Fenrisulvyn, on 22 March 2015 - 10:44 PM, said:
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.
Just going to throw this out there, if you're shooting LRMs at something you don't have LoS on, SOMEONE does. You know, like a laserboat who relies on direct LoS. So, the claim that you're doing more damage than the guy spotting for you when you wouldn't be doing any at all without him? Ehhhh, dubious.
YCSLiesmith, on 23 March 2015 - 03:03 AM, said:
no one ever kills me with LRMs.
This. The rare instances when I die to LRMs, it's because I did something wrong like charge thinking that my team is going to charge with me.
YCSLiesmith, on 23 March 2015 - 03:03 AM, said:
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.
Not sure where you are getting this number; you can hypothetically achieve up to one damage per missile in a perfect play environment. I've seen LRMers do 1200 damage on some rare occasions. Or 0. They're very situational weapons.
YCSLiesmith, on 23 March 2015 - 03:03 AM, said:
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.
Some truth to all this, though I feel that LRMs are useful in the capacity of suppression weapon, since getting hit with them forces players to decide whether they want their armor sandblasted or to move.
YCSLiesmith, on 23 March 2015 - 04:36 AM, said:
I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad how bad those are.
Rogue Jedi, on 23 March 2015 - 05:25 AM, said:
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).
All true, though as you said, a bit off topic. Also, on damage as a metric for value, I feel that while it can and must be one, it also must not be the only one. In fact, the best indicator of how much you helped the team in my opinion is the kill most damage award, not that it shows these to the team at the end of a match. Sure, you can sandblast enemies and be likely to get it, but if you're sandblasting enough that you get most damage, you did your part imho.
One final word. I like LRMs. Not to shoot, but having them on my team. LRM rain on someone I'm shooting tends to prevent them from hitting me at all very well, and in a Locust extra misses are kind of a big deal.
Edited by Tim East, 23 March 2015 - 06:32 AM.
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