137 replies to this topic

[YCSLiesmith]

Tesunie, on 22 March 2015 - 07:37 PM, said:

OP did not ask if LRMs were good. He asked for advice on a Catapult. You misunderstand the OP's request. We know your opinion of LRMs. We got it on the first page, the second page, the third page and even the fourth page. I think we got it. Move on.

my advice to the OP was responded to on the first page. now im responding to the guy asking if there's a trick to killing people who are behind obstacles with LRMs (there isn't, they're a trap weapon for noobs)

[Madcap72]

Kyynele, on 22 March 2015 - 04:38 AM, said:

Any great LRM tips for skirmish matches where the opposing force just camps the basement of HPG manifold or the tunnel/lower level in Crimson Straits? Let's add to that that the opposing force killed a scout and waiting for them to come out isn't a winning option?

Not sure if you just regularly get some really not-so-great-opponents, or if you just don't really know the maps.

I kill people with LRMs from catapults in the HPG basement all the time. You know you can use them in there, right?

As to your crimson straight argument, it's valid, and also goes to show that it's a team game, and sometimes you can't do all the heavy lifting for the team with LRMS.

But, more to the point, look how far you have to move the goalposts to support your argument, and one is invalid. ONE spot, on ONE map, feel free to bask in the glory of your "gotcha" moment.

[MechWarrior3671771]

Ignore the LRM whiners. These are the same people who whine when they get rained to death.

Yes, LRMs are less efficient because they spread damage. But you are doing more damage than the laserboat who can't shoot over the hill. Its a team game, and for all their smack-talk about kill stats, none of them complain when they encounter an enemy assault that's had its armor stripped by your missiles.


As for the Command Console:
"... in the context of running an LRMer, the boosts that BAP provides are better than the Command Console, since BAP can counter an ECM in range."

Pretty much this ^^^ . There are better uses for the tonnage, like BAP and more ammo. Most people only add the Command Console to fill out a mech that has more tonnage than slots available. It's useful but mainly a luxury item.

Edited by Fenrisulvyn, 22 March 2015 - 10:45 PM.

[Madcap72]

Here's a pretty normal match for me, normally I make less because I don't have premium time, but it's still pretty representative. People can argue against the LRM's all they want, but facts are facts... LRM5 Cat A1's can put out hurt and farm C-bills like it's going out of style.

Fenrisulvyn, on 22 March 2015 - 10:44 PM, said:

snip
As for the Command Console:
"... in the context of running an LRMer, the boosts that BAP provides are better than the Command Console, since BAP can counter an ECM in range."

Pretty much this ^^^ . There are better uses for the tonnage, like BAP and more ammo. Most people only add the Command Console to fill out a mech that has more tonnage than slots available. It's useful but mainly a luxury item.

BAP+CC+sensor module is a pretty powerful combination.

[MechWarrior3671771]

"LRMs are useless in this circumstance", he wailed as he dived for cover

"BAP+CC+sensor module is a pretty powerful combination"

Oh I agree. If you have the tonnage avail for the CC. I always *try* to make room for all that when I build LRM boats, but too often its a choice between BAP or CC. I find BAP to be more bang for the buck.

And by sensor mod I assume you mean Adv Target Decay. I used to like Adv Sensor Range, but with BAP I can already detect out to 1000m and have never found ASR to be of much use after first contact with the enemy.

Edited by Fenrisulvyn, 22 March 2015 - 11:02 PM.

[Madcap72]

It's a catapult, I can have ALL the modules!

I use Advanced sensor range, target decay and (since mastered out) radar derp.

I like having the absurd targeting range because;

A, with the LRM5 range module, I can whang guys out to 1100

2, It allows me to spot targets that while out of my range, might be in range of someone else.

The spotting assists and all the scouting bonuses stack up over time to.



Then, there's other fun stuff. For fun my buddy built out a matching Catapult, so we double team maps and by staying about 3-400 M away from each other we have mutual cover, and can fire and maneuver. By using focus fire, we can share locks, and maintain them with the target decay pretty well.

