90 replies to this topic

[IraqiWalker]

Redoxin, on 15 August 2015 - 09:14 AM, said:

Maybe not wrong per se but surely not optimal. You have plenty of spare armor to soak shots but didnt do anything to make use of it. Bascially you did not make use of all your tonnage. The dmg numbers also do not sound very impressive if it was about over a long period of time.

If you indeed distracted them like you said then you were a useful contribution. But if the enemy instead decides to not go after you but walks over your team 12v11 then your tactic was a failure.

Soaking shots is bad. Seriously. It's best to not be hit, than get hit.

[Wolf486]

Spleenslitta, on 15 August 2015 - 09:01 AM, said:

Making all maps as big as possible could be a good start. Gives hit and runners more opportunities and scouting matters more when there is more territory to cover.
Imagine an urbanmap the size of Alpine peaks with almost no opportunities to see straight across the map unless one manages to climb the tallest buildings somehow.

Making certain there are more attack routes and fewer bottlenecks are also a good things.

ConcoursePro for MW4 and TC_Urban Jungle for MWLL! I loved those maps and they were so good at making all roles viable.

[Arc Viper]

I agree with you. I run lrm boats, but I always stay at around the 400m range and reel in those kills. It's infuriating to see your team fold and you wonder why you died so easily, when you spectate and see that the last mech is a fresh direwolf sniping with medium lasers who ends up going down without breaking 100dmg. I see this all the time with assault pilots.

When I see a match where an assault pilot hangs back and camps, that's a real bad indication.

[Spleenslitta]

Arc Viper, on 28 August 2015 - 12:03 PM, said:

I agree with you. I run lrm boats, but I always stay at around the 400m range and reel in those kills. It's infuriating to see your team fold and you wonder why you died so easily, when you spectate and see that the last mech is a fresh direwolf sniping with medium lasers who ends up going down without breaking 100dmg. I see this all the time with assault pilots.

When I see a match where an assault pilot hangs back and camps, that's a real bad indication.

That may be true for an assault mech but lights and mediums should avoid getting shot if they can.
Here is something that kinda proves something i had 2 matches earlier today where i had around 90% health left in my Kit Fox.
Despite of this lack of damage to my mech i did around 600 damage in each of those matches.
I was not the best on my team in the damage department but if the match had dragged on or my team died i most likely could have handled the rest alone thanks to the low amount of damage i had.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

(Bear with me for a minute. I'm going to go off on an IRL tangent, but I SWEAR I'll bring it back around to MWO relevance.)

(Also, nothing I'm about to write is any kind of military secret or classified, eyes-only, if-I-tell-you-I-have-to-kill-you sort of stuff.)

I had the distinct pleasure of serving, at various points in my military career, in field artillery AND attack helicopter aviation units. Both fascinating stuff. In the FA days, specifically, I was in an MLRS unit. We sometimes practiced a SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) mission. And indeed, in Albania (1999, support of the Kosovo air campaign) there were some of those planned and ready to go, when I had already moved on to working on AH-64As. The point of that sort of mission? SUPPRESSION. Tough to DESTROY an air defense unit, especially a tactical and mobile one, but easy enough to make them put their heads down for a minute or two by raining explosive submunitions on their general area. While everyone's in a tizzy over that, there go those happy helicopter crews flying by, right on through airspace that should be contested for them by that air defense system that was just SUPPRESSED. It was practiced a lot, and most industrialized nations' militaries practice this--it's not USA-unique. Sometimes, it's a 2-part mission, with the second suppression fired for the egress, as was done for the ingress, of that aviation asset.

Heck, as an assigned M-60 machine gunner, one of the tactice we most trained for was SUPPRESSION. sustain a consistent volume of fire in the area of enemy troops, even if they're under cover. KEEP them in cover, heads down (or at least eyes off your positions). While they're suppressed, your friendlies move out quickly to a new position, which is advantageous with regard to the enemy's known or suspected position. So it can be done with direct-fire and indirect-fire weapons and weapon systems.

