19 replies to this topic

[Hexsyn]

Hey all, first post, and sorry if this has been handled sometime before--preliminary search didn't show any solid answers. ANYWAYS...onto the question:

Can anybody explain the niche uses (if any) of some of the seemingly under-utilized weapons? I was particularly curious about the flamer, AC/2, LB #-X ACs, machine gun, and also the utility weapons (TAG, NARC, Beagle Active Probe).

I've been playing for about a week now, and the game has got its hooks into me pretty deep already; as such, I've been trying to catch up on all of the random game details that I can. In my search so far, I haven't been able to find good answers to why the above-mentioned weapons seem less popular, and I don't know if it is because they are mechanically under-powered, not useful in the current meta, or what. Hopefully the fine folks on this thread can throw me a bone on these guys!

[Raubwurst]

Hey, Greetings and Welcome Hexsyn.
I will try to give you some information about them:
First - Flamer - Nope this weapon has almost no use at the moment. If is extreme short ranged and will add up heat at your enemy, but it will also add more heat to your own 'Mech, which makes it... not so useful.
Although I have seen enemies holding the flamer right on my cockpit to block my view, which has worked surprisingly good.

AC/2. They do, as the name suggests, 2 Damage per Round (for IS, 2 Damage per Volley for Clans). They have a quite short cooldown, which allows them to be used as a kind of fast firing, MG-like, weapon. It's advantage is, that it deals low damage, but shakes the enemies cockpit, thus it is harder for them to hit.
Multiple AC/2 can be used to shaken the enemy, while allowing you, or other players, to inflict major damage, without much counter fire.

LB ACs. They are often described as "Shotguns". They are similar to their "normal" AC counterparts and the LB 10 does 10 damage per shot (if all pellets hit the enemy). Each pellet does one damage, thus you have 10 pellets to shoot.
They have the advantage, that they don't build up heat, and that they have a chance to crit your enemy.
Critting means, that, if you shoot at an enemies component, which has no armor left, each pellet has a chance of inflicting additional damage, thus this weapon is especially good agains armorless components.

Machine Guns: Same as ACs - no heat - crit chance - but very shortranged

TAG is only useful in combination with LRMs (either your own 'Mech has LRMs, or your teammates have them). Thus it is mostly used in the group queue, where you can be sure, that your friends brings LRMs. There is nothing more annoying than bringing TAG and NARC and have no one with LRMs on your side

NARC shoots a becon on your enemy, which will provide information for 60 seconds. With these Informations you can lock on him, without line of side, giving you the possiblity to shoot your LRMs at him, even if he runs away.

Active Probe: This will let you counter ECM in (I think it was) 180m. For SSRMs and LRMs this is very important, because otherwise you cannot log-on enemies, if you are within range of an enemy ECM-Mech, which will totaly block any lock-on mechanic.

These utiliy weapons are good for teamplay reasons, but won't give you damage or much CBill gain, which is the main reason, why you won't see them that often (same as AMS).

Whether they are underpowered or just harder to use... I'm not sure. I'd say it depends on where you play. Sologames and Groupgames can be totaly different and some weapons will work good on the one queue and bad on the other one.

[jss78]

As far as MG's, flamers, AC/2's, LB-10X, the answer is the same for all of them: PPFLD.

Stands for "pin-point front-loaded damage", meaning damage you can apply to a single target location (pin-point) in a short period of time (front-loaded).

PPFLD is a perennial component of the MWO meta, as it equals ability to knock out components off enemy mechs with minimal exposure. Peek, unleash a high-damage alpha strike, blow out a critical component to cripple the enemy, get back in cover.

AC/2's and especially flamers suffer of not being FL. LB-10X's are FL but not PP due to the shotgun effect. MG's are neither PP (due to the cone of fire effect) nor FL.

I'm not sure BAP and TAG are thatunder-represented, I see TAG used by smart missile boat pilots a lot. NARC you don't see so often, for sure.

[Leone]

Flamers. So, flamers are a support weapon. They do not deal much damage. Instead they cause heat to your opponent. (And blind em.) The above video is me playtesting a light tanking concept using flamers to increase my effectiveness at annoying folk. (Also, mad props to SnagaDance for that run as well.)

AC/2 works as a great suppression weapon. Hard to tell whether those acs are 2's or 5's. Also, realy long range, great for harassment. You wont be killing or winning any leaderboards, but you can use them to try to sculpt the battlefield.