[Kyynele]

Madcap72, on 22 March 2015 - 10:14 PM, said:

I kill people with LRMs from catapults in the HPG basement all the time. You know you can use them in there, right?

As to your crimson straight argument, it's valid, and also goes to show that it's a team game, and sometimes you can't do all the heavy lifting for the team with LRMS.

But, more to the point, look how far you have to move the goalposts to support your argument, and one is invalid. ONE spot, on ONE map, feel free to bask in the glory of your "gotcha" moment.

Yeah, I have played the LRM5 A1 a couple times:



And if the basement is properly camped, and the enemy team isn't 95% scrubs, you can't properly push in there with a LRM 'pult even though you can shoot missiles there. You can't keep proper range and will die.

Not feeling a "gotcha" moment. :/

Edited by Kyynele, 23 March 2015 - 02:12 AM.

[cryonic]

The Catapult is a solid choice for a newish player. The advice some of the other guys are giving about LRMS not being great in competitive play is true - BUT applies only to above average ELO tiers - which you wont be seeing for a while. LRMS are still very useful weapons in low-Mid ELO games and PUG games.

The biggest downside about LRMS is they are vulnerable to ECM. You can help this a bit by equipping a Beage Active probe - which will reducle your locking times and also cancel One enemy ECM if it is closer than 300m. Also equipping a TAG system - at the cost of one of your energy slots can negate enemy ECM and aid locking and grouping.

As a long time C1 player - i find that the best ranges are about 400-600m slightly behind your main team - supporting them with lrm fire - which can put off the enemy. being able to reposition helps - so the larger XL engines mean you can move quicly enough to get the best firing positions and are not vulnerable to being cut off. Dont fall too far behind - or enemy lights and fast mediums can make mincemeat of you.

try and watch your lrm contrails and spot if AMS is in use. if its not in use - then sometimes its worth switching to chain fire against larger targets - as the more frequent screen shake is as valuable as the damage if they are engaging friendly mechs. Its not always the damage thats important - its the effect it has on the enemy player and his fire against friendlies.

Another thing you can do - is you can sling lrms higher over buildings etc by getting a lock - then angling your aiming point higher up before firing. then after firing - quickly recenterign the aiming reticle on target before the lock is lost. This allows you to fire over some terraint hat would otherwise block your shots. The same can be doen quing jump jets - to jump and fire.

If you get into trouble do not panic - use your medium lasers and ask for help.

My C1 is my best win/lose kill/death ratio of all my mechs. _ I play mainly Low-Mid ELO pugs.

[YCSLiesmith]

Fenrisulvyn, on 22 March 2015 - 10:44 PM, said:

Ignore the LRM whiners. These are the same people who whine when they get rained to death.

Yes, LRMs are less efficient because they spread damage. But you are doing more damage than the laserboat who can't shoot over the hill.

lmao see this is why I an not letting up in this thread. this is a tragically false statement. no one ever kills me with LRMs. the idea is preposterous, like someone saying 'dont listen to the anti-flamer crowd, they're just [insulted] about getting roasted to death'

I've already posted at length on LRMs being bad elsewhere but i just realized that I never really broke it down for you guys in this thread. apparently that's called for. Therefore I'm going to repost a breakdown I made earlier. the guy i was responding to had just said that LRMs made for great support weapons, and that they blasted straight through AMS so they were the OP weapon of the day. my response:

no. LRMs are not useful as support mechs.

here's the thing: you can beat a single ams with LRMs, sure. a single ams is not a useful countermeasure. you know what is a useful countermeasure? knowing how to play. that's all it takes to make LRMs useless. on maps with cover (all maps) against groups with ECM (most organized groups), against multiple AMS mechs (not common, admittedly) or against players who know how you play, your LRM boat is going to get chewed up and deal negligible damage.

LRM mechs cap out at about 600 damage. that's if all your shots are well placed and you're playing against morons and just firing until your ammo runs out. you can maybe up that if you drop all your armor or some nonsense but not by much. And you'll rarely see 600 damage because a guy with LRMs is advertising that he's a bad player who has wasted a lot of tonnage and who wants to get ganged up on and chewed up.

