24 replies to this topic

[Rayvn26]

I'm curious about some of the options available to some of my mechs, for instance my Atlas mechs, is there a reason not to use an XL engine or Endo-Steel or Ferro-Fibrous? I'm just starting to mess around with builds so any info will be appreciated.

[mailin]

Generally you do not want to use XL engines on assaults, although there are just a few exceptions, but avoid XLs in Atlases and Stalkers. When upgrading to either endo or FF, always go endo first. In MWO endo gives you a greater weight savings, but both are at the expense of 14 slots each.

[Domenoth]

Reason you might not want to use any of those: the amount of space they each take up. Ferro and Endo each take up the same amount so if you can only fit one, Endo is always better than Ferro.

As for XL, if you lose a side torso, you die. So XL Atlas is notoriously a bad idea. XL doesn't make you faster it just makes you die faster so the extra weapons you can pack don't make it with it for the Atlas.

[Rayvn26]

Ok, so XL in Atlas=Bad but endo and double sinks are fine. Now as for the builds part, are all Atlases brawlers? I assume brawling is within 200m, right? Is a sniper or mid range Atlas a good idea?

[mailin]

Personally I'm not a fan of snipers. The most successful Atlas builds tend to be brawlers. AC20s and srm 4s or 6s. Brawling doesn't have to be at less than 200m, but srms have an absolute max range of 270m.It depends on the range of your weapons.

[The Basilisk]

Rayvn26, on 15 October 2016 - 07:11 PM, said:

Ok, so XL in Atlas=Bad but endo and double sinks are fine. Now as for the builds part, are all Atlases brawlers? I assume brawling is within 200m, right? Is a sniper or mid range Atlas a good idea?

No not realy a good idea.
Problem with the Atlas is the location of its weapons hardpoints.
His ballistics are at his hips and energy only slightly higher.
When you want to go at long ranges you mostly poke and try to stay out of enemys field of view as much as possible to avoid counter fire.
The Atlas has to expose too much surface area to bring its weapons to bear ... so its quite difficult to longrange with an Atlas but possible to go at med ranges on certain maps.
Due to its low and few direct fire hardpoints you have to pack very heavy weapons like Gauss and PPC for a ranged fight. to pack enough of them you will have to use all your hardpoints.
Again you need to expose all of your mech to fire and due to its slowness you will stay exposed for too long a time.

Medrange builds with LLasers and LPLs are doable but quite situational and clearly outclassed by other Mechs in game.
AS7-S
AS7-RS
Notice the RS and K are the weakest Atlas in game. Unlock your Arms to be able to track faster targets with your lasers.
AS7-D-DC
This seems like a waste...but well there you go.

And please, please do not ask for LRMs, please. There are so many good threads around explaining in every painfull detail why they are generaly and on assaults especially a bad idea except for trolling or organized teams running an arty strat.

Edited by The Basilisk, 15 October 2016 - 07:56 PM.

[mailin]

And as a general rule, always double heat sinks.

[Leone]

So, build considerations. For XL engines, it's generally best to use them to make a build go faster, rather'n to free up space. Since IS mech'll die to a side torso loss with an XL, you'll need to decide whether or not your mech'll loose the side torso first, or the center. Some mechs're very tanky, and can keep going with a side torso lost. Some just have too big torsos that oft get targetted. Build your mech, get happy with it, and, if your usually dieing to the CT before the sides blow, then think about trading in the extra Survivability for some speed.

As for endo, and ferro, I take the same considerations. Find a build, get happy with it, and, if you've the space, upgrade to Endosteel. Take a look at the remaining spaces, and see if ferro fibrious warrants a pass. (Usually only on lights.) Heck I've some builds that don't even use endosteel or those without doubleheatsinks. Just, build your mech first. Take it for a spin, and if the design is tenable, you'll see the room for improvements unfold.

~Leone.

[S 0 L E N Y A]

the "problem" with an Atlas as anything but a brawler is that all of their weapon mounts are relatively low to the cockpit.
This means the mech needs to expose the majority of its profile to hit an enemy at range.

Add the problem of Atlas being slow as sin, which also means you are not exactly going to be jumping in an out of cover quickly.

So what does that leave you with?

LRMS!!

No, just kidding. Don't do that..

It leaves brawling.

[Ano]

Very quick generalisations:

Double heat sinks are pretty much always required. There's perhaps a handful of builds that run cool enough that you skip it (dual guass builds with no/almost no backup weapons) but outside of specialised weirdness, just go ahead and mentally add the cost of double sinks to any mech you buy that doesn't come with them pre-fitted.

Endosteel structure and ferrofibrous armour effectively do the same job -- reduce weight at the expense of taking up space within the mech -- but Endo is better at it (saves more weight for the same amount of space occupied) so should always be taken first. I would say a large majority of IS builds use endo, and a smaller number ALSO use ferro. On clan mechs, endo and ferro save the same amount of weight but occupy half the space (7 slots vs. 14, if I remember correctly). Only clan battlemechs (not omnis) allow you to add/remove endo/ferro. Omnis are fixed, currently.

