117 replies to this topic

[Rattler85]

I bought the Daishi pack and am very happy with the mechs.

[Corbenik]

Gremlich Johns, on 15 June 2014 - 05:10 PM, said:

Has anybody done a cost analysis on these mechs yet?

the most ive seen a couple of them sold from inventory are at least 5 mil cbills

[Darvaza]

the entire point of Omni mechs is destroyed with the lousy hard points they give. I like the Summoner, one of my favorite mechs, but with only single hard points...

I will never buy one.

the hard points as a whole suck. I cant bring myself to spend money on the lousy hard points. what is the point if you cannot customize and OMNI mech?

[Corbenik]

Pariah Devalis, on 15 June 2014 - 02:22 PM, said:

Spoiler

Consistently getting 650-700+ damage games.

I turned My TW-C into the build i run on my Protector xD

Spoiler

Spoiler

Great Support Mech Soften them then clean em up get good 700 or so damage again

[Mordin Ashe]

My experience with Clan Mechs:
Beasts. In a very beastial, ferocious way. But somehow PGI managed not to make them OP, mostly due to lack of pinpoint damage, so there is a huge + for Paul. Most of them are fast and those that are not are deadly. While they can mount a lot of ordnance getting easy kills requires a lot of skill in aiming. Impact of Clan Mechs on IS will be significant though, and it will be great. Reason?
IS meta is not really mobile, mostly poptarts and LR ballistics. The proper answer to this are fast, heavy hitters and it just so happens that is exactly what Clans offer. Many people today play MWO as a turn-based strategy with little movement and a lot of digging up, leaving a gap only fast strikers like Embers can exploit. Well, the battlefields from tuesday on will be very different.

One little surprise I got thrown at me I wasn't ready for at all is how long matches take. In common matches it takes 5 minutes and the match is somehow decided, but on PTS it took 7-8 minutes of fighting for things to turn up. If at least part of this makes it to matches then TTK will be increased and the game will be much more fun. Those few hours with Clan mechs were one of the best I had in MWO and I am glad they will be out so soon.

[Pariah Devalis]

Mordin Ashe, on 15 June 2014 - 09:19 PM, said:

One little surprise I got thrown at me I wasn't ready for at all is how long matches take. In common matches it takes 5 minutes and the match is somehow decided, but on PTS it took 7-8 minutes of fighting for things to turn up. If at least part of this makes it to matches then TTK will be increased and the game will be much more fun. Those few hours with Clan mechs were one of the best I had in MWO and I am glad they will be out so soon.

Was just commenting about this to a clanmate. While trying to process and upload a pair of videos, I realized every single game played generally lasted between 7 and 10 minutes. Each started with ranged poke and gradually, and organically, transitioned into a brawl as the fight progressed until, by the end of the match, all semblance of ranged combat would go out the window and it was a flat out mad house.

Absolutely glorious!

Edited by Pariah Devalis, 15 June 2014 - 09:38 PM.

[_Comrade_]

I love the clan mechs , i am officially a stormcrow pilot

Darvaza, on 15 June 2014 - 08:18 PM, said:

the entire point of Omni mechs is destroyed with the lousy hard points they give. I like the Summoner, one of my favorite mechs, but with only single hard points...

I will never buy one.

the hard points as a whole suck. I cant bring myself to spend money on the lousy hard points. what is the point if you cannot customize and OMNI mech?

Is the hardpoints the thing you have to buy in the mechlab? I saw something like omni hardpoint but wasn't sure what it was,

Love my stormcrow though i am officially a JF stormcrow pilot! It's my main mech

Edited by Grimwill, 15 June 2014 - 11:01 PM.

[Chimerahawk]

Mordin Ashe, on 14 June 2014 - 03:26 AM, said:

If I may ask, what do you think will be the best Clan LRM boat? TW or Warhawk, and what configs? I will try to build one very heavy LRM boat just for giggles tomorrow but thats still more than a day away.

Only got to try missiles one match, (ISP had an outage), but I got 1000+ damage with my Direwolf missile loadout. 2xlrm20, 1980 rounds, 8x ERmedlasers. You can wreck stuff up close, but easily LRM any target to death.

Darvaza, on 15 June 2014 - 08:18 PM, said:

the entire point of Omni mechs is destroyed with the lousy hard points they give. I like the Summoner, one of my favorite mechs, but with only single hard points...

I will never buy one.

the hard points as a whole suck. I cant bring myself to spend money on the lousy hard points. what is the point if you cannot customize and OMNI mech?

You can swap any omnipod from any varient to any other varient. You want the right torso from the Direwolf-b on your direwolf prime? Good2go. It costs to buy the omnipods, and to swap them I believe, but you can do it.

