As a dedicated medium pilot, I had a hard time trimming this down to just 5 mechs. And well, to be honest I suppose I didn’t really, what with the honorable mentions. There’s just something about taking the worst class of mechs in the game, and going forth and proving that with the right pilot they can still demolish the opposition with the best of them. Sure, I could be even more effective if I had devoted the time to becoming godlike with jenners, or if I had embraced the meta and bought highlanders and victors, or if I had laid down cash for the clan packs, but I wouldn’t be having nearly as much fun as I get from stepping over the ac20-riddled corpses of assault mechs in my lowly blackjack. And so, in no particular order:
BJ-1 ‘Lone Hand’. Usually ran with the old standby
‘Bamjack’ build (or as I like to call it, the ‘Flying Wang’, and no, I didn’t copy this off of Sean Lang or the champion, I thought it up myself and have been running it since shortly after the chassis came out), but currently using
this right-side semi-sniper uac5/ppc/2mlas build. There’s just something about this chassis and mech; I don’t know what it is, but of all the mechs I own, Blackjacks are the ones that come closest to piloting as if they were wired directly into my brain. They just ‘fit’, and Lone Hand is one of my most effective mechs of any class and my overall all-time favorite mech. When I’m at the controls of this mech, there’s basically nothing I really fear. I may not be able to take every mech in the game one-on-one, but I’ll darn well give them a good fight. This mech holds one of my two 8-kill games in the ‘modern’ 12v12 era. An honorable mention goes to my new BJ-A ‘Right Bower’, which is basically a doppleganger of my BJ-1 and has taken over the role of running
the ‘Flying Wang’ build since it can free up weight by putting the third laser on the torso.
BJ-3 ‘Dutchman’.
This build has stayed with the stock weapons, merely adding the usual upgrades and switching to a larger XL engine. Again, there’s just something about blackjacks, and playing ‘the littlest poptart’ can be a surprisingly effective role with the ‘jack’s maneuverability, small profile, and high mounts.
SHD-2K ‘Grinner’. I own four of the five Shadow Hawks, and they’re all good mechs, but this one is probably my favorite, mostly because of how much I love missiles and that this version has the most energy slots to back up a missile-focused build (since you can’t really go heavy missiles with a ballistic at this weight). I’ve run it with three main builds:
2ppc/3ssrm,
2(er)llas/3asrm4, and
3mlas/3asrm6. The first two combine high-mounted peeking weapons with some good close-range punch, and the last one (my favorite) plays like one of the old splat-cents on turbo steroids. This mech holds my other 8-kill game in the 12v12 era - none of my lights, heavies, or assaults have that honor. The other feature of this mech that I especially love is having the two beefy shield arms - for someone like me who cut their teeth on the old-school zombie Centurion, playing whirling dervish as I spin through the brawl in this bad boy is sheer heaven.
SHD-2D2 ‘Red Wolf’. What can I say? I love missiles, I love highly articulated arm mounts for brawling, and I love mounting a single big ballistic on a medium and going out to thwack things. The sheer flexibility of the 2D2 keeps me coming back over and over again, because there’s just
so many fun builds you can run on this thing.
CN9-A ‘Fearless’. The very first mech I ever bought, and the mech I was piloting during
the first ’epic come from behind victory’ experience on my third day in the game that cemented my love of medium mechs. Good old Fearless has been one of my most stalwart rides ever since the beginning. Whether the
original stock-plus build I used right after I bought her,
any of the iterations of the splat-cent SRM zombie build, the
nostalgia-fueled hybrid build I’ve used most recently, or even the occasional experiment with XL builds, she wields them with grace and tenacity. Like my Blackjacks, there’s just something about Centurions that makes them pilot as if they were practically extensions of my brain, and many were the corpses of heavier mechs that Fearless left strewn in her wake with nice neat ac-10-shell-shaped holes in their engines. Even though she’s mostly retired these days, I still pull out old Fearless now and again, and she never lets me down.
Honorable mention: Novas. I’ve only had the chance to try them out for a day on the test server last week, but I already know that they’re going to become one of my favorite chassis. Lurking on top of buildings and behind obstacles on the new map, only to appear suddenly and dump massive laser volleys into unsuspecting victims before vanishing again, was some of the most fun I’ve had playing MWO in *months*. Clan stuff may be OP, but I’m going to enjoy it as much as I can before they nerf it!
Honorable mention: Kit Foxes. Yes, I know, they’re technically lights, but they play like baby mediums and suffer from most of the same problems. The power of ECM and clantech keep them from being totally useless, but they’re still relatively slow, lightly armored, easy to disarm big targets. There’s just something about these cute little buggers, though, that makes them such fun to play. Perhaps it’s just the challenge of going out and hanging with the big boys in one of the probably top 3 most fragile mechs in the game.
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Ph30nix, on 26 August 2014 - 09:00 AM, said:
j/k