BACK TO MWO. What's the enemy do when he sees that "INCOMING MISSILES" warning on his screen? He tries to put cover between himself and those missiles. While concealment isn't necessarily cover, cover is usually concealment. It works both ways, too. So, while that enemy mech is taking cover from the rain of missiles headed his way, that lance of medium skirmishers can advance to the next covered/concealed position, from which they can trade even more intelligently with that same enemy.

Another thing that causes enemies to duck for cover? Having Gauss, UAC, or PPC hit them or very close to them. ESPECIALLY UAC fire, as that is pretty sustainable. If the enemy is hitting you before you spotted and hit him, then you're at the disadvantage. HE has the initiative. Your best bet is to cut losses and get to cover, and try to reassert yourself with regard to the initiative. But again, while you're getting into cover, that enemy's pals can be moving in that space between you and that suppressing enemy, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it without exposing yourself to the enemy's waiting sights again.

So, support role mechs MAY NOT be the most effective killers of enemy mechs. But they CAN be used wisely, to GREAT effect, by a skilled lance or company commander. Keep this in mind, when someone announces "lock pls" at drop. He's at your mercy, eager to get another 1,000 DMG match in that CPLT boat, and would LOVE to have some cooperation from the team. Use that to suppress your enemies while your team maneuvers, so they can make it across relatively open terrain (if necessary) without being exposed to as much enemy fire. A 2-mech FS team, one LRM boat and one PPC or Gauss sniper (or UAC/5, though that requires somewhat shorter range), when positioned well with respect to the main maneuver/brawling force, can be a VERY valuable asset. They should not be overlooked, but rather integrated and employed wisely.

[Takashi Uchida]

caveat: I am someone who runs sub-optimal builds and variants 99% of the time I play solo queue, so I understand that I sound like a hypocrite when I suggest a build is a "waste of tonnage" or something. Because if you think about it, any build that isn't Tier-1 Esports meta-p33n leet compliant is at least somewhat a waste of tonnage. but even I have standards and won't take like a lore-true Banshee with like 2 weapons.

Okay, now that's out of the way. I guess the point of the match (Skirmish mostly, assault and conquest a bit lesser) is to kill all enemy mechs right? Disregarding capping, you win if you destroy the opposing team, or run out the timer with the more mechs standing. So, we want to blow up all the bad guys before they do it to us. How do we do that? Focused fire? Good recon? Shooting the AC/20 off ASAP? Spotting for missiles?

Rolling damage so the rest of your team can take out the distracted enemies?

Providing big pinpoint alphas from the back?

Showering the enemy with missiles and denying them territorial advancement with that threat?

There are a lot of ways to play the game casually and still with at least some skill. I feel justified when I take out the ERPPC/LRM Warhawk I bought from the sale because I'm confident that I'll walk away with a kill and 300-500 damage. Will there be some games where I'll just be on fire and wipe out half their team and do 1000 damage? It's rare, but it happens. Will there be some games where we get rolled and I do mediocre numbers? Sure.

But I don't feel guilty that I'm not out there in a Timberwolf helping to lead the push. A Dire Wolf loaded with Gauss rifles and ERPPCs can efficiently destroy a mech from long range with a couple salvos. Does it matter if it takes little damage? No, that's the trade off. It's banking on it's ability to disable enemies from long range in a matter of seconds. If a mech is taken out before it has the chance to do much damage, or has its firepower severely handicapped, there's less of a need for frontline mechs to absorb punishment.

Now of course, most people can't use ERPPCs and Gauss rifles nearly as well as they would want to, and I can understand why people are frustrated when they see a 100 ton mech finish with <100 damage. I think this is more of a matchmaker issue than a "what kind of mech you choose to play" issue.

