25 replies to this topic

[ogy]

So light pilots tend to fall in to 2 camps, the first ones "whack a huge engine in that mother" and run like a banshee find an opponent and run like an chicken around and around firing lasers machine guns etc ... nothing wrong in that ... bit boring but what ho ! The second camp, out fit their beloved mech with electronic gizmos that allow them to use terrain and guile to sneak up on their opponent tag or nark them for a "team kill" ... Now which do you think are going to prevail on a battle field where an Atlas can see every thing, even into the deepest canyons. I know this is first implementation of 3rd person view and so things will be {Scrap} for a while. But we need to make 3rd person view like a drone affect ... you shoot it in the air, the drone floats down to earth in maybe 5 seconds, the owner gets to see his lovely custom paint job maybe helps his team pin point an attack ... You get maybe 1 or 2 for a mech each match, once used up that's it ... it makes much more sense !

[El Bandito]

"Sense" is in short demand at PGI headquarters.

[stjobe]

Scouting in the traditional sense (send out a light 'mech to find, target, and relay data on the enemy) has been dealt a number of severe blows in MWO:
* It's not rewarded with CB or XP in any appreciable amount
* An assault is as good at it as a light, and gets rewarded as much (or rather little) for it.
* Seismic sensor both removes the need for close scouting and makes sneaking up on someone near impossible
* Aerial Drone is way better at relaying targeting data than any 'mech, light or not.
* And now 3PV

All this means is that lights have little choice but become Strikers, whether they want to or not; it's the only viable role for a light in MWO.

When the only role for 'mechs is "do as much damage as possible", is anyone surprised we have a heavy bias towards the upper end of the weight scale?

Edited by stjobe, 21 August 2013 - 01:22 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

ogy, on 21 August 2013 - 12:08 AM, said:

So light pilots tend to fall in to 2 camps

Wrong.

Light pilots tend to fall into one camp. The guys that pack as many streaks, medium lasers and PPCs as their tiny legs can carry, with the biggest engine, and take turns between capping and brawling.

Scouts are a myth. Role warfare is false propaganda. There is no NARC. The command console is a lie. Everything is working as intended.

[DerSpecht]

ogy, on 21 August 2013 - 12:08 AM, said:

Now which do you think are going to prevail on a battle field where an Atlas can see every thing, even into the deepest canyons. I know this is first implementation of 3rd person view and so things will be {Scrap} for a while. But we need to make 3rd person view like a drone affect ... you shoot it in the air, the drone floats down to earth in maybe 5 seconds, the owner gets to see his lovely custom paint job maybe helps his team pin point an attack ... You get maybe 1 or 2 for a mech each match, once used up that's it ... it makes much more sense !

An atlas cannot see everything. He still hat his limited view of 100-120° in front of him. Scout/tag em from the side or the rear and ure golden.

[Corleym]

becasue of role warfare and all the rewards associated with it

[Trauglodyte]

Alistair Winter, on 21 August 2013 - 02:59 AM, said:

Wrong.

Light pilots tend to fall into one camp. The guys that pack as many streaks, medium lasers and PPCs as their tiny legs can carry, with the biggest engine, and take turns between capping and brawling.

Scouts are a myth. Role warfare is false propaganda. There is no NARC. The command console is a lie. Everything is working as intended.

Win!

I def pack a PPC and Md Lasers on my CDAs. The 3C was an abject design failure and was intended to be something better. So I created the 2A3C and it makes me happy.

[Ngamok]

My scouts find where you are and keep you locked up for my teams LRMs to core you.

[Bunko]

Scouting finds the enemy and radios into the team the enemy's location, compliment, and actions. They don't engage, if anything they stay hidden and avoid engaging. This may be using TAG but with TAG being visible it's not much of a scouting tool.

Your second point is totally incorrect. The other way to use Lights is a Wolfpack using speed and numbers to take down a single target then move to the next.

As for 3PV, your reasons aren't very valid being:
- Drones actually helps scouts see the enemy
- When being swarmed by Lights the extra view area doesn't give much advantage being Lights would be moving so quickly in and out of view range
- All weapons on the enemy are locked to torso, tracking a Light would be rather difficult.
- No radar to keep track of where all the Lights are

I'm not in the 3PV love wagon, but what you are saying here doesn't make much sense in what a Light pilot actually does and the advantage of 3PV vs a Light. I think you are right that 3PV has advantage in slower mech battles but not ones where mechs are zipping in and out.

[PEEFsmash]

Scouting is utterly worthless in pugs, and overrated in 12 mans. The role is {Scrap}, really. No reward, and little importance to scouting outside of the first couple minutes. After that, the only scouting you need to do is keep an eye on the enemy lights, which isn't the greatest challenge known to man, considering the typically small number of routes taken.

