57 replies to this topic

[Escef]

At the end of the match, I look at what the team as a whole dealt for damage. If we won and I'm in the top 4 damage dealers on the team, I'm satisfied. If we lost, but I'm still in the top 4 damage dealers, regardless of team, I'm satisfied. If I got at least 2 kills and 250 damage (so that I don't feel like I just waltzed in and finished an already crippled foe), I'm satisfied.

Some of the damage numbers listed by other posters are seriously unrealistic. 800+? Really? With that much damage the rest of your team must have horribly sucked. Or your opponents did. Or both. You're talking about a scenario where you probably got 5+ kills, and dealt the lion's share of the damage. That or you just picked apart one or two enemies that weren't shooting at you. I've only broken 800 a couple times, and one of those was while most of the enemy team was focused on the rest of my team. (You wanna ignore me while I provide medium range fire support? Pfft, ok, cool, I'll empty my ammo bins into you. You'd be amazed how much damage you can do with 2 large lasers and 2 AC5s.)

In most drops, I've found the average player in a heavy or assault gets between 2 and 4 hundred damage, and 3 to 5 players on a team end up with the kills (rarely does everyone get a kill). Lights tend to do less damage unless the pilot is really good at evading and picking targets that are preoccupied. And I don't expect lights to do a lot of damage, I expect them to cause havoc and keep the enemy off balance.

[Lynx7725]

A lot depends on the type of build you are running. If you are running laser heavy or missile heavy, essentially you are sandpapering the enemy mechs and it's expected to have high damage numbers, but potentially low kills, though possibly high number of assists if you game it right. You may get kills, but that's more luck based (i.e., you sneaked in the kill hit on something that someone else worked over).

If you are running pinpoint burst builds, you shouldn't be doing high damage numbers but should get more kill counts. AC40, ex-Poptarts, PPC boats should be getting low damage but high kills.

I used to run with the following for my own personal expectations:

Light: 0 to 100 damage
Medium: 100 to 200 damage
Heavy: 200 to 300 damage
Assault: >300 damage

This generally works for average solo PUG matches (where you have a good chance of getting pugstormed as your team falls apart). The light score might be a bit low because really good light pilots can easily do more than that, but in role warfare I don't expect lights to do that much damage.

However, since I swapped to a pinpoint burst build, I've taken a different perspective to damage numbers.

Since, at its core, the game is about dropping enemy mechs as efficiently as possible, you'll want to look at kills and assists more. Since each mech can be killed with 35 points of damage, the "Platinum" or best possible is Number of Kills * 35 -- i.e., you are scoring headshots with every shot you make. (Technically, you can go below this number, but that's more luck based again.)

Even when not doing headshots, most side torsos do not have armour from either front or back to take more than 100 points of damage, and since taking out a side torso often results in a mission kill, you shouldn't need to do more than 100 points per kill/ assist -- unless you are sandpapering (which btw is not meant to be derogatory, it's a way to reduce the effectiveness of the opposing force, so if it can be done safely, no harm doing it).

So nowadays what I do is I take whatever damage I've done, and then divide by the number of kills and assists I have. The "average damage per kill/ assist" I get, I then peg against the following:

<40: basically is ineffective. need to improve on mech positioning and tactics.
40~60: Efficient use of weapons, particularly if high burst damage builds.
60~90: Average, particular if high burst damage builds. Good if a sandpapering build.
>100: Poor if high-burst. Ok if sandpapering. May need to review build for effectiveness/ efficiency.

Essentially, my PoV is that if you are doing >100 points on average per kill/ assist, you're really taking too much time on that one mech. Since MWO has a increasing dropoff in effectiveness as the number of mechs lowers, the longer you take to drop an opponent, the more likely a game will turn against you. Spending too much time working over a mech means a certain level of inefficiency in the damage delivery or tactical approach a pilot takes into the game.

So for example, a particularly good game recently had me doing 672 damage, over 3 kills and 4 assists. So on average I was doing 96 points per kill/ assist, which wasn't great since I was running an AC40 build. Another match in a Dragon, I got 5 kills 1 assist with doing 516 damage, working out to be 86, which is average as the Dragon was trying to be a high-burst build (though with med lasers...).

Yet another recent game, after the patch, I scored 226 damage for 1 Kill/ 6 Assists, that's 32 points.. And it's correct, since I was horribly out of position during that match with a LRM/ SSRM Cat. Too out of practice and needed to relearn the tactics, and it shows.

In case you guys are wondering, personal best I can recall is 48 damage per Kill/ Assist. 5 kills 1 Assist, 288 points of damage on River City, with a GunJaeger build. Got lucky there; a couple of snap headshots, then a couple of good hits on damaged mechs.

[RiceyFighter]

Where I don't end up carrying an entire pug team to glory.

[ArmandTulsen]

Damage or kills mean little. It's all about winning.

Yes, I base cap. HAHA!

[Ningyo]

It depends on the mech role I am playing, but a couple things will always make me happy with my performance.

1: I personally kill any mech that is nearly undamaged, or personally kill any mech that poses a massive danger to my team that as not about to die anyway from another players attack (atlas DDC, often stalkers, sometimes a raven or jagger or cataphract that looks pretty deadly.)
2: I do significant damage to CT(from healthy to internals or such), or destroy a side torso(with weapons) or leg on at least 2 or more mechs.
3: I do over 500 damage (at this point regardless of where its being dealt you have seriously hurt the enemy team)
4: I have fought 5 or more enemy mechs at once on my own for over 4 minutes (whether my team capitalizes on having the rest of the enemy team at 2 to 1 odds or not, I have given them plenty of time to get some easy kills)


For some light skirmishers (my cicada with 2 ER LL for instance) I am happy if I get 2-3 heavy/assault chasing me around for the entire match, I might or might not kill any of them or do significant damage, but if they are fighting me the entire match, they are not helping the rest of there team, so mine has a big advantage.

