Steel Claws, on 02 June 2013 - 07:26 AM, said:
Not necessarily true. Run a light up close to where the enemy are and launch a UAV. Vola instant target locks and nobody is exposed. It works very well I might add. You can even carry your own. I also pack Bap ML and SSRMs as backup weapons.
Question:
Is it necessary to employ consumables to make PPCs a viable support weapon?
Gass Rifles?
Large Lasers?
Even then - the drone is quite vulnerable to taking fire from hostiles.
Quote
In his drops, he did reasonable damage. If you look at the damage his team did he did more than enough damage. Sure people CAN get higher damage if they are playing with a ****** team but when you have a good team the scores are usually nothing special. I see lots of drops where no one scores over 350 damage yet the entire other team is dead. In games where you have 3 or more doing 300+ damage you will normally not see big numbers unless your purposely stripping mechs. Yes he expended a lot of ammo but by his own admission he was trailing behind his team. Had the enemy been standing in the open his numbers would be higher. Would you have us balance a weapon based on misses? They won all but two drops by kill out. Show me where this is a fail.
He's dealing saturation damage. The damage he's applying is not going to a single component on the mech. It's being spread all over. If you figure all of the damage he did was applied relatively evenly across the three torso sections, and take his assists into account - he was dealing less than 30 points of damage to any single armor section with any kind of reliability over the course of the match (averaged across the mechs he decided to target). That was on some of his better damage ratios.
I've got a nice clip that illustrates this (and I'll have to upload it somewhere) of an Atlas with 'orange' internals taking a full salvo of 40 missiles to the face... smiling at me, and dipping behind cover. Earlier that same match - I was dumping LRM salvo after LRM salvo into the team that was over-running my own brawlers.
Sure - I came out with the highest damage on my team... but I wasn't actually able to do anything.
Put me back in my Jenner - and a single burst from my lasers would have put that Atlas into the ground. I could have been clipping components off of mechs left and right - because just like the concept of a team focusing fire on a single mech - having your weapons focus fire on a single section of armor is more useful.
People want to look at the fire support role as a role where one "softens up" the target. That's not what it is, at all. It's for supporting a wider front. When your mechs make contact with the enemy and engage - they are relying on you to tip the odds in their favor. It's too late to soften things up (and what enemy would sit there and let you?). You are what allows bralwers to live long enough to down their second opponent.
When you neglect these responsibilities - or when you can't fulfill them - your team suffers, and suffers massively - because they are alone.
That's what makes playing with LRMs unlike any other play style - you have the ability and the responsibility to be the cavalry for your team. Even if you are playing 'tactical' LRMs - to know when to look back over your shoulder and hammer the AC-20 Jeager about to rip through a couple of your teammates... that's what separates the men from the boys.
Just like the timely arrival of a Jenner to run off an ankle-biter, or to punch through the rear armor and take down a rampaging behemoth. That's why I like playing the Jenner so much, as well - it's a highly dynamic role to fill. You can push the offense, shore up the defense, babysit the stalker, **** off the Atlas enough to stop shooting at your team and focus on you... or just lead half the enemy team on a wild goose chase (and being just convincing enough that even the experienced pilots will unknowingly fall for it).
LRMs, in their current form, just lack the stopping power they need to really perform their role. Their role isn't to "soften things up." Their role is to bust things open so your brawlers can get straight to the tootsie-roll center when 'one simply doesn't have time for that.'
That's why people didn't like Tourmaline and Alpine very much. They'd push out into the open, with no cover except for the single ridge in front of them... and some crazy like me would decide to move his kitten-cat behind their main line and start opening fire. Poor ******** hardly ever knew what to do about it, even after missiles were nerfed out of functional capacity - but the cries of splash damage bugs kept them fearing the missile swarm for a while. Until they got smarter and stopped caring.
That's why they still don't like those maps. It's just that they no longer play peek-a-boo over the ridges like they used to. Kind of pointless when anything metallic that crests the hill gets 15 PPCs thrown its way.
2