Role warfare right now is pretty damn dead. 8 assaults is the best team in the game.

[Angel of Annihilation]

You know Scouts claiming they can't scout because of some aspect of the game be it Siesmic or 3PV just makes me want to laugh out loud.

First, scouting is about finding the enemy. In a light you can rush out across the battlefield, find the enemies location and where they are going and relay this back to your team. This in and of itself is quite important so you can insure your team can intercept the enemy and not get ambushed or caught out in a bad postion when they finally engage.

By the Way...this is all Scouts do so any mech that can find the enemy quickly and relay that information back quickly is a Scout.

Second, everything else this community likes to call Scouting is actually doing something completely different from scouting. Using TAG for example is called "Spotting". Sneaking up to attack an enemy from behind is called "Raiding", "Harassing" or "Ambushing". Weaving in and out of enemy mechs in order to draw attention away from your teammates is called "Distracting" and then there is "Capping" which we all understand.

In writing this I also thought of a third "Ambush" using a Jaggy but I think you get the point by now.

Lets talk about TAG and NARC.

With NARC all you have to do is speed in and lauching a NARC and an enemy mech then speed back out. TAG just requires you to hold the laser on an enemy in line of sight. Both require you to be in light of sight of the enemy and if you can see them, they can see you. No real advantage lost here.

Raiding, Harrassing or Ambushing.

Not going to go into detail here since I have did plently of detailed analysis on this topic back when I was debating the use of seismic under the old rules. In a nut shell this is still easy to do with skillful use of terrain, cover, concealment and distraction. For example, in two seperate instances last night, I snuck (not a real word I don't think) a JagerMech JM6-A running an impressive 64 kph around the enemy flanks and scored 5 kills and 1 crippled enemy mech out of my efforts.

First scenerio. Tormaline Desert. Flanked way around the left flank and managed to catch a Missile boat Catapult along inside his missile range. Took him out with minimal damage. Continued my flank march, caught another Catapult Missile boat from behind, took him out before he even started to turn toward me. I then engage the next mech in line, A Stalker, managed to almost take him but finally the enemy realized there was someone behind them and focus fired me before I could finish him.

Second scenerio. Canyon Network. Again flanked way around the left and using cover and concealment again managed to get in close to a Catapult Missile boat. Took him out with minimal damage. As I cam up the hill there was an Altas with back to me, Took him out in two volleys. When up the little goat path only to find three enemy in the valley below and took out a Hunchback that was distracted by engaging the friendlies in front of him. I even managed to put 2-3 Volleys of Quad SRM6, 2 ML on an Atlas before they noticed me and forced me to withdraw from the hill.

Now seriously, if I can do this sort of thing in a frickin JagerMech that can only run 64 kph, your going to tell me you can't do it in a Jenner running 140 kph plus?

Distracting and Capping

Self explanitory, we all know what this is and how to do it.

Edited by Viktor Drake, 22 August 2013 - 12:20 PM.

[PEEFsmash]

Viktor Drake, on 22 August 2013 - 12:17 PM, said:

You know Scouts claiming they can't scout because of some aspect of the game be it Siesmic or 3PV just makes me want to laugh out loud.

First, scouting is about finding the enemy. In a light you can rush out across the battlefield, find the enemies location and where they are going and relay this back to your team. This in and of itself is quite important so you can insure your team can intercept the enemy and not get ambushed or caught out in a bad postion when they finally engage.

By the Way...this is all Scouts do so any mech that can find the enemy quickly and relay that information back quickly is a Scout.

Second, everything else this community likes to call Scouting is actually doing something completely different from scouting. Using TAG for example is called "Spotting". Sneaking up to attack an enemy from behind is called "Raiding", "Harassing" or "Ambushing". Weaving in and out of enemy mechs in order to draw attention away from your teammates is called "Distracting" and then there is "Capping" which we all understand.

In writing this I also thought of a third "Ambush" using a Jaggy but I think you get the point by now.

Lets talk about TAG and NARC.

With NARC all you have to do is speed in and lauching a NARC and an enemy mech then speed back out. TAG just requires you to hold the laser on an enemy in line of sight. Both require you to be in light of sight of the enemy and if you can see them, they can see you. No real advantage lost here.

Raiding, Harrassing or Ambushing.

Not going to go into detail here since I have did plently of detailed analysis on this topic back when I was debating the use of seismic under the old rules. In a nut shell this is still easy to do with skillful use of terrain, cover, concealment and distraction. For example, in two seperate instances last night, I snuck (not a real word I don't think) a JagerMech JM6-A running an impressive 64 kph around the enemy flanks and scored 5 kills and 1 crippled enemy mech out of my efforts.

