180 replies to this topic

[PurplePuke]

I don't drive assault mechs often, but it seems to me that when a teammate pilots one, it sometimes causes the pilot's IQ to plummet to unbearably low levels.

Anybody else noticed this?

[pbiggz]

PurplePuke, on 28 June 2021 - 09:14 AM, said:

I don't drive assault mechs often, but it seems to me that when a teammate pilots one, it sometimes causes the pilot's IQ to plummet to unbearably low levels.

Anybody else noticed this?

Assaults are really feast or famine. They work best in teams, and are almost always specialized, so they need to be in the right spot (positioning happens to be a thing assault mechs are bad at), and they need support.

If your team ditches you, you're dead.

If you leave your team, you're dead.

If your team goes somewhere that you can't perform (i.e. forcing snipers into close quarters or forcing brawlers into a long range trade), you're probably dead.

Pugs often leave you behind or refuse to support you. However, just as often, assaults while go full zug zug, march into an unwinnable fight, die, and assume that death was because "the team didn't support me". It's a two way street.

[Nightbird]

Assaults are the best weight class in game, earning more damage and kills than any other weight class on average. People tend to notice exceptions rather than the rule, though I've no doubt some assault pilots are bad.

[pbiggz]

Nightbird, on 28 June 2021 - 09:19 AM, said:

Assaults are the best weight class in game, earning more damage and kills than any other weight class on average. People tend to notice exceptions rather than the rule, though I've no doubt some assault pilots are bad.

There is zero room for error when you go 48kph, especially right now, where we have highly damaging weapons, and alot of agility, but quirks haven't come up to compensate just yet. That means any mistake could be fatal. We have no respawns, so if your team ditches you, its fatal for you, but also if you're a brainlet and you ditch your team, its also fatal for you.

That said, if you're in a 48kph blap annihilator or brawling direwolf and you catch someone in brawling range, youll score higher damage and kills than anyone else in the match.

feast or famine

Edited by pbiggz, 28 June 2021 - 09:27 AM.

[Nightbird]

Not every assault goes 48, and all assaults as a whole do the best. Some assault builds are feast or famine, most are not.

[pbiggz]

That's fair. I think OP is referring to the big ones though. Krabbos, Annihilators, Fafnirs, and Direwolves. The ones that can delete people if the winds of fate are favourable. Other assaults more often just behave like modestly slower heavies.

[LordNothing]

assaults are hard to play well. they also tend to be kind of a noob magnet and they dont know what they are getting into. they take strong map knowledge, strategy, good positioning, evasion and good marksmanship to play well. you also have to think a bunch of moves ahead, its like playing chess. you need to be extremely alert from the second the mechfeet hit the ground (a lot of them cannot even figure out when the game starts).

you have to plan for and anticipate squirrels coming for you and how you will deal with them. best strat here is dont be the target. stay low and avoid giving away your position (like by firing lerms at out-of-range targets, when i pilot lights i use this to find isolated assaults). use as direct a path as possible and avoid slopes to reduce travel times while staying in the lowground to avoid visual detection. you also want to maintain proximity to team so they can provide fire support in a pinch. if a squirrel finds you (its probibly behind you so pay attention to your hit direction indicator and always be ready to twist when the rear segment lights up), target it, use target spotted or help on the command wheel, or use comms. this tells your team there is a cookie nearby, they want cookies. shoot back if you can (the best defense against squirrels is being able to dispatch them yourself), otherwise twist and find a wall to back up against.

just selecting a position is its own can of worms. predict what your team is going to do. this effects positioning, and with the slowness of assaults means a bad prediction results in you being grossly out of position. choosing a position requires not only map knowledge but also knowledge of the tactics typically used on that map/mode selection. a map thats prone to nascar usually has you swinging wide to the right. then it only takes some guy on comms to go "reverse nascar!" and your screwed, so you need a backup plan (and likely a backup for that one as well). if you cant survive the first 5 minutes of the match, maybe assaults are not for you. after that you are pretty much free to unleash hell.

Edited by LordNothing, 28 June 2021 - 06:56 PM.

[Bud Crue]

Assaults OP! Nerf the Mean Baby! Dragon Slayer OP!! Luck Number Seven: best mech in the game!!! When they buff JJ's Highlanders will suddenly be unstoppable!!!!!

Ahem. Whew, sorry about that.