Now, 600 damage may feel like a lot. it isn't, but it's great for newbies! the first time you crack 500 damage you feel like you've finally gotten this game. It's a joy, I remember it well.

this feeling is an illusion.

LRMs spread damage over the entire enemy mech. 500 damage to a whole mech might not even kill it, where 100 damage to the rear side torso or a leg will. you're artificially inflating your damage with LRMs and you don't even know it. Also, as your ELO goes up, you'll see fewer and fewer people who are dumb enough to get hit with LRMs. so you start out bad because you're new, get good with your chosen weapon, then watch in horror as your (mediocre) numbers start to actually slide backwards. only where before your low numbers were just because you were a newbie learning the game, now you're straight bad at mechs.

But im different, you say. I'm an amazing mechwarrior, way better than YCS liesmith, and what he says does not apply to me. I will get 800 damage a match! I'm incredible! well, that's great, but now you need to compare to other weapons. where you were getting 800 damage to some king crab and barely killing it, a real support player got behind an atlas and dropped it with a couple gauss shots, then cored a light and legged a stormcrow. Efficient, targeted damage, allowing the player to cripple or destroy a mech and then move on. That's where real killing power lies.

Further, lets talk about the other side of support: damage taken. In a firing line, a group of players in decently resilient mechs line up and focus down enemies. the enemies are forced through some sort of gap so they are approaching one on one, and hopefully are disoriented and splitting their fire. by adding more bodies to the line, you give the enemy more targets, meaning less damage on any one player, and also carry more ordinance as a unit, so that the unit as a whole drills through their called targets faster. Where is the LRM boat in all this? he's standing in the back with no damage taken. he may feel proud of this. "they didn't even get close" he chortles. but his safety comes at the cost of his unit. if you've got 10 guys with semi-equal armor, but one is sitting in the back avoiding damage, that line gets killed 10% faster. that means less time to do damage, less overall damage by the unit, and ultimately lost games. The LRM guy is wasting his allies' potential damage by acting selfishly.

tl;dr: don't LRM.

Edited by Marvyn Dodgers, 25 March 2015 - 03:36 PM.
Language

[MechWarrior3671771]

"lmao see this is why I an not letting up in this thread."

lmao see this is why I didn't bother to read the rest of your little tantrum.

You gave good initial advice to the new player - and then you went on to the usual rant against LRMS.

This is the new player section, stop being a snot and let the new guy play what's most fun for him.
You want to rant about LRMs being lame, fine, go do it in General Discussion.

[YCSLiesmith]

this is the new player section, so the worst thing to do is to let players just do as they like. this is a difficult game with a lot of trap options (LRMs, Flamers, clan ballistics, half the mechs) and if you just say 'oh well let the new guy play as he feels' he's going to get ground into the dust and the only advice he will get is from battletech nerds and idiots.

why would I rant about LRMs in general discussion? this is the place new players are turning to when making weapon decisions. this is where they can be told that no, their LRM/machine gun dragon 1n is not a good build. Or that the Catapult is, with very few exceptions, a garbage mech.

[MechWarrior3671771]

"so the worst thing to do is to let players just do as they like"

<snort> listen to yourself.

Give them good advice, then let them do what they want. He'll have a blast playing them for many many months before he's dropping in the expert tiers where LRMs are non-meta.

You're pretending you are being a snot for his own good. I think its because "WARNNG INCOMING MISSILE!" still makes you wet your pants.

Edited by Fenrisulvyn, 23 March 2015 - 04:46 AM.

[YCSLiesmith]

Fenrisulvyn, on 23 March 2015 - 04:44 AM, said:

"so the worst thing to do is to let players just do as they like"

<snort> listen to yourself.

Give them good advice, then let them do what they want. He'll have a blast playing them for many many months before he's dropping in the expert tiers where LRMs are non-meta.

You're pretending you are being a snot for his own good. I think its because "WARNNG INCOMING MISSILE!" still makes you wet your pants.

you're super hostile and that's cool, im fine with that, but honestly no one in the world is scared of lrms dude.