Edited by Chimerahawk, 15 June 2014 - 11:25 PM.

[Deshiva]

After my second time in pts with my clans i can say i had the same experience as the first time. Now i had some fun with Omnipods, jjets on timber with speed tweak is good fun. 3 ams on kitfox and ecm made one supportive mech, not sure what weapons to go for with this build though.

[KuroNyra]

Darvaza, on 15 June 2014 - 08:18 PM, said:

the entire point of Omni mechs is destroyed with the lousy hard points they give. I like the Summoner, one of my favorite mechs, but with only single hard points...

I will never buy one.

the hard points as a whole suck. I cant bring myself to spend money on the lousy hard points. what is the point if you cannot customize and OMNI mech?

Strange, I was able to turn my Summoner has a Sniper or a pure brawler like I wished with a nice supply of LRM missile.
More omnipod will come with the time. Thus giving more possibility's.



For now, I'm only waiting to see if yes, I can recreate a Prometheus or Widowmaker loadout on my Dire Wolf Prime.

[Petard]

Couldn't take part in the test, due to living in Australia, and having to first sleep, then get up and go to work today....I am sooo envious of all you guys, absolutely CANNOT wait for tuesday night, when I will get a chance to play around with all of these beauties....

MY PRECIOUSES, I WANTSES THEM.....

[Sniper09121986]

KuroNyra, on 15 June 2014 - 11:41 PM, said:

For now, I'm only waiting to see if yes, I can recreate a Prometheus or Widowmaker loadout on my Dire Wolf Prime.

Why, here is the Widowmaker for you, good sir, as far as I got it. No guarantees of actually assembling it in the game though, but you get the idea.

[Dascyllus]

I had a much more mixed take.

Anyway, I think the following quote sums up what I learned on Sunday:

NRP, on 14 June 2014 - 11:22 AM, said:

From my experience, not exactly. On paper, the Dire Wolf looks devastating, but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. After further reflection, I think it is due to the burst fire of the CACs and the longer burn time of the CLasers, the result of which means the Clan weapons don't feel like they can front load damage like IS weapons currently can. As a result, IS mechs can pretty easily hold their own against Clan mechs.

Of course, this is a preliminary impression based on a few hours of screwing around. More time to learn the nuances/understand the tech will surely refine (if not outright change) these impressions.

I'd like to send this man a cookie. That is absolutely spot on.

In any case, I got to spend about six hours in the Dire Wolf, and another ~3ish in the Timber Wolf, experimenting (especially with the Dire Wolf) with a few of the different weapon systems.

***Dire Wolf***

I think this will actually be a pretty tricky mech to play well. As others have said, it's a brutally effective fire support mech, and absolutely God-awful terrible at everything else.

I don't think that there's a whole lot to add to the existing reviews, so here are some additional observations that I haven't seen repeated earlier:

In practice, a lot more fragile than you'd think. The combination of a spectacularly slow turning radius and an enormous cube of a hit box means that it is a very easy target. Critically, it's a very easy target **from it's side arcs**. This thing might literally be half again or even twice as *thick* as an Atlas.

I tried a ton of different load outs and styles with these and came up with two important notes:

*Clan Autocannons and large lasers are a lot more difficult to use effectively on any mech due to the way they spread that damage out over time, but it's especially hard on something with the arm and torso twist rate of a Dire Wolf. Lots of people were running these with DPS ballistics like boating cUAC5s. That'll be great as long as people stay in your front arc. This means that this build is a somewhat inefficient method of killing other Dire Wolves, and is otherwise pretty unimpressive.

*Clan med. pulse lasers, erPPCs and Guass rifles are much easier to use on this platform because they do a better job front loading the damage. I settled on a couple of builds that focused on these weapons systems, learned to stay well back (those med. pulse lasers have a 400m range!) and play fire support, and had good consistent success.

The bottom line: If a team can afford to use a 100 ton assault mech in a fire support role and devote real effort to protecting it, this mech is hands down *amazing* in that capacity, once you learn it's quirks. It'll be mediocre in a PuG, and (I think) should get torn up by a dedicated brawler. Beating one is easy: don't be in front of it, keep moving, and hit it from the sides.

***Timber Wolf***

This review is probably a lot less useful than the one of the Dire Wolf. Frankly, I think this mech needs a nerf. It excels as a generalist, or it can be specialized into a nasty brawler. It can be a decent LRM boat or sniper, but I think there are probably more efficient options out there for that role (although those have down sides that this guy doesn't).

It's fast, stupidly agile, and has some well thought out hard points. The hit boxes seem tight for a mech this size, and since you'll be running and jumping and 89 kph, that's pretty nasty.