I totally understand why LRM users get vilified. Even a direct-fire long range support build is at least still going to be able to fight up close. If you take an LRM boat into the solo queue, you don't know if you're going to have a dedicated spotter. You don't know if your allies have packed UAVs. There could be 0 ECM mechs on the other team, or there could be 6. Sometimes everything goes right. Locks abound, half the enemy is narc'd, and you find a home for 1000 missiles. Other times, the whole team is covered with ECM and it doesn't matter if use tag or all of your dumb-fire skills.

How do you get enjoyment out of this game? If it's 100% or close to purely winning, I don't see any reason why you would even take a mech like the Locust or an Awesome. The competitive scene is an important part of the player base, but the vast majority of players have different reasons to play. They may just be into Mechwarrior and BT. They may like sci-fi. They may like the ability to mess around with equipment. They may like having a stable of different mechs that can be built to do different things. They may just like big stompy robots. They may have seen that cheesy cartoon from the 90s.

For me, learning to use different weapons in interesting combinations, and just the aesthetic and "feel" of various mechs is a big reason why I play. Now, I still like winning, and I can't tell you where exactly that line between "oh that's an interesting build" and "wow that person is just trolling" is, but I can tell you that I'm okay with seeing an LRM-60 King Crab. I'm a little more aggravated when I see an Atlas with just a large pulse laser and a machine gun.

Edited by Takashi Uchida, 29 August 2015 - 10:01 PM.

[Zordicron]

Well, I am sure it has been covered, I didnt read this whole thread but:

OP has left out quite a lot of variables in his "math" assesment. Not the least of which is tonnage and armor and mech condition, to go along with variables in chassis and variant options for loadouts in itself.

Honestly, i think this thread could have saved a lot of time had Op just made a rant about how some n00b cadet made a CoD l33t sniperz loadout and JJ his way to his camping spot and proceeded to contribute nothing to the teams match score total in his last match(es). There's going to be a lot of variation in play styles and skill levels in pugs, "thas how it is mang".

Everyone has seen it, spectate mode that last team mate as he is running across the top ring on HPG with his single ERLL Arctic Cheetah, 1600M away from where his last 3 team mates died. Can;t do much about it, the guy wasn;t griefing, and that's how he wants to play.

[Ragz]

lot of people here trying to talk about how "they dominate" or tug their testiculars, but op is right, a lot of you "sniper" types, think that means hiding at the end of your range,... essentiall taking you out of the match to plink at the unwarry while the enemy force is forcusing fire better than your team. WORTH NOTING: most of the time there's more than one guy that wants to do damage but not get hit, cause they think somehow that makes them a bad*** while they're piloting a heavy or assault.

"if you expect a light mech to get to the front and get pummled" you don't play lights do you, you have any idea how easy it is to get assaults on the same team to shoot each other, OR how much fun it is, yes most lights are probably more significant than a sniper. i've run the spiders, ravens, cheetah, mistlynx, these are all viable to make assualts and heavy's look stupid, while some ***hat in the back is pretending his

FURTHER more, i've never been in a match where a sniper helped change the course of battle, or when they are inevitably the last one left, (probably with no ammo) get to watch them loose or hide and power down because? they're PU888s and useless. be a sniper fine, but at least be in range to do something worth a damn. if your fire doesn't distract, you aren't helping. i've been in matches with a hellbringer, tied up in combat with teamates, taking fire from the back from a sniper, generally a pot shot at the "cool guy" they duck, i reposition, ruin their buddy, help my team finish off the other guy, go hunt down the "cool guy" god you guys are awful on a team.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Ragz, on 15 October 2015 - 12:06 PM, said:

FURTHER more, i've never been in a match where a sniper helped change the course of battle, or when they are inevitably the last one left, (probably with no ammo) get to watch them loose or hide and power down because? they're PU888s and useless. be a sniper fine, but at least be in range to do something worth a damn. if your fire doesn't distract, you aren't helping. i've been in matches with a hellbringer, tied up in combat with teamates, taking fire from the back from a sniper, generally a pot shot at the &quot;cool guy&quot; they duck, i reposition, ruin their buddy, help my team finish off the other guy, go hunt down the &quot;cool guy&quot; god you guys are awful on a team.