XL engines are a tradeoff for IS mechs, and (generally) a no-brainer for clan mechs (again, omnis don't give the options to change the engine; clan battlemechs do). XL engines weigh much less for a given rating, but occupy space in the side torsos AND for IS mechs, you die when either of your side torsos is destroyed. Clan XL engines can survive a single side torso loss.

While there are IS mechs which are often run with XL engines (Battlemasters and Banshees spring to mind) as others have said it's not a good idea on the Atlas, as its defining characteristic (its ability to absorb damage) is significantly undermined by an XL engine.

Smurfy: a couple of people have posted build links to Smurfy, and you probably already know the site, but just in case: if you're experimenting with builds, Smurfy is the place to do it -- you can create builds, save them, share them here and ask for feedback, and (most importantly) it's impossible to accidentally click "apply" and buy 9m cbills-worth of equipment you don't actually want.

Not that I've ever done that, of course. *cough*

Edited by Ano, 17 October 2016 - 08:47 AM.

[Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky]

If you have spare time, feel free to check out metamechs.com

Here is an atlas guide (with builds):

http://metamechs.com...r-guides/atlas/

Even if you dont copy the builds, it is a very nice read compiled from information gathered by an extremelly good pro competative pilot!

[Koniving]

Ano covered the gist of the items and their practicality in MWO.
I'll cover the reasons they exist from the source material and why it's a bit different there than here.

Double heatsinks - Battletech, which considers its weapon ratings in 5 to 10 second time frames (as an example, an AC/5 is rated to do 5 damage in 5 seconds or less; so a very specific Marauder-carrying GM brand Whirlwind/5 is a 120mm AC/5 [the largest you can get], which delivers a 3 round burst at a rate of 3-4 per second [this is considered to be painfully slow], and requires a 3 second reload time to change cassettes as each normal cassette or magazine contains 3 shells. It also requires a single second to cool the barrel before trying to change cassettes or fire again -- which is only an important consideration with extended cassettes design quirk as the 6 shots of the extended magazine would fire as 3 shots in 1 second, cool barrel 1 second, 3 shots in 1 second, reload in 3 seconds... 6 seconds to deliver 10 damage and be ready to do it again).
GM Whirlwind/5
Why does this matter and what does it have to do with double heatsinks and why they exist?
In Battletech, standard heatsinks are often enough for most weapon systems, as that GM Whirlwind/5 is actually very quick to deliver its firing rates, most ACs max out at 2 times their rating within 10 seconds at an extremely high chance to jam (or UACs at a significantly lower chance to jam). Meanwhile medium lasers deliver their full damage rating in about 10 seconds. In comparison, MWO AC/5s under the worst conditions can fire a minimum of 7 ratings in 10 seconds, and under most average conditions about 10 to 12 ratings in 10 seconds. Now imagine high heat weapons which in BT would only fire once... yet in MWO can fire up to 4 times in a 10 second period?
Thus... why DHS are practically required in MWO. And why mechs have double armor and double+ structure and yet die faster than BT despite BT's horrendous front-loaded damage.


-------

Endo-Steel versus Ferro-Fibrous. These consume the same amount of space within the mech's available slots. However, endo's bonus is absolute because your skeleton is always the same weight -- your armor's weight changes based on how much of it you have.
Beyond this, Endo-Steel is much better overall in Battletech Lore. It's also incredibly hard to get, required to have in order to repair the mech's skeleton, must be constructed in special facilities in space that people love to blow up, and in order to even get it in BT, you'd either have to have a mech built from scratch with it or literally disassemble and reassemble your mech on a new skeleton, fully aware that there's a significantly high risk of creating problems in the mech and its systems by doing so.
Even in MWO's R&R, the repair cost for around 50 units of structure damage to endo steel cost over 100,000 cbills. The cost of Ferro's repair for the same damage? Less than 16,000.
Ferro in general is just easier to come by, much more affordable and can also be made even on most lower tech planets provided you actually had the materials. Not as easy as standard armor is to come by, but more than 30 times easier to get ahold of than Endo Steel's materials.
MWO doesn't really reflect any of this, however.

XL engine versus standard.
XL engines are constructed using a mixture of techniques and materials, to include Ferro-something steel. Not Fibrous but something else. The materials are boatloads lighter, but it has to be thicker and larger in order to harbor the same strength, the end result is an engine with half the weight and almost twice the volume.
XL engines are thusly easier to hit, and regardless of if it is standard or XL, 3 damaged crit slots equals a disabled engine.
In IS XL engines, there are 3 slots per ST. In Clan XL engines there are only 2, because the Clans uses better techniques and facilities that aren't always under the threat of destruction; this reduction in crit slots make theirs harder to hit and allows them to survive the loss of an ST.

In actual Battletech, this difference doesn't actually give 'much' of an advantage to the Clans; not nearly as much as it does in MWO. This is because with level 3 rules, through armor crits, and the use of PPCs, Gauss Rifles or the kinda rare LBX, you'll have an easy time disabling Clan XL engines.

In MWO, Clan XL engines are punished with a significant amount of heatsink capacity and cooling cuts in addition to losing "all" of the ones externally mounted to the engine itself. I say it in quotations as that story kept changing with balancing stuff. Basically if you lose your ST in a Clan mech with XL engine. it's gonna get real damn hot real quick.

