arkanis, on 21 August 2014 - 04:36 AM, said:
There are mech weapons and systems in clan tech that are so unbalanced compared to IS that you are gimping yourself by going IS.
The most blatant cases for me are clan XL (no shouldering risk, full weight saving),
clan gauss (identical but 3 tons less 1 crit less),
clan DHS (identical but 2 crits),
clan medium lasers (quasi IS large lasers for 1 ton). With those things around and no drawback i don't understand why we are sharing queue other than to be farmed.
Seperated your quote out into individual pieces to make it clearer to understand.
1 - Clan XLs - Sure your right except now instead of the enemy having to decide which is the best route to kill you by going for CT or ST, you know that the best route to kill a Clan mech is always to shoot the CT. Also most people shoot center mass anyway so a majority of the fire that hits you goes to your CT whether your playing Clan or IS. Not saying it isn't an advantage but most people seriously overstate exactly how much of an advantage it is.
2 - Clan Gauss - Ok I can give you this one. No drawback. It weighs less hands down with no drawbacks to balance it out.
3 - Clan DHS - sure they are smaller and easier to fit but Clan weapons are also quite a bit hotter. The end result is both IS and Clan mechs can attain similar heat management capabilities. Don't believe me, just test it on Smurfy's.
4 - Clan ER ML - Drawbacks, lets see. Hotter and longer burn duration. Now I am not saying they aren't good but get your info straight if your going to complain about them. They definitely have some drawbacks and I would even say that under 270m, IS MLs actually have the advantage.
The point is, Clan tech as it is balanced currently isn't overwhelmingly better than IS tech. At most it is situationally better such as being better at extreme long ranges for example, but there are also alot of situations where IS weapons are better as well.
Standard PPCs are much cooler for example and offer 90-95% of the same benefit as a Clan ER PPC within its 90-540m effective range making them overall better within those ranges. Another example is the LPL. Sure it has much shorter range than the Clan version but at its effective range, it fires a 0.6 pulse vs the Clan LPL firing a 1.3 second pulse. That is a huge advantage under 350m. IS LRMs are also fired en mass which is quite a bit more effective at defeating AMS an concentrating damage, again another huge IS advantage (especially considering how many LRM OPed complaints there are).
Anyway, I could go on and on with this but it is pretty obviously that Clans don't hold a 100% tech advantage across the board.