So there's this guy. Tourmaline Desert. LCT-1V with a single ERLL. Top damage of 24 players in the drop. Last on his team, chased by 4 other mechs for 5-6 minutes, and destroyed one of his pursuers. On a long enough timeline, he would have won the match.

But yeah, probably not at all a contributor. ;-)

[Spleenslitta]

TheRAbbi, on 15 October 2015 - 12:27 PM, said:

So there's this guy. Tourmaline Desert. LCT-1V with a single ERLL. Top damage of 24 players in the drop. Last on his team, chased by 4 other mechs for 5-6 minutes, and destroyed one of his pursuers. On a long enough timeline, he would have won the match.

But yeah, probably not at all a contributor. ;-)

In this case i'd say he did his job and if anyone is at fault it's the team that didn't manage to stay alive through it all.
He played smart and managed to shoot without getting shot back much.

There are 2 things i never understood about those that say light mech snipers are no good.
1) In what way is it better to trade back and forth damage when you can shoot the enemy without getting shot in return?
Let's say i stay inside the optimal range for my long range weapon and shoot an enemy in the CT without him being able to return fire.
And one of my teammates shoot him in the CT too but gets just as much or even more damage in return for what he did.

He just made himself that much more likely to die if he ends up in a brawl trading damage at close range.
While i just made good use of my weapon without paying anything beyond heat/ammo.
How is it possible that the teammate who got damaged just as much as he damaged his opponent is the one who does things better than me?

2) Just because i'm sniping at one moment when a dead teammate spectates me it does not mean i've been only doing that all match.
I tend to pack a bunch of middle/short range weapons in addition to my long range weapon.
When i see an opportunity to make use of my entire arsenal i usually take it if i believe i got a decent chance of getting away from it without dying.
There is more to MWO than just charging mindlessly towards the closest enemy guns blazing while hoping for the best.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Spleenslitta, on 15 October 2015 - 01:27 PM, said:

In this case i'd say he did his job and if anyone is at fault it's the team that didn't manage to stay alive through it all.
He played smart and managed to shoot without getting shot back much.

There are 2 things i never understood about those that say light mech snipers are no good.
1) In what way is it better to trade back and forth damage when you can shoot the enemy without getting shot in return?
Let's say i stay inside the optimal range for my long range weapon and shoot an enemy in the CT without him being able to return fire.
And one of my teammates shoot him in the CT too but gets just as much or even more damage in return for what he did.

He just made himself that much more likely to die if he ends up in a brawl trading damage at close range.
While i just made good use of my weapon without paying anything beyond heat/ammo.
How is it possible that the teammate who got damaged just as much as he damaged his opponent is the one who does things better than me?

2) Just because i'm sniping at one moment when a dead teammate spectates me it does not mean i've been only doing that all match.
I tend to pack a bunch of middle/short range weapons in addition to my long range weapon.
When i see an opportunity to make use of my entire arsenal i usually take it if i believe i got a decent chance of getting away from it without dying.
There is more to MWO than just charging mindlessly towards the closest enemy guns blazing while hoping for the best.

Yeah, LOTS of THIS. ^^^

[Omi_]

Eh, I get the jist of what the OP is saying, but you have to hand it to that 5 kill DWF that stands across Canyon Network alpha'ing everything as the enemy peeks around cliffs.

[Ragz]

TheRAbbi, on 15 October 2015 - 12:27 PM, said:

So there's this guy. Tourmaline Desert. LCT-1V with a single ERLL. Top damage of 24 players in the drop. Last on his team, chased by 4 other mechs for 5-6 minutes, and destroyed one of his pursuers. On a long enough timeline, he would have won the match.