---though even that paled to taking 2 crit-slot hits to your engine in BT with heatsink taxing rule... Nothing worse than melting heatsink after heatsink by just jumping away from enemy fire.

Edited by Koniving, 17 October 2016 - 07:27 PM.

[Koniving]

Rayvn26, on 15 October 2016 - 07:11 PM, said:

Ok, so XL in Atlas=Bad but endo and double sinks are fine. Now as for the builds part, are all Atlases brawlers? I assume brawling is within 200m, right? Is a sniper or mid range Atlas a good idea?

XL is usually not a good idea due to the shape of the Atlas's hitboxes, the large side torso hitboxes are what helps it 'tank' by twisting to spread damage. This said, it's not impossible and some really good builds do exist that use XL engines... But you don't want to be on the front line anymore if you go that route and you better be damn fast.

Brawling is fighting out in the open, at ranges of 600 meters or less with a preference for 300 meters or less. This often means without cover or protection.

I usually don't recommend Endo for 90+ ton mechs, as you often want to have the biggest weapons you can get and they need that critical space. Now, if you have something like a Mauler and plan on doing 6 AC/2s or 4 AC/2s and two LB-10xs... then Endo away 'cause you're gonna need all the help you can get to have the tons. Endo for several heavier, smaller things... standard structure for few but bigger things.

Edit: Included hitbox.

Note small CT, large STs.

Comparison:
King Crab hitbox

The King Crab is also 100 tons and works well with either engine because honestly you're equally screwed.

This is a Cataphract. Note how skinny the STs appear? This will tend to be better with XLs than standards.


This is a Hunchback and while it does good with an XL, they say to never put one in. Can you see why?

Good luck, and check out... http://mwomercs.com/...x-localization/

Edited by Koniving, 18 October 2016 - 06:42 AM.

[IraqiWalker]

This guide on mech building

will help you out quite a bit.

[Rogue Jedi]

As others have said an XL Atlas is not usualy a good idea, as for which Mechs are XL safe that is for you to decide, people will be quite happy to give you their opinions, there are people who do well in an XL Atlas but those seem to be few, almost any Mech can be made to work well with ether standard or XL but some for most people will tend to be beter with one than the other

With an IS Mech when I first get the chassis I will take a look at it and guess if it is XL safe and build accordingly, if I go 10 matches without loosing a side and it was running a standard engine I will usually switch to an XL (because if you never loose the side you may as well use the extra tons an XL can give you for more speed/weapons/equipment).
conversely if I was running an XL and dying frequently to side loss I would switch to a standard (because what use is the extra tonage of an XL if you are knocked out early)

[762 NATO]

The only exception to the above posts that I own is the WHM-6R. Dual guass, 4 MLs and an XL300. Yeah I even brawl a little and occasionally lead a push. 4KMDDs with 6 assists at 600 damage is not terribly hard to do. Getting the kill shots without dying or pulling more than a single headshot, those are a bit harder. If you think like a skirmisher and close range support (drill that CT til its open, someone else can have the kill) or a headhunter (go for headshots and put them down while they are still fresh - gets you killed more) then you are driving like I do. Mobility trumps survivability when you can swing a win for the team with 4 red cores from fresh and let lights or hitscan get the kill. Just my take. I don't claim to be more than a supporting player.

Cheers!

[Rayvn26]

Seems too simple, but might work with my limited skill set right now.

http://BOAR'S HEAD

Edited by Rayvn26, 18 October 2016 - 05:36 AM.

[Koniving]

Seems okay, the cooling efficiency is a little worrisome but the amount of firepower you're bringing to the fray will make sure your engagements are short.


You are literally screwed on range, though.

For a counter build idea...
O.o; Notice the high energy efficiency, meaning you can fight on pretty much any map without worry. The ranges possible like this are significantly better. Simple two weapon group setup just like you had. AMS protection to deal with LRMs. The front-heavy armor makes a bit better since since you could stay at range all you wanted,or rush in for the kill after softening them up.

In either case since the armor is the same,watch your back; someone will make very short work of you.

Example of the idea in action using an Atlas RS pre-quirks... (ignore the plight of text at the end, I've given up on trying to get PGI to put reasonable thresholds; they'd rather have ghost heat and energy draw than just limit the max heat).

Edited by Koniving, 18 October 2016 - 07:11 AM.

[Alreadythere]

Rayvn26, on 18 October 2016 - 05:34 AM, said:

Seems too simple, but might work with my limited skill set right now.

http://BOAR'S HEAD

I would take 3 armor each of the legs, and move it back to the head. Might save you from a lucky hit on the head. And you don't need those 3 points in the leg.
In addition I'd remove one ton of ammunition, and replace it by a heat sink. 4.5t should be enough for most games.

And move the armor to the legs, usually your torsos get blasted before your legs, so you'll be saver from ammo explosions.

Something like this:
BOAR'S HEAD

Edited by Alreadythere, 18 October 2016 - 08:00 AM.

[Rayvn26]

I like both of those, I'll have to try them out and see which I like better. Thanks.