22 replies to this topic

[Riverboat Sam]

First off, please don't tell me how you earn C-Bills. I'm not asking about earning C-Bills. This post is NOT ABOUT C-BILLS.

Please don't tell me that C-Bills and XP are earned the same way, because they are not. If you look at the patch notes there are MANY rewards that give C-Bills but NO XP. Many.

I have three more mechs to level up to full elite status; Timber Wolf, Dire wolf and Warhawk. I need advice on how to get enough XP to level them up under the new rewards system. What I'm up against is, with losses earning me less than 100 XP and wins only earning me 800 to 900, I can play a whole night to unlock just one or two basic skills. Before Rewards 2.0 I could unlock half the basic skills for a variant in a typical evening of Pug play.

It's such a grind now to level up that I'm considering just giving up on it for a while. Any intelligent advice would be very much appreciated.

[KraftySOT]

Metabuilds on all of them.


You want laser vomit on the Timby, 2 er ppc 2 gauss on the dire, and an LRM warhawk. You want to survive as long as possible. You want to do ALOT of damage and get solo kills/most damaged.

Make sure you do well if you win your first victory. Even if it means suiciding at the end into the last few enemy mechs trying to get more damages and kills.

XP still seems to revolve around damage, assists, and kills. Whereas cbills are handed out more for teamplay.

Metabuilds and high damage are your answer.

[Sougard]

Put in BAP to get counter ECM bonuses.

Use UAV every game.

[KraftySOT]

SplatCat is also not a bad call on the Timby.

Just be patient and wait till you can splat.

Putting tag on wouldnt be bad either for extra XP.

[Torgun]

Whether it's XP or CBills just mount a tag on it and use software with macro so you can toggle it always on. Every time you damage something you get a bonus for it, so there's that.

[KraftySOT]

Sougard, on 28 October 2014 - 07:22 AM, said:

Put in BAP to get counter ECM bonuses.

Use UAV every game.

UAV only pays for half its use if you get spotting on the entire enemy team (24k)

However f youre JUST looking for XP, and cbills are not an issue, yes use the UAV every game.

[VanillaG]

For mediums and heavies, using as many SRMs and lasers seems to be a good way to go. While the SRMs don't give you pinpoint damage they help you secure the Most Damage reward and if you get the kill blow you almost always get the Solo and Brawling rewards which works out to over 500xp per Kill.

On a side note, people were complaining that before the rewards were allowing them to master out a chassis relatively quick but they would not have enough C-Bills to buy the next mech. The new rewards seem to be geared towards earning more C-Bills but slightly less XP so that when you finish the Basic skills you should have more C-Bills to get the next chassis.

[Mcgral18]

Shoot things, stay near the team.

[LordKnightFandragon]

KraftySOT, on 28 October 2014 - 07:22 AM, said:

Metabuilds on all of them.


You want laser vomit on the Timby, 2 er ppc 2 gauss on the dire, and an LRM warhawk. You want to survive as long as possible. You want to do ALOT of damage and get solo kills/most damaged.

Make sure you do well if you win your first victory. Even if it means suiciding at the end into the last few enemy mechs trying to get more damages and kills.

XP still seems to revolve around damage, assists, and kills. Whereas cbills are handed out more for teamplay.

Metabuilds and high damage are your answer.

So the game went from hundreds of options to progress to like 3? fun fun, but typical of MMOs.....so many options, only a few that are really worthwhile.

[Mothykins]

KraftySOT, on 28 October 2014 - 07:24 AM, said:

UAV only pays for half its use if you get spotting on the entire enemy team (24k)

However f youre JUST looking for XP, and cbills are not an issue, yes use the UAV every game.

UAV Locked Damage - Tick up 25 XP and 1800 Cbills each time.


If you can, run a BAP and try to Brawl DDCs


Also, just make sure you're target locked on everything and anything you can. Spotting bonuses are nice.

[Deathlike]

Placing good UAVs is #1 on the list.

The only other way is doing precision damage on a target to maximize the XP growth.