Other mechs can be built for other roles, I've seen a raven 3-L staying with a group of 5 enemy assaults the entire match, my team had 2 missile boats that it rendered useless. I think that raven ended with about 140 damage or so, but was it effective. most definitely.

[Major_Crash]

One can place two cockpit shots, get two kills while doing ~60 damage. Or spray lasers all over targets while hitting all parts, doing 300 damage and killing none, not even disabling one. Which situation you would prefer? Damage in itself is meaningless, except when translated to C-Bills/XP.

[Joseph Mallan]

Above 350 is a good game to me. I hit quite a few bad guys.

[Livewyr]

How much of an impact did I have?

Did I cause us to win (bringing back half the enemy team to their base, with a single light mech)
Did I hinder us (doing something really stupid)

That's my gold standard

[Joseph Mallan]

Livewyr, on 06 June 2013 - 03:51 AM, said:

How much of an impact did I have?

Did I cause us to win (bringing back half the enemy team to their base, with a single light mech)
Did I hinder us (doing something really stupid)

That's my gold standard

198 damage, 2 kills 4 assists 6th place of 8... we won. Great match by my standards even with the low damage.

[Triple Patte]

I'm ok if I killed my weight in mechs.

I'm happy if I killed twice my weight in mechs.

[Acid Phase]

For me, it's not about numbers really. I'm more about supporting fire for my teammates and trying to stay alive more matches than dying.

[Theodor Kling]

I also prefer to look at way more then dmg. My twin LRM 40 Jaeger does dmg alright, but gets no kills, due to the distributive nature of missiles. Sometimes more, sometimes less dmg.. but a good match is if
a) Teamwork worked, and my walking turret did not get into any brawls, doing what it is made for
I got into a brawl, and managed to come out on top ( their bad if they ignore my backup weapons)

In my Commandos I have completeley different standarts? Did I survive without hiding? Did I distract enemy snipers, LRM boats enough so that the big guys could kill them with ease? Did I provide enough Tag support for my own LRM carrying mates?
Yeah sometimes I do 400+dmg in my COM-2D, mostly when dueling a heavy or assault ( SRMs are great for harrasing, but bad for precision shots), but although that isfun, it means an enemy assault and I were alon in our portion of the battlefield, so something went wrong.

Edited by Theodor Kling, 06 June 2013 - 05:05 AM.

[Megalosauroid]

How are all you people expecting to do 700+ damage. Unless everyone else on your team is terrible its not feasible for one person to do that much damage consistently because your teammates will be stealing 'your' damage and kills.

[Disapirro]

I PUG almost exclusively, and 90% of the time in a spider 5D. My average is 186 dmg with a win ration of 1.34. Kills are scarce with this dainty mech and my average is 0.36 kills. So anything above 186 dmg is good for me, and if we win I am satisfied. If I get a kill it is gravy.

[MeiSooHaityu]

When PUGing, I try to at least do over 300 damage per match, but I feel good with 400+

BTW, That is with a heavy mech. With Light mechs, I am happy to get over 200 Dmg.

Edited by MeiSooHaityu, 06 June 2013 - 05:43 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

I'm in it for the kills. As long as I kill more times than the enemy kills me, it's a good match.

Which doesn't mean I don't care about winning or doing damage or making money or whatever else. But when you're pugging, a win or a loss depends on so many factors beyond your own control. No matter how much my team sucks or how many 4-man assault mech groups are on the other team, I can always try to take two or three of the red devils down with me.

Doesn't matter if I'm playing light, medium, heavy or assault.

Edited by Alistair Winter, 06 June 2013 - 05:46 AM.

[Lupin]

Does depend on what game type you are playing, wining the match more important to me than damage.

[Tarl Cabot]

Delas Ting Usee, on 05 June 2013 - 09:14 PM, said:

Wow...suddenly my "standards" seem subpar compared to some of the numbers thrown out.

Most of the games I play, I only average 200 plus pts of damage no matter the class. Me not worthy.

I do like what "Topgun505" wrote though.
I also have LESS respect for a player who does 600 pts of damage with 2 assists and/or no kills.

grasshopper, stereotyping is not a good thing

I have had games like that. And on review when I have had such games, I had done enough damage to strip away armor and components then have the target die a spit second later with someone else getting the kill shot. You see the mech die then look up and see that it is not your name. Then other times someone else has stripped the mech at the same time I fire and I get the kill shot but caused very little actual damage.

Now thinking about it, it is possible the I am perceiving it that way due to the state reward. As for the damage itself, if a side torso is the most damaged part of the mech, I shoot it so that even if no kill shot due to XL or other, I have removed components from game play, be it HS, weapons or other items.

Of course, there are things that do make one wonder. Even when winning the match see an atlas with 75pts of damage, no lights/med on the team and seeing that someone had been capping the way points...hmmm

[FrDrake]

Some matches the whole team gets rolled so I don't like to have a set amount of damage I go by, but more so am I one of the top damages on my team.

[KiXneeL]

i just had a game where i killed every single person on the other team. and there was a pgi employee on their team too... im in an as7-k btw... I wonder if they are gonna nerf me