kamiko kross, on 20 February 2015 - 09:43 AM, said:
Thing is Rip, that clan stuff ISN'T op. Not by a long shot. I use both tech and I'd take a Thunderbolt over any clan heavy, even the imbawolf.
The nature of mwo combat is peek a boo snapshot or long ranged sniping. In PAB IS has every advantage under the sun, if you know what you are doing. We run cooler and have all that PPFLD on tap.....
Ranged snipng? Yeah clans have more range but lordy those burn times....oh and the core of the sun hot as heat scale off of your 2 ER medium lasers...use ppcs! yes why not? But hang on they can make your mech go super nova hot in 4 secs sans 55 million heatsinks!
Anyway, silly dribbling aside they really, really ain't as op as people think they are. Nearly all my Is mechs have higher KDR, even my assaults.......
Yeah, I tend to think the gap is less technology based, and more simply faction based.
1st, it's perceived that Clan tech is OP, which it may be slightly, but not necessarily dramatically (and certainly not unbeatably) so, and that pulls players who are playing to "get the best tech" to the Clans (likely many of the meta gamers, with no attachment to lore for any reason, might fall into this category, at least if they aren't playing Firestarters at the moment
).
2nd, many of the current batch of Mechwarrior gamers (and I certainly won't fault anyone this, since they were super awesome games) cut their teeth on MW2/MW3/MW4, as either a Clanner, or an IS Mechwarrior with Clan tech, so while for me the nostalgia factor is strongest around IS mechs and Succession Wars stuff, for that group, the opposite is true, so the Clans pull those players for that reason. Clan Wave III that was just announced is certainly not going to alleviate this situation any.
3rd, there is definitely an advantage to the fact that they have no Clans without a border into the Sphere, while we have 3 factions with no direct path into Clan territory. This has led to a ton of "in-fighting", as it were, while the Clans gobble up planets. I'm not exactly saying this is a bad thing per se, since I, for one, loved the Succession Wars, and had really been hoping the IS factions would have a nice chance to play that out a bit before the Clans showed up. Simply that, what I seem to see is, the Clans fighting each other from time to time, but mostly focused on driving to Terra, while you get IS factions wavering between countering the Clans, and taking planets from each other. Again, this is sort of what they did "emotionally" during the Clan Invasion (so I'm not 100% disappointed here), but when it came down to it, they came around and, except for House Liao really, more or less turned their attention away from each other and towards the Invasion, at least until Comstar bought them some time.
Finally, all these factors contribute to the fact that they're winning, alot, at the moment, and for some players, the team that's winning is the team to join (as a Davion loyalist, to be fair, this has worked to my own advantage from time to time in the past
), so the Clans pull that type of player for that reason.
All in all, I have no idea how it ends up balancing out, but it feels like a repeat of what was experienced by many when the Clans showed up in Table Top...which was "Oh man...
the Clans broke Battletech 
".
Anyhow, all that aside, I'm still having a blast in my Enforcers and Locusts right now, so...
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