[KraftySOT]

LordKnightFandragon, on 28 October 2014 - 07:41 AM, said:

So the game went from hundreds of options to progress to like 3? fun fun, but typical of MMOs.....so many options, only a few that are really worthwhile.

You can totally garner alot of enjoyment out of a ton of the content here. Its not ALL THAT MATTERS.

But if youre trying to purely grind for something, you want that to be the shortest grind possible. Shortest distance between two points and all that. So you want to do what rewards the most XP. Thats still kills/brawling/lasthits/assists, in this guys case. His best bet for those mechs, are meta builds, thats how he's going to be the most effective at nabbing the XP rewards.

[Spheroid]

you can exploit the game timer by playing your battles directly before and after 7:00 CST, earning two double XP bonuses a day in the span of some twenty minutes.

[KraftySOT]

Cavale, on 28 October 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

UAV Locked Damage - Tick up 25 XP and 1800 Cbills each time.


If you can, run a BAP and try to Brawl DDCs


Also, just make sure you're target locked on everything and anything you can. Spotting bonuses are nice.

Yeah and generally youll only get 4-5 of those in a pug game. Wont pay for the UAV, so youre at a loss. But if thats not an issue, and you just want the 125-175xp from it. Go for it, thats a good bet.

[KraftySOT]

Spheroid, on 28 October 2014 - 09:01 AM, said:

you can exploit the game timer by playing your battles directly before and after 7:00 CST, earning two double XP bonuses a day in the span of some twenty minutes.

This is also good if you can be on then. Helps take the sting out of it a bit if you just have an hour or so a night.

[Greenjulius]

If you have many mechs to level up like you mentioned, make sure you play each of them for a couple games every day to take advantage of the double XP bonus for the first win of the day. Once you get that first win, go to the next mech, then the next until you've gotten all those double XP bonuses. That literally allows you to level them all up twice as fast.

Spheroid, on 28 October 2014 - 09:01 AM, said:

you can exploit the game timer by playing your battles directly before and after 7:00 CST, earning two double XP bonuses a day in the span of some twenty minutes.

Totally correct. Try to get your XP bonuses before this time, then you'll have a chance to get even more right after.

Like others are saying, another solid option is mounting a single tag laser on the mech and using it on every enemy mech you see, especially if you can spot for LRMs.

It's self evident that you need to be cautious and stay alive as long as possible to gain the most XP you can. You have to balance that with doing enough damage / assists / kills as possible without putting yourself in a dangerous position.

UAVs are nice, but they are an expensive way to boosts XP. I usually leave them to competitive play and only use them if they can potentially tip the balance of the round.

If a double XP weekend comes up... Make sure to set time aside for it, because I've leveled up many mechs to master level from basic in a few hours with the DXP weekends.

Edited by Greenjulius, 28 October 2014 - 09:15 AM.

[Spheroid]

There is also a bug affecting damage/kill assists that should be patched shortly. XP earned is artificially low right now. Hopefully Tuesday's patch will fix it.

Edited by Spheroid, 28 October 2014 - 09:29 AM.

[Riverboat Sam]

Thanks guys. All very good, thoughtful advice.

[Brody319]

I get most of my xp by getting kills and destroying mech parts. Large lasers or Large pulse lasers are good for this, pulse lasers actually do about the same damage as ppcs, but generate a lot less heat. Large lasers generate a lot less heat than both, but do less damage, however ususally you can fire 3 of them for less than the heat cost of 2 PPCs or 2-3 Large Pulse Lasers.

They are good at long, medium or close ranges, where ppcs have a minimum range of 90m or they do no damage.

Plus with large lasers you can sweep the enemy team, to trigger the assist bonus, then fight normally and get kills when you can, but not losing out if you don't get it.


Try to go for most damage, flanking, and hit and run bonuses. flanking and hit and run are easy, just shoot them when they aren't looking and run a little bit.

[Mechteric]

I will second the UAV suggestion, just make sure you only pop it up when you are close to more than about 3 or 4 mechs, bonus XP if you pop it near some ECM mechs.

One great way to know how many mechs are nearby is to bring seismic also, then when you see it really light up, pop it up and get the heck out of there!