[Rogue Jedi]

I know this comment is off topic, so I apologize

YCSLiesmith, on 23 March 2015 - 03:03 AM, said:

Now, 600 damage may feel like a lot. it isn't, but it's great for newbies! the first time you crack 500 damage you feel like you've finally gotten this game. It's a joy, I remember it well.

this feeling is an illusion.

while I do not disagree with much of what you are saying ^{(the idea that LRMs are totally useless is one area but lets disregard that for now, I have already made my points, it is now for the players to decide)}
Are you seriously suggesting that 600 damage for most Mechs is not good work?

it has been suggested several times that Mech weight multiplied by 5 is a good showing in any Mech, multiplied by 10 is an excellent match, so 600 for a Catapult is a very good match
600 in a Light Mech and you have done an exceptional job, 600 in a Medium or heavy and you have more than pulled your weight, 600 in an assault if you are good in assaults (unlike me) is still at worst an average showing, and there is no shame if you do not hit it every match.

In terms of damage, about 1 game in 5 I will break 500 damage, out of about 4 thousand games over 2.5 years I have had about 30 games in which have broken 700 damage and none past 950. With 1 exception in the over quirked TDR-9S they were all in the Timber Wolf, the first time it happened was in my first ever TBR match using what was supposed to be a joke build on the C (2 ERML, LBX5, ERLL, 2 SRM6).
My best ever game where I killed 5 Mech including 2 Dire wolves, a Highlander, an Atlas and a Centurion ^{(3 kill most damage, 2 Solo kills, 6 assist)} in a Firestarter A I got about 670 damage.

damage alone proves little but that you pulled your weight, kills show you fired the last shot to finish off a Mech, I have had a game where I have got a kill and died with 0 damage done, ^{I walked around a corner, fired a laser, a Mech died, then I died from focused fire}, you can even be instrumental to a win with 0 kills, less than 100 damage ^{(e.g. a well placed UAV can turn the tide in a match, or ECM cover can be vital if you spawn on Caustic with a team full of slow, long range builds while the enemy have a lot of LRM boats, or can cover your team allowing them to get into a better position unnoticed, even a light harasser who does a strafing run at the enemy backs "convincing" half the enemy team to turn around and shoot at it while the rest of your team walks around the corner and opens up there exposed backs, if the light dies with 10 damage done it could have won your team the match)}.

[YCSLiesmith]

Rogue Jedi, on 23 March 2015 - 05:25 AM, said:

I know this comment is off topic, so I apologize


while I do not disagree with much of what you are saying ^{(the idea that LRMs are totally useless is one area but lets disregard that for now, I have already made my points, it is now for the players to decide)}
Are you seriously suggesting that 600 damage for most Mechs is not good work?

Yes. Under normal circumstances, with targeted weapons, 600 damage is solid, slightly above-average play that you can feel good about if you're hitting consistently. You're not a top league player or anything with 600 damage but you will be in the top three or four for your pub team a lot of the time. Nothing to sneeze at by any stretch.

the problem here is that LRMs deal untargeted damage. what I mean by that is that if I do, say, 25 damage to your mech, you can be sure I'm hitting one or at most two components. that's 25 armor stripped off a single leg or a side torso or something. you're going to lose components fast if i can manage to click on the same ones a couple more times. With LRMs, though, that's maybe five damage to the center torso, ten to one of the sides and five to the arm on that side, and five to the head due to a lucky hit that will not be repeated.

the head damage is worthless to you, because you wont hit the head again and the damage threshold is already so low that two direct laser hits will break it so grinding it down doesn't bring you any benefit. the torso damage and arm damage may also be worthless to you, because that arm and torso may not have any weapons and you actually ended up hitting the guy's shield arm/deadside due to basic torso twisting. in particular, f he's a clanner he doesn't care AT ALL about that arm or side torso. so ultimately the only useful damage you did was a pretty measly hit on the center torso. you feel like a badass looking at the screen at the end, but in terms of actual gamechanging damage, your numbers are inflated 2.5x! holy CRAP that's rough. now you're doing 240 *real* damage, i.e. damage that matters. that's... that's not good damage. and that's actually with a pretty tight grouping: you could easily end up having each missile hit a different component, barely scratching the dude's paint.