In all seriousness, this is the other side of the "lights OP!" coin. Yes, some assaults are amazing and arguably OP, the rest...perhaps the majority (I haven't done an inventory but based on the few I see consistently in match?...maybe) not so much.

As to the OP, yes a lot of us when running particular assaults, quite literally point at the enemy and just move in a straight line toward them (me in a Dire); not much IQ is involved. With some, and in the right circumstances, you can make this look like an act of brilliant leadership, with others its a quick death sentence.

Now then, for the nay sayers who insist all assaults are over overforming or are inherently superior in all ways over all other classes, post two 1000+ match score games in a Pretty Baby, dated from today on. Prove to us the inherent superiority of this paragon of OPness.

[ThreeStooges]

You don't need iq when you have lrms only on your as ult mech. You need a tag not iq. I've spectated so many lrm only assassults the best one I saw today was a clanker atm 12 boat with tag.

Whenever I see the snv-a,acw, stalker lrm 40 only or that nct-b or whatever with missile boxes I leave it to its fate. I might use my uav or not. Depends on how fast the so called team is dying.

[Zordicron]

I don;t think there are any more "bad players" in that class then the other ones. I just think they are more noticable when they show up in bad loadouts because lighter team mates have a higher expectation from them, because they are the fatties.

Sure, there are some bad ones out there.
But the good ones have bad games too. The current state of the game, heck I would say almost all the way back to 8v8, for sure clans, many assault chassis are just not up to tthe task, and there is no way to hold your own if your team goes full raytrad. In the way back machine, you could pull some BS off and overcome a lot of stuff because of the match ups. Not so much nowdays, too much firepower flying around.

Example time of how things go in an assault:
Be me, in my ® Mauler with a stupid amount of MRM and some LBX to back it up, 600 meter range omega armor destroyer. Not going to post a loadout, but nothing and nobody wants to get hit by this twice.

First match, Hibernal. We had 4 ecm mechs. And two of them knew enough to cover me and the fat Anny plodding along trying to get out of the spawn trench. Enemy discovered, firefight ensues, I got 600dmg and could have done much more because I was at over 70% yet but the match ended as we utterly crushed them. Outstanding awareness by the team as far as positioning and team mates and rotating to the back if you ate some enemy fire, etc.

Match two, HPG. I did 900 dmg, blew away there Anny they left behind in the open, shredded a bunch of others. Teammates were chicken, scared to push a 5vs2, some of them kamikazee rushed a light that was in the open. I had a good match. Couple other did too. We lost by 3 mechs, but it wasn't really that close as the last 4 mechs on our team, only the speedy locust had any lasers to shoot, the others were red core sticks that fell like dominos. In this case, the team stuck together, but was just bad mostly and there was no winning.

Match three, Caustic. Team consists of a 4 man, all in TBR-S, some mediums and heavy mechs, and me and an ASP. Everyone heads straight for the crater, because of course they do. UAV reveals enemy, where you would expect. Enemy starts to push NASCAR, but slow, 4 man decides to rush the warhawk that was not moving with it's team and sniping at them. Straight across the center. Worked great! Enemy team was not aware of them a first, and behind cover that prevented them from shooting into the center.
Except me and the ASP weren't even to the crater yet. 4 man got the warhawk, shot up some other stuff with most of the rest of our team, and then got flanked badly and decimated as the enemy had a few faster mechs go in around behind them and the rest just turned around. I fired an alpha into the back of something, got one more shot off and then it was 8 vs me as the ASP was trying to move to the side of the crater on the other side of the one rock and couldn't even share enemy fire with me. Wouldn;t have mattered, maybe it would have doubled my dmg output, but it was already 3 vs 9 at this point. The two of us never even got to the battle before the match was over.



IMO, this is all typical in quickplay as a slow mech. Some people know the fatties will win you a match if you let them, some people think they can win it themselves in their 75 ton heavy, some players are bad either way.

The art of Surprise Atlas is basically gone, and even if it was there, the ADD nature of teams and premades now that crave instant action and view new matches as respawns make tactical play as an assault a rarity, it is much more reliant on if your team is going to ditch you or not. This play is desired and encouraged by the dev team ad the streamers, and so it will not revert any time soon. So, thems the breaks, either deal with it or play a faster heavy, and don;t be surprised if your assaults break 1000 dmg, or fail to break 300, their fate is in their team mates hands more now then ever before.