First scenerio. Tormaline Desert. Flanked way around the left flank and managed to catch a Missile boat Catapult along inside his missile range. Took him out with minimal damage. Continued my flank march, caught another Catapult Missile boat from behind, took him out before he even started to turn toward me. I then engage the next mech in line, A Stalker, managed to almost take him but finally the enemy realized there was someone behind them and focus fired me before I could finish him.

Second scenerio. Canyon Network. Again flanked way around the left and using cover and concealment again managed to get in close to a Catapult Missile boat. Took him out with minimal damage. As I cam up the hill there was an Altas with back to me, Took him out in two volleys. When up the little goat path only to find three enemy in the valley below and took out a Hunchback that was distracted by engaging the friendlies in front of him. I even managed to put 2-3 Volleys of Quad SRM6, 2 ML on an Atlas before they noticed me and forced me to withdraw from the hill.

Now seriously, if I can do this sort of thing in a frickin JagerMech that can only run 64 kph, your going to tell me you can't do it in a Jenner running 140 kph plus?

Distracting and Capping

Self explanitory, we all know what this is and how to do it.

Thanks for telling us the tale of a pug player playing against bads.

[Corbon Zackery]

ogy, on 21 August 2013 - 12:08 AM, said:

So light pilots tend to fall in to 2 camps, the first ones "whack a huge engine in that mother" and run like a banshee find an opponent and run like an chicken around and around firing lasers machine guns etc ... nothing wrong in that ... bit boring but what ho ! The second camp, out fit their beloved mech with electronic gizmos that allow them to use terrain and guile to sneak up on their opponent tag or nark them for a "team kill" ... Now which do you think are going to prevail on a battle field where an Atlas can see every thing, even into the deepest canyons. I know this is first implementation of 3rd person view and so things will be {Scrap} for a while. But we need to make 3rd person view like a drone affect ... you shoot it in the air, the drone floats down to earth in maybe 5 seconds, the owner gets to see his lovely custom paint job maybe helps his team pin point an attack ... You get maybe 1 or 2 for a mech each match, once used up that's it ... it makes much more sense !

Actually third person hinders a Atlas because of the large mech blocking the center of the screen. So if I run straight at you eventually your chassis since its bigger than my mech will block line of sight.

This was found out by accident during deployment as I ran over a teammates Raven with my atlas before I could get it out of 3rd person.

The 2 primary builds for lights are (Drum roll please!)

1. (Light mech killer) This build involves speed, small lasers, streaks, sometimes ECM depends on the mech build. Your job is to kill the other teams light mechs


2. (Hit and Run on Medium, Heavy, Assault mechs) These builds involve mostly speed, M. lasers, SRM, Large lasers, PPC. Your not looking for kills here. Your trying to rack up 12 assists as you zip back, and forth between mechs hitting them, and then running away this way when your team engages them they all have some sort of weaken armor that can be exploted.

Community drops are so random that putting TAG, or MARC on you mech is a gamble. Your gambling you will drop with someone who knows how to exploit those items. Also your losing dmg. when you equip them. NARC and TAG are really only seen in 4 man teams. Were also looking into getting some heat added to the TAG laser because people are locking it on with a joystick throttle key.

Typical Light builds should have Max armor, XL, FF, and Endo. This is due to the 1 slot items most light mechs will use.

A typical example of a light mech killer is.
Jenner
4 small pulse
2 streak missile launchers
AMS, Ammo
Streak Ammo

This build is one of the reasons Commando's (Also known as popcorn due to the heavy missiles loads and ammo dependence)Got ECM added to them this Jenner would swoop in and annihilate the slower moving Commando's.

Since your weapon package takes up 10 slots go ahead and save weight by dropping in a XL, FF, Endo. This allows you to max out the engine and armor. The small pulse lasers allow you to carve up a lights back armor and the auto hit of the streaks now damage the legs as well as back armor. Your speed will keep you right behind him were you can do your work without receiving damage.

Edited by Corbon Zackery, 22 August 2013 - 01:07 PM.

[Blackadder]

Wasting tonnage on support equipment is mostly pointless, especially with Hit detection as bad as it is, excluding ECM, streaks were nerfed into oblivion, rendering bap pointless. Narc has always been a waste of space, and TAG has only been useful if your playing with a team that brings enough LRM"s to make it worthwhile, which in most pugs is not the case. Given the constantly diminishing state of hit detection, Missiles are currently the worst weapons in the game currently when considered as a class.

Being a scout in a light is pointless beyond what others have already stated the role is. The only worthwhile role of a light mech is to act as a striker and harasser to help your team. So either your in the ankle biter brigade eliminating bad players who isolate themselves, abusing hit detection with spider tanks, or playing a striker with a jenner or cicada at times. Being good in lights is far harder then it is in heavies or assaults, excluding the obviously bugged aspects. Most pilots cant pull it off, those that do have a huge impact on the match.

