Sjorpha, on 05 July 2015 - 04:17 AM, said:
Quirks is the only thing making Thunderbolts good right now, so if this thing has bad quirks it's going to be pretty weaksauce despite having 9E.
Several clan mechs can already get 9E and more, it's not a big deal and often not even worth using. What are you going to put there? 9 medpulse with much worse quirks than the 5SS? That's just going to be hotter and slower with less range for a slightly nastier alpha.
SPLs?, well yeah that might be fun but hardly competitive. You can't go higher than standard 315 which isn't going to cut it for extreme close range focus.
Mixing in larger lasers? Maybe, but this is no xl friendly mech so you only have so much weight to play with or go super squishy while still being capped to 315 engine.
You can mix medium and medium pulse, or medium and large like the stock variant, which is likely the best bet, but you have lighter mechs like the BJ-1X doing that very well already while running like the wind.
We already have the Grasshopper 5P with 8E and jj, and the black knight with 9E is coming too. Both looks better in the absence of quirks.
So as far as I can see this thunderbolt needs quirks to be good just as much as the current variants do.
Just saying... Before quirks I had no problems running the thunderbolt. Got builds for skirmisher, brawler, sniper, etc. using weapons like PPC's, ER PPC's, Large lasers, LRM 10's, LRM 20's, SRM 6's, SSRM 2's, etc. most of the cannon-weapons so to say across my time. and unlike most people back then who are to scared to use XL engines, I used an XL engine on all my thunderbolts to great effect. (Note: I found this mech very XL friendly, especially after the quirks that makes the side torsos nearly bursting with structure and/or armour quirks)
And comparing to the clans isn't the best idea, because the clan mechs of the weight class that can spam those weapons (Timberwolf/ stormcrow) gets like 30%+ cooldown and duration nerfs to an already longer duration weapon. While the others (Summoner, which averages 3-4 hardpoints / weapons on most popular builds, Mad Dog, typically only 4E used on energy heavy builds, etc) can't spam energy that well or struggle to even do the easy copy paste meta build for the clan mechs.
... however if you are comparing the Thunderbolt to the NOVA PRIME and think the Nova is better... I think we got more problems at our hands then Thunderbolt Tallman quirks...
Also the thing i find the funniest is the Summoner (clan "superior" counterpart to the Thunderbolt...) in MW: O is worse then the thunderbolt and all but missile builds is better on the thunderbolt..
What else was I going to say... oh yea! I think this mech will be very good ,even without a single weapon quirk. Already got my money out to buy this thing when it comes out AND already got a smurfy mimic build for a stock+ build for it.