[pattonesque]

PurplePuke, on 28 June 2021 - 09:14 AM, said:

I don't drive assault mechs often, but it seems to me that when a teammate pilots one, it sometimes causes the pilot's IQ to plummet to unbearably low levels.

Anybody else noticed this?

oh, other weight classes have folks making equally stupid decisions in them. It's just that if you make a dumb decision as a light you can usually run away and live for a bit, whereas assault pilots who go off by themselves tend to get owned immediately and hilariously with no way out.

[Stonefalcon]

There is a very simple explanation for this.



POWEEEEERRRRR!!!

[Monkey Lover]

Nightbird, on 28 June 2021 - 09:30 AM, said:

Not every assault goes 48, and all assaults as a whole do the best. Some assault builds are feast or famine, most are not.

Anything going under 60 kph should be banned from the pug Q

[Khobai]

Monkey Lover, on 29 June 2021 - 08:58 PM, said:

Anything going under 60 kph should be banned from the pug Q

or just raise the max engine caps for those mechs

a max speed of 48kph is clearly nonfunctional in the current game

[MyriadDigits]

Khobai, on 29 June 2021 - 10:02 PM, said:

or just raise the max engine caps for those mechs

a max speed of 48kph is clearly nonfunctional in the current game

48kph very much is functional, if you struggle to perform with 48kph heavies and assaults the fault lies with you.

Besides, not only would engine cap not save omnimechs with their locked engines, but frankly most players probably wouldn't bother pushing to it since engine mass increases exponentially, and engines past 300 quickly start to become obscenely heavy.

[Monkey Lover]

MyriadDigits, on 29 June 2021 - 10:35 PM, said:

48kph very much is functional, if you struggle to perform with 48kph heavies and assaults the fault lies with you.

Besides, not only would engine cap not save omnimechs with their locked engines, but frankly most players probably wouldn't bother pushing to it since engine mass increases exponentially, and engines past 300 quickly start to become obscenely heavy.

48kph is basically 1 mech down or even worse the whole lance will try to protect the assault and get wiped out in first few minutes of the game. Sure you can get lucky with some overwatch with an uv dire but really a mad2c is better for the team.

I would like to see something like a speed tweak increase for assaults.

Edited by Monkey Lover, 29 June 2021 - 10:51 PM.

[w0qj]

+1
I second this!
At least make the results worth the massive Speed Tweak skill investment!

Monkey Lover, on 29 June 2021 - 10:50 PM, said:

...I would like to see something like a speed tweak increase for assaults.

Edited by w0qj, 29 June 2021 - 11:09 PM.

[Khobai]

MyriadDigits, on 29 June 2021 - 10:35 PM, said:

48kph very much is functional, if you struggle to perform with 48kph heavies and assaults the fault lies with you.

Besides, not only would engine cap not save omnimechs with their locked engines, but frankly most players probably wouldn't bother pushing to it since engine mass increases exponentially, and engines past 300 quickly start to become obscenely heavy.

the direwolf is the only omnimech that goes 48kph that im aware of. it would be a simple matter to give it a max speed quirk.

considering the direwolf is already at a massive disadvantage to other clan assaults due to not having endosteel or FF giving it a max speed quirk would actually be fair compensation for that. It puts it more on par with the kodiak.

give the direwolf a +7.5% max speed quirk so it at least goes 52kph

additionally they should raise the max engine caps on mechs like the annihilator by 25 engine rating. Again just so it can at least go 52 instead of 48.

48 is totally nonfunctional IMO. and no the fault is definitely not with you if your team abandons you to go nascar. even 52 is pretty nonfunctional but its noticeably better than 48.

Edited by Khobai, 29 June 2021 - 11:21 PM.

[MyriadDigits]

Khobai, on 29 June 2021 - 11:12 PM, said:

the direwolf is the only omnimech that goes 48kph that im aware of. it would be a simple matter to give it a max speed quirk.

I'll say it again: If you can't perform in a 48kph mech, the fault lies with the pilot and not the mech.

Besides, the DWF can pack an incredible amount of firepower, it does not need free speed tweak. The thing is incredibly powerful already, and would probably be grotesquely so if you slapped an extra 16.8kph (presumably) to itfor free.

[Storming Angel]

My King crab goes 50 and is fine, just depends if your teammates want smell the rears of the enemy more than waiting for you or not rotating 24/7 and actually doing a counter-rotate instead, which has happened in a few of our games and almost always ends up in a win for us as they can't push through as they get hit from multiple angles.