even if you count all the 25 damage from that salvo, though, and don't discount any hits, that's still not great. say I have 50 armor and 25 health on a component. 25 damage to that component puts me only two direct hits away from death or crippling injury. 5 or 10 damage doesn't actually change things at all: that guy is still three direct laser hits from death in that component. you get an assist but the wubverine or stalker or dragon 1-n who killed him does all the actual work.

as for 'stripping off all the armor from a crab' as someone mentioned before, that's a really herculean task that doesn't actually make good use of your efforts. why strip off ALL the armor when you can just strip off one component? With LRMs you have no choice: if you end up doing real damage to a single component that's the luck of the draw. with targeted, direct fire weapons you can choose to hit weak spots.

speaking of weak spots. say I'm in a crab and I hear the LRM warning. what do I do? I turn towards the LRMs and I roll, spreading all the damage to my front armor. Hooray! you shout. Direct hit on that crab! but actually I don't care AT ALL, because a single hit on the front center torso s nothing. grind away at me for a full minute and I'll die, but you did nothing else and were effectively out of the game for that time. meanwhile some jerk in a locust that I could core in one salvo has got behind the other king crab on our team and killed him within ten seconds, and is now hassling behind what remains of our brawlers. he may only do 400 damage but he contributed a lot more to the team.

Edited by YCSLiesmith, 23 March 2015 - 05:52 AM.

[YCSLiesmith]

this is totally aside from the fact that at even moderate ELO you're not getting 600 damage anymore because people are moving behind the big rocks/buildings/dead bugs that litter every map.

also just to be clear '25 damage' and '75 armor/hp' are just stand-ins for any real numbers, they are just there to illustrate how weapon spread means you're having a fraction of the impact that you think you're having.

[Orion Starion]

YCS, please stop your attack on this thread. I play mid to high tier PUG and I consistently score higher with my LRM boats than my brawlers. And when we move into a firing line, I'm on the line, not in the back.
LRMs work fine but like all weapons have their upsides and downsides.
Liesmith is not the final authority on weapon systems or play styles.

tl;dr: LRM if you want to

[MechWarrior3671771]

"you're not getting 600 damage anymore because people are moving behind the big rocks/buildings/dead bugs that litter every map."

Why are they moving behind big rocks/buildings? To avoid the LRMs you claim are useless?


"honestly no one in the world is scared of lrms dude."

Then why is everyone hiding behind big rocks and buildings?

[YCSLiesmith]

not sure what you mean by 'attack' since i'm being pretty thoughtful and careful not to, say, call anyone terrible even if they love bad mechs and weapons. I get that this is a space for new players to learn so im being real nice about it.

also I'm not sure how you can say you play mig to high tier pug, since there really aren't any clear indicators of what your ELO is or how it is calculated. the only clear indicator i've seen of getting better is the complete disappearance of LRMs. Maybe you overestimate your ranking.

[YCSLiesmith]

Fenrisulvyn, on 23 March 2015 - 06:06 AM, said:

"you're not getting 600 damage anymore because people are moving behind the big rocks/buildings/dead bugs that litter every map."

Why are they moving behind big rocks/buildings? To avoid the LRMs you claim are useless?


"honestly no one in the world is scared of lrms dude."

Then why is everyone hiding behind big rocks and buildings?

ok, you got me, if you stand motionless in the middle of the ocean or at the bottom of a valley and wait to get shot LRMs will end up killing you. I don't know how I could have missed this! this entirely invalidates my point that LRMs are easy to mitigate, making them worthless against competent players who are using cover effectively because that's a core element of this game.

maybe this is a mean post, it feels a little mean, but honestly I don't understand how you could misunderstand so fundamentally. LRMs are worthless because a competent player can dodge them. saying 'well why are they dodging if LRMs are worthless??? Riddle me that Liesmith!" is kind of nonsensical.