Mr 144, on 07 October 2013 - 11:23 AM, said:
I sometimes use free-look to shoot my Centurion's right arm weapon at enemies while presenting a bare minimum of it, making it harder for them to hit and destroy. I've found that when I get lazy and don't do it, the right arm gets shot off alarmingly fast.
I've also used the Awesome's arms and free-look in order to maintain LRM lock to continue firing while maneuvering evasively and slimming down my profile by presenting an oblique torso twist angle.
Take the Jager as a counterpoint. Fantastic fire-support mech. It can stalk a ridgeline, moving laterally, and presenting a very small target while laying down fire. But take it into a brawl, against people who know how to shoot out a side-torso, who know how to aim under the Jager's "armpits", and it gets crippled or killed very quickly. The AC/40 Jager has a distinction because it can kill enemies so quickly in its preferred range, but it pretty much *has* to kill those enemies quickly because otherwise it will get killed first.
With the way the game has low heat dissipation and high heat capacity, sometimes all you gotta do is outlast someone's heat threshold, and once their DPS drops into the gutter from overheating, you can live much longer. Eat everything to the CT and maybe you die just as soon as your foe starts to overheat about 15 seconds into the fight. But tank 40 or 50 damage on the arms, and suddenly you have a healthy CT and an overheating opponent, and now it's gonna take him 30 or 40 more seconds to dish out enough DPS to core through your CT.
And having arms to soak damage is a fantastic thing for an XL-equipped mech. My Catapult-K2 has vulnerable side torsos, and sometimes making one wrong step means death. Even if I twist fully 90 degrees away, I die because my arms don't cover the sides.
Edited by YueFei, 07 October 2013 - 11:01 PM.