But yeah, probably not at all a contributor. ;-)

so in the end they lost by 4 mechs,... and even though he did top damage they lost,.. wow, couldn't have seen that coming. what was top damage 350? whoa, sure got me,...

lot of butt hurt folks on here, i suppose you guys must fit the bill, well, listen ill pat yer heads, some of you get involved, most of the time i see a guy sniping on the other team, i'm not worried about how the game is gonna turn out.

[Ragz]

also my point, high damage, didn't change the outcome of the match,.. but lets ignore that detail.

Edited by Ragz, 15 October 2015 - 02:11 PM.

[IraqiWalker]

Ragz, on 15 October 2015 - 12:06 PM, said:

FURTHER more, i've never been in a match where a sniper helped change the course of battle, or when they are inevitably the last one left, (probably with no ammo) get to watch them loose or hide and power down because? they're PU888s and useless. be a sniper fine, but at least be in range to do something worth a damn. if your fire doesn't distract, you aren't helping. i've been in matches with a hellbringer, tied up in combat with teamates, taking fire from the back from a sniper, generally a pot shot at the "cool guy" they duck, i reposition, ruin their buddy, help my team finish off the other guy, go hunt down the "cool guy" god you guys are awful on a team.

You clearly haven't played with a good sniper. I play sniper mechs often, and

1- I usually get quite a few kills/cripples.

2- If I'm the last one alive, I still get a few kills, and possibly win the match.

3- Never power down when I am the last one alive, with no weapons (Always have back up lasers, so unless those are destroyed, I'm hitting something)

So thanks for looking at how bad snipers play, and generalizing it to all snipers.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Ragz, on 15 October 2015 - 02:05 PM, said:

also my point, high damage, didn't change the outcome of the match,.. but lets ignore that detail.

Fair point.

On the other hand, match scores and the meta game favor DAMAGE above anything else other than Win/Loss. He may have lost the match, but he flat-out OWNED the meta game. 5 more minutes of match time, and he'd have carried in the game's lightest, weakest mech. Or, y'know, a team that hadn't folded under two consecutive (and very predictable) flank pushes, and he'd have been top contributor (embarrassing a GRF TDR, and a bunch of other much heavier and more heavily-armed mechs on his team) to a pretty impressive victory.

But yeah. It's the fault of the one guy that DIDN'T get his stuff shot out from under him (was my second drop ever in a TBR-C, and maybe fourth or sixth ever in ANY TBR variant, and I don't do heavies, and I pulled like 498 and 2 kills against his team, and maybe a dozen of those damage points against their WEAKEST AND MOST WEAKLY-ARMED MECH, because that pilot was solid gold). TOTES his fault.

Sure, the meta has changed, and the days of LRM boats regularly raking-in 1000 damage and 5 kills per 12-mech drop are long-gone. Well, until the current PTS anyway.

Sorry. If you send 12 meta brawlers out to face 12 other meta brawlers, it's just BORING and PREDICTABLE, and most importantly, STALE. It's why I play THIS game, and not CallofBattlefieldOps or HALO 44 or whatever's hot with the console kiddies.

I grew up, as an online gamer anyhow, with Ghost Recon. THE 2001 GotY. It forced teamwork down your throat. You were THRILLED to have a sniper on your 5-man team when competing on TCZ's GR 5v5 ladder against your rival {OGzr]. Someone brought a noobtube? FANTASTIC! We didn't complain about having a PROPER PROPORTION of those more support elements in the team.

A 100% snipers-and-lurmers 12-mech team in MWO? That's a recipe for disaster. A single SPL boat ACH and about 150 seconds, and that's a 12-0 pugstomp carried by a 30-ton light. Totally agreed.

But to claim that anyone not participating in the stale meta-brawl is a jerk and a detriment to the team? THAT just shows that you've no idea what a "TEAM" is or does.

And that might explain the significant text backlash you've faced here so far...