[Bishop Steiner]

ogy, on 21 August 2013 - 12:08 AM, said:

So light pilots tend to fall in to 2 camps, the first ones "whack a huge engine in that mother" and run like a banshee find an opponent and run like an chicken around and around firing lasers machine guns etc ... nothing wrong in that ... bit boring but what ho ! The second camp, out fit their beloved mech with electronic gizmos that allow them to use terrain and guile to sneak up on their opponent tag or nark them for a "team kill" ... Now which do you think are going to prevail on a battle field where an Atlas can see every thing, even into the deepest canyons. I know this is first implementation of 3rd person view and so things will be {Scrap} for a while. But we need to make 3rd person view like a drone affect ... you shoot it in the air, the drone floats down to earth in maybe 5 seconds, the owner gets to see his lovely custom paint job maybe helps his team pin point an attack ... You get maybe 1 or 2 for a mech each match, once used up that's it ... it makes much more sense !

because that would not help with it's supposed stated purpose, which is to help noobs grasp piloting their mech.

More sensible would be to limit 3pV to trial mechs ONLY, and even then only for the duration of the Cadet BOnus. If one cannot figure out how to steer their mech after 25 matches, one should probably go back to playing fruit ninja.

[Zerberus]

Alistair Winter, on 21 August 2013 - 02:59 AM, said:

Wrong.

Light pilots tend to fall into one camp. The guys that pack as many streaks, medium lasers and PPCs as their tiny legs can carry, with the biggest engine, and take turns between capping and brawling.

Scouts are a myth. Role warfare is false propaganda. There is no NARC. The command console is a lie. Everything is working as intended.

Agreed with the sole exception of the PPCs. The bottom line is we are all insane trolls in the best possible way.

I run quite a few lights, most of them will either troll you from 1000m out with an erll, troll you close in with Mls /srms/ mgs, troll you by tagging you, troll you by running through your lines borking up your sensors, troll you by capping the bases away, ...

My job as a light pilot is to find out exactly where you are, let everybody know, and then proceed to do anything I possibly can to annpoy the living hell out of you in any way I can possibly think of. If I actually manage to kill you in the process, it`s because you suck, not because I`m imba, becasue me causing actual damage is entirely optional.

And no, I don`t run ravens, either. Commandos, Spiders, and a Jenner, none with a ppc, only one with streaks, and only 2 w/ ECM.

PEEFsmash, on 22 August 2013 - 11:53 AM, said:

Scouting is utterly worthless in pugs, and overrated in 12 mans. The role is {Scrap}, really. No reward, and little importance to scouting outside of the first couple minutes. After that, the only scouting you need to do is keep an eye on the enemy lights, which isn't the greatest challenge known to man, considering the typically small number of routes taken.

Role warfare right now is pretty damn dead. 8 assaults is the best team in the game.

Hmm, 8 assaults is 2 Steiner SCOUT lances, which would be directly contradictory to that...so how exactly is scouting dead again?

Edited by Zerberus, 22 August 2013 - 03:24 PM.

[Orzorn]

PEEFsmash, on 22 August 2013 - 11:53 AM, said:

Scouting is utterly worthless in pugs, and overrated in 12 mans. The role is {Scrap}, really. No reward, and little importance to scouting outside of the first couple minutes. After that, the only scouting you need to do is keep an eye on the enemy lights, which isn't the greatest challenge known to man, considering the typically small number of routes taken.

Role warfare right now is pretty damn dead. 8 assaults is the best team in the game.

Definitely. "Scouts" are just the short-hand for "light mechs that try to kill the other lights as fast as possible, then join the main fray".

Because that's literally all they do right now in 12 man competitive matches.

[Donnie Silveray]

The OP argument is rather void considering an Atlas cannot cross the map in a matter of seconds or minutes nor flank, move around, or spy effectively on an enemy team while having the time to regroup and move. 3PV cannot allow you to see the entire map, plus your minimap is gone leaving predicting where the enemy will be in the dust. Having a scout head out and observe the enemy in secrecy while giving said info well ahead of a confrontation is infinitely more useful than being in an Atlas and going "Hey, they're above that ridge but we can't do anything since we're pinned."

[Kaspirikay]

Since the start I have always been against scouting lights. I find it a waste of precious armor.

Edited by Kaspirikay, 22 August 2013 - 04:13 PM.

[Lusankya]

When I run in a lance with someone who wants to use a missile boat I will usually grab one of my scouts and just do a bunch of spotting. It's a nice change of pace from brawling which is my preferred mech combat.