In any case, it was an absolute blast to play. I think the caveats from above about the pros and cons for clan weapons all still apply here, but this was a much easier mech to get into than the Dire Wolf, and consistently absolutely annihilated Dire Wolves in anything like 1x1 match ups.

Fwiw, I think this show cases the omnipods pretty well. My favorite variant took the prime chassis, but added the torsos from the SRM/JJ variant.

The bottom line: I think PGI assumed that this was such an iconic mech that they better make it at least very good. I think they shot a little passed that.

[101011]

Darvaza, on 15 June 2014 - 08:18 PM, said:

the entire point of Omni mechs is destroyed with the lousy hard points they give. I like the Summoner, one of my favorite mechs, but with only single hard points...

I will never buy one.

the hard points as a whole suck. I cant bring myself to spend money on the lousy hard points. what is the point if you cannot customize and OMNI mech?

Well, if you had bought one and played it, you would change your mind. It can brawl, snipe, or lurm with equal ability. Prime is a sniper (either 3 ERPPC if you love humping that heat curve or ERPPC and Gauss), B is a missile boat, and D is a brawler (4 ML, UAC/20, 5 JJ...brutal stuff). I think that in an up-close brawl, it wrecks a Timber Wolf. Those JJ's really help.

[Whippetsnapper]

I enjoyed my initial 5 matches or so in my Stormcrows. It is a fast medium with survivability. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to try out some different autocannon types on the C variant (I enjoy the harder hitting AC's). It will be interesting to test how well this speedy survivable mech will brawl.

The Prime is an excellent laser sniper with the added perk of a huge quantity of heat sinks and the speed to avoid confrontations where neccesary.

I was only able to play the missile variant once..and found the initial load out a bit odd. But I'm sure with some tinkering it will be quite viable.

It looks like the Stormcrow was a really solid pick.

[Mordin Ashe]

For all those who propose nerfing Clan Mechs, slow down your horses. Each and every lacks aplha, scratch the CERPPC builds. No matter how well they fared in PTS, they will be different and this drawback will be serious in matches against IS Mechs. If anything, many Clan Mechs will have CERPPCs installed on them so that they can take some part in the current meta. But if you nerf this, there will never be any chance of them becoming good brawlers and hammers to squishy poptarts they are supposed to be.
Jsut wait until they hit the servers.

[NRP]

Petard, on 16 June 2014 - 12:22 AM, said:

Couldn't take part in the test, due to living in Australia, and having to first sleep, then get up and go to work today....I am sooo envious of all you guys, absolutely CANNOT wait for tuesday night, when I will get a chance to play around with all of these beauties.... MY PRECIOUSES, I WANTSES THEM.....

You will not be disappointed. The Clan mechs are a breath of fresh air.

[Pariah Devalis]

Warhawk, further use impressions:
85-tons of pain. Surprisingly durable for a mech its size, capable of armor rolling fairly well. Arm mounted weapons are not that big a deal, as the side torsos get hit more often. Extremely snappy torso twist. Big enough to put in a couple big guns with room leftover to cool them. Basically a cross between a Stalker and Awesome. A blast to pilot, but if pressed can struggle to manage its heat generation, even with 25-27 DHS.

Also, sorry NRP, did not see you ask until the game ended. Yes it was elited.

Timber Wolf further impressions:
Great generalist mech or a decent brawler. I say decent, as it has a fairly easy CT to hit, making it hard to armor shield in a knife fight. Still, it is fast, maneuverable, and due to the omni system extremely flexible. However it requires a minimum of three jump jets to get any sort of lift, and it suffers from Thunderbolt syndrome where you have almost more hardpoint then you actually need to use.

Nova post small and medium ghost heat linking:
Actually, it worked. Before killing anything with the Nova was trivial. Now you need to be on top of your weapon group and heat management or else you will fail miserably. One accidental alpha will shut you down. Good management, however, and you can still cut someone wide open. Interesting mech, actually.

[Dnarvel]

Don't have any clans mechs, But I just going to voice a general opinion. Clan mechs indeed carry more firepower and have the ability to dominate in a 1v1 situation. But I was able to hold my own in some of my IS mechs (Jenner, Raven, Firebrand, Banshee, etc) quite well. The timberwolf, dire wolf and warhawk are just as easy to take down as an atlas/stalker. PGI got it right, and I can't wait to see more of the load-outs you guys are going to try. Oh, and the current META will definatley change, and for the better. More tactics and less pop-sniping is always a good thing.

[Lily from animove]

Whenever a new pilot coems into the game, you would automatically suggest him a Timberwolf. Simply because the timberwofl can be everything. laserboatong, LRM boating, JJ's yes/no? Ballistic, or any mix of them. It's the perfect mech for a newcomer to find his playstyle (without being broke 100times) before he may chose another chassis more specialised to it.