[Archie4Strings]

I strongly disagree! Some mechs can make far more damage than other mechs and have less armor. Which means they are much more vulnerable and a loss of them would mean a large decrease of the firepower (more than just 1/12) - like XL Jägermechs with 3 UAC5 or Ilyas or as said above lrm-boats.
Some Mechs are just not made for tanking.
It is a team game, everybody has to play his role. That means that a thunderbolt (very tanky mech) should be in the front, distract the enemy, do his fair amount of damage and absorb the damage which would hit the more sensitive mechs otherwise. And while doint that, the snipers can take out the enemies out of the beakground!

That is called teamplay!! I like to play brawler and i am not afraid of being in the front line or being the first one to come around a corner. As long as we won the match, it was good. I try to not die, but as a brawler you are made to take damage, so... dont complain!

[Chados]

I've been playing TDRs lately. Good God, I've become Metagirl!

Seriously, though, Archie4Strings is right about the Thud's tankiness. It can straight up take some punishment and dish it right back like a boss. My only ever +1000 damage match? In a TDR-9SEC stock as it comes from the store, in full basics, sporting radar dep and level 5 LPL range and cool down modules. I hadn't even ticked off the first elite yet. I like it very much. My Thuds have positive K/D ratios. My SEC has racked half as much damage as my Jester...in 15% of the total number of drops. Some of that is because I'm starting to learn the game. The overwhelming majority of it is because the Thud is a pretty decent brawler and I've been wanting to get down and dirty for a loooong time...and as much as I love to LRM I love to get in there with an attitude and mix it up with the bad guys even more. It ain't the pilot...it's the 'mech, at least with me and this one. I'm not that good but the Thud makes me feel like I'm not that bad.

Having run a lot of LRMs and being a Catapult aficionado, I feel pretty good when I'm wading into a fight blazing away with seven medium wubs on a TDR-5SS, and some dude in a Cat A1 is hosing my target with LRM5 spam. It keeps him ducking and covering while I melt his face off at point-blank range. I facetanked down a Dire Wolf like that a couple nights ago in Viridian Bog because of the light 'mech TAGging the Dire for his LRM buddy raining hot death from 750 meters away, which let me wade in under cover of the barrage and finish the job up close and personal-like...and live to tell the tale.

I'm not sad to see LRMers LRMing, even when they get the kill I most-damaged. Clanners die hard. I want all the help I can get against them.

Edited by Chados, 16 October 2015 - 08:00 PM.

[Ragz]

worth noting I'm not lost on the use of missile boats, again coordination is a BIG part of that being effective.

SOME people are good at it, thats great, but without coordination its like a solar powered flashlight.

If your going to be a TEAM asset, recognizing you're playing a pug and dressing the part are kind of important.

I know specialized rolls are fun, in a unit it's literally amazing how powerful a sniper can be IN A UNIT.
(DISCLAIMER: sometimes you get a team of two or more in a pug that happen to be coordinated cause of team speak or whatever your choice of voip is, this is generally INCREDIBLY effective, this can make almost any specialized roll, exponentially more powerful)

It's okay to admit you don't care and you just wanna missle boat or poke and cower in a pug because you find it entertaining and YOUR score is up. but recognize this OP is what everyone else is generally thinking when they see you peel off and show up in uncoordinated spurts because you're not close enough to pick the target everyone else is working on or get visual cues by players nearby.

Edited by Ragz, 17 October 2015 - 07:16 AM.

[Ragz]

Arc Viper, on 28 August 2015 - 12:03 PM, said:

I agree with you. I run lrm boats, but I always stay at around the 400m range and reel in those kills. It's infuriating to see your team fold and you wonder why you died so easily, when you spectate and see that the last mech is a fresh direwolf sniping with medium lasers who ends up going down without breaking 100dmg. I see this all the time with assault pilots.

When I see a match where an assault pilot hangs back and camps, that's a real bad indication.

THISS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!