupendously high skill ceiling (which I and most other light pilots will never reach).
I'm gonna give you some general non ECM light and scouting tips. Plus jenner tips, and I'll include my own super secret builds to use. All for the low low price of free.
General Non-ECM Light mech tips
Light mechs aren’t supposed to win even brawls with undamaged heavy and assault mechs. Yes it happens sometimes, especially if you can get behind them and stay there. In general though, you are a scalpel not a sledgehammer. Something weak? Finish him. Enemy has LRM support not near the lines? Hunt it down.
Don’t get me wrong, a clever light mech, using terrain and jump jets can absolutely do 400+ damage a round and when the last mech standing against a field of damaged goliaths can come out on top. In general though, lights aren’t your team’s primary damage dealers. A good light pilot helps the team win by carefully scouting and relaying information (VOIP is essential)
Scouting
Feel free to use your high mounted weapons and cockpit and ridge hump if you need to shoot someone over a ridge or need to see if the coast is clear.
If you don’t know where they are stopping and using your seismic helps, just don't do it when they can see you.
But for the love of Jenner don't pop over a ridge to their side and expect to not get shot. Sure you'll get away with it sometimes, hell I've gotten to the point where I can tell what ballistics the enemy has from the sounds they make hitting the ground all around me, but the damage you do take will take the last few seconds you need to kill an enemy away from you.
Doing Damage
If they’re bigger than a medium mech and not horribly damaged and they’ve noticed you if you do more than pop a quick alpha and GTFO, you’re going to take unnecessary damage which will get you killed later.
Be patient. At the beginning of the match, your job is to peek over ridges and figure out which of the 2-3 most used paths they’re taking. Your secondary priority depends on the map. On Alpine for instance, you know damn well where they’re going, and that the assault lance is gonna take a while to waddle there. Guard the assaults when they get left behind or a light lance can and will eat them up.
Once the big guys engage, keep an eye out for enemy flanking maneuvers, opportunities to get around behind their line without getting shot up, and damaged enemies. 4-6 ML or a bunch of SRMs will finish off a wounded target, take off an arm, leg, or ST making the enemy less of a threat. If you can’t do these things, play your light like a medium, advance with the brawlers, shoot their targets, etc. Lights tend to get ignored when there’s a King Crab or Dire Wolf killing you.
If you sneak behind an enemy who is taking fire from your allies, you have to decide, torso or legs. If you want them to turn to face you, torso because people watch their rear armor since it’s usually so thin. If you don’t want to get noticed, shoot the legs, they have one hit box so they can’t immediately see that the damage comes from behind them.
Circle strafing. In general? Don’t. It does work better in the oxide or hugin though because you don’t have to hold your mouse on target for the beam duration. It also can work against lone dire whales, but chances are good you’ll get squished before you do serious damage. Instead, do hit and run tactics.
Other
Running away. If they aren’t lights, cicadas or ice ferrets, run in a serpentine fashion. It’s a lot harder to hit a target moving in 2 dimensions than in 1, even better, using terrain variances and speed changes to make your movement even more unpredictable.
Be the squirrel. Sometimes near the beginning of the match or after you’ve flanked them you’ll get noticed and people will start trying to kill you. Embrace it. Pull as many enemies off as you can. Then run away from the battle line. If 1 or 2 non-light mechs follow and it’s a fairly close match congratulations you just won the game for your team. Yes you’re likely going to die, but it doesn’t matter if you took several heavies or assaults out of the main fight.
Dealing with streaks. If you pop around a corner and boom streak crow, you have 3 choices. Go back the way you came, stop and head shot them (which requires 30 damage in lasers or AC to work), or push your foot down harder and blow past them before they can get a lock. If their entire team isn’t behind them, you can usually get away and only take 1 streak barrage. Turning around is a good choice too if you’re close to cover, if not, CHARGE.
Got legged? You’re dead. Take half a second and aim at their face if they stop to aim at you. You won’t believe how many people strip their head armor down to 6 points (just enough to stop an AC20) allowing you to kill them. It won’t work 90% of the time but you’re doing CT damage in that case which helps the team.
Coming to terms with death. You’re going to get one shot by dual gauss and dual AC20 from time to time. It happens, just get the cursing out of your system and drop in another mech. PGI could fix this by removing pin point conversion but I’ve been asking for that since closed beta and we’re not gonna get it.
Jenner Specific Tips
On a Jenner, always run max or near max engine (oxide excepted) you're gonna need the extra internal engine heat sinks and the speed lets you get away from quick mediums and heavies. Frankly the XL300 is one of the few advantages the jenner has over the firestarter (besides being freaking awesome) (P.S. Use double heat sinks on every single mech, except AC20 ravens and 3AC5 Shadow Hawk 2H builds)
You can strip half a ton of armor off the arms of any jenner build. Yes you’ll lose them to Dual Gauss, but they both have to hit that small area and even then you still have half or more of your fire power. So, if the extra half ton of ammo, heat sinks, or weapons makes you better go for it. If you don’t like it, change it back.
While you can reduce your head armor, since it’s in the middle of the CT it does get hit fairly frequently. Sometimes you get lucky and it takes an AC20, PPC, or Gauss round instead of your CT.
Jump jets. 1 or 2 will let you skate up most things and unless you’ve build an ERLL sniper thing you won’t need the height the extra jets provide compared to extra armor, heatsinks, etc. However, if you want to get on top of the outer wall in HPG, you need 3-5 JJ. Personally, I don’t snipe so that isn’t important to me.
AMS… not needed on light mechs. You can either out run the missiles or get to cover 95% of the time. If you do take it, take only half a ton of AMS ammo and manually toggle the AMS off and on.
Jenner Builds
Oxide
For the oxide, run a slower engine, (
Narcissitic Martyr's Oxide that I used in the hero event last month [top 50 finish not that that is much of an accomplishment]) and despite the loss in DPS using 3x ASRM4 can be worth it since you don't have to get right next to someone to splat them. You have 337m of range, why not use it? It's not like every map is brawler friendly. Plus SRM hit reg for more than 12 SRMs is atrocious atm in my opinion so I’m sticking with artemis at least until the july 7 patch comes out. Granted most folks disagree with me, but everyone plays a bit differently so I suggest you try out 3ASRM4 instead of the standard 4xSRM4.
JR7-K
Narcissistic Martyr's JR7-K Look, it has MPL to abuse the quirk. That’s… about all there is to the JR7 K.
JR7-F
I’m of the opinion that there are 2 builds for this chassis. 6xML or 6x SPL. These days the 30 damage at range is just better since lights don’t’ fight lights as much as they used to. Plus the firestarter does 8 SPL with super quirks so you’re gonna lose the SPL fight anyways.
Narcisisstic Martyr's JR7-F
JR7-D
This one is interesting. 4 real choices, 2x SRM4, 2XSSRM2+BAP (less damage but able to cancel an ECM mech so LRMs can rain down), 2xLRM5 (treat them like mid range streaks and use to scare people into taking cover), and NARC to again let LRMs rain down on ECM mech’s heads. Personally I use them all but mostly SRM4s and SSRM2+BAP.
Narcisisstic Martyr's JR7-D
You can run an XL295 or one less DHS for extra ammo if you like on this one, but personally I use the 2xSRM4 to exploit armor breaches or to do a large amount of burst damage to rear armor. As such I don’t miss the ammo too much.
Anyways, hope this helps out a bit.
Edited by Narcissistic Martyr, 29 June 2015 - 08:05 PM.
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