Cimarb, if "But I do great this way" were a valid objection to a guide,
any guide, we wouldn't have much of a Guides section! You can always find people who say, "well I do
great chain firing my LB-10Xs and ER Large Lasers from 400-600m out!" Not a hypothetical example, by the way. You can always find someone to say "but it works for meeeee," for a number of reasons - bias confirmation, player aptitudes; heck, even playing in a substantially different Elo range. If ignoring a guide,
any guide, works for you, then keep doing whatever until it stops working: no one size fits all, which is why (along with his truly arrogant dogmatism) Victor has long been on my ignore list.
Just don't rely on "but
my personal subjective experience says," to trump reasoning - after all, my own personal, subjective experience says that Atlas missile boats are bad to have on my team. Seriously, do you think I'd have made this post if they were doing awesome? Any of them? If I'd
ever seen it work, I'd have asked myself "why" and written
that guide. But if I were to write that guide, and build up an Atlas for
just LRMs, then analyze/tweak it, I get a progression of 'Mechs that look like this:
Pure LRM;
LRM w/ ER Large;
LRM with Large Pulse or (
ER)
PPC;
LRM with UAC and Large Laser. There are other permutations you could use, of course - the relevant design elements here are that they all have the same LRM armaments (ALRM15 +2ALRM10s; selected maximum rate of fire at the largest throw weight available) and that they all have lots of missile ammo. All of them but that last, sorta-hybrid build have enough missiles to last well over four minutes of constant firing - which is over twice their time to overheat with missiles. The pure boat has enough missiles for
six point four minutes of constant firing - about half the combat time of a full-length, wait-out-the-timer match. Realistically, you're not going to be dealing effective damage for that long - if even half the missiles hit, you'd be looking at an 1800 damage match (plus other weapons, etc.) Which is great, since lobbing those LRMs is all it can do; but as I add more weaponry to the build, I find that I still have enough rounds to last out a realistic-length match, but with increasingly more effective burst firepower and/or sustainable DPS. Even the hybrid build, which is weaker than I would prefer because I declined (for the sake of illustration) to downgrade the LRM battery, has enough AC rounds to last roughly a minute and a half of direct combat, plus missiles for 3.72 minutes of constant fire (if I was making a true hybrid, it would look
More Like This, but I might go with a different AC, energy, and/or even LRM armaments.
To summarize all this, when I examined the mechanics of running a pure boat Atlas, I always got better designs out of using some of the Atlas' massive tonnage pool on something other than extraneous amounts of LRM ammo.
Finally, I'm just going to have to keep pointing this out till it sticks, somehow: this is the section of the forums for giving advice on how to play the game - there's no arbitrary, "but not if you tell them
not to do something another player likes to do" rule. If there were such a rule,
every single guide in this section of the forums would violate it.
As for
you, Giga, you have fun with that guide. I'll just go ahead and point out right now that cherry-picked videos are not strong evidence - and that if you end up advocating non-boat LRM builds, you'll be agreeing with me and admitting you were wrong here. I'll also point out that following up
your opinion - that an argument based on facts you don't dispute is "just an opinion" - with your
dogmatic opinion that a guide with which you disagree is somehow "not a guide," isn't terribly... logical. It's also par for the course with you. Ditto with your refusal to even characterize my opinion accurately, despite my many corrections that "LRM Atlases" in general are not what I'm talking about. Or your accusation of special pleading...
Either you lack the intellectual ability to think past your own likes and dislikes - or you're just engaging in deliberate sophistry. Either way, I cannot recall a single worthwhile post you've made in 13 pages of thread. You're not responding to arguments or even presenting your case - you're just heckling, and reinserting your opinion next to the actually productive posts of others. Rage and stamp your foot elsewhere; I'm done with your trolling. /ignore
Edited by Void Angel, 05 May 2014 - 04:53 PM.