Lbx's Awesome frontloaded acs for Clan mechs. I take em almost as often as I take Uacs nowadays. For clanners at least.

Machinegun. Heat neutral damage over time. The brawlers best friend. The twelve ER small nova loves to carry four machineguns to suppliment and provide a heat neutral alternative to overheating. It helps wreck face, it just doesn't do all the work.

Tag. Provides a cbill bonus to your lrm mechs, provided you keep the tag on target. Also allows faster locks, cuts through ecm (slowly) and allows for better missile tracking.

Narc. Huzzah Narc! locks down ecm mechs for the duration, and keeps a target targetted for you so you don't hafta maintain that lock. A missile mechs best friend.

Active Probes. Useful for extending sensor range for snipers, and for shutting down ECM for brawlers. Also handily speeds up paper doll target info gathering for better damage focus.

~Leone

Edited by Leone, 22 December 2015 - 12:15 PM.

[jss78]

Leone, on 22 December 2015 - 11:56 AM, said:

Flamers. So, flamers are a support weapon. They do not deal much damage. Instead they cause heat to your opponent. (And blind em.) The above video is me playtesting a light tanking concept using flamers to increase my effectiveness at annoying folk. (Also, mad props to SnagaDance for that run as well.)

AC/2 works as a great suppression weapon. Hard to tell whether those acs are 2's or 5's. Also, realy long range, great for harrassment. You wont be killing or winning any leaderboards, but you can use them to try to sculpt the battefield.

I agree AC/2's can be pretty nice. They received a decent buff in the rebalance too. I like my Quad-AC/2 Jager-S these days. But it is kind of tricky to play, as you need to maintain range or otherwise make yourself a secondary target. You won't be winning many duels due to the time and exposure you need to do damage.

I like to occasionally equip a single flamer in brawler builds. Maybe they'll create some confusion, but at least they send a message ("screw the meta!"). But running more than one flamer is a realm of crazy I haven't ventured into yet.

It's a great mystery to me how they (PGI) labouriously went through the whole rebalance process, and didn't do anything to increase the usefulness of MG's and flamers.

Edited by jss78, 22 December 2015 - 12:16 PM.

[AlmightyAeng]

With respect to Leone, here's the other side of those weapons:

Flamers/Machine Guns/LBX's : Hi! We're weapons that make noise, and sound, and if you're already shooting an incredibly damaged, armor stripped opponent, can have some effect! But, if you take us against a fresh mech, one on one, we won't do much, and you'll die. Take anything else and be more effective in combat, including heatsinks instead of these weapons. We're under-represented for a reason. The reason is we suck.

Tag/Narc/BAP: Great for organized gameplay involving LRM's on your mech, or your teammates. Solo? Bit of a crapshoot, but can still be situationally useful.

Edited by Ghost Badger, 22 December 2015 - 12:21 PM.

[Leone]

Ghost Badger, on 22 December 2015 - 12:21 PM, said:

With respect to Leone, here's the other side of those weapons:

Flamers/Machine Guns/LBX's : Hi! We're weapons that make noise, and sound,

And the sound! Lbxs are my favourites for that. Just the sound of the Lbx 10 reloading does my liver good.

~Leone.

[AlmightyAeng]

Leone, on 22 December 2015 - 12:26 PM, said:

And the sound! Lbxs are my favourites for that. Just the sound of the Lbx 10 reloading does my liver good.

~Leone.

Dude. The heavy "ka-chunk!" reload of the IS Inner sphere AC/10 keeps it on a mech or two of mine...even if competitively there are better choices

[Tarogato]

Hexsyn, on 22 December 2015 - 11:30 AM, said:

Hey all, first post, and sorry if this has been handled sometime before--preliminary search didn't show any solid answers. ANYWAYS...onto the question:

Can anybody explain the niche uses (if any) of some of the seemingly under-utilized weapons? I was particularly curious about the flamer, AC/2, LB #-X ACs, machine gun, and also the utility weapons (TAG, NARC, Beagle Active Probe).

I've been playing for about a week now, and the game has got its hooks into me pretty deep already; as such, I've been trying to catch up on all of the random game details that I can. In my search so far, I haven't been able to find good answers to why the above-mentioned weapons seem less popular, and I don't know if it is because they are mechanically under-powered, not useful in the current meta, or what. Hopefully the fine folks on this thread can throw me a bone on these guys!

No worries, the forum search function is very shoddy.

Flamers - these are literally useless. This is intentional because if flamers were viable, then more people would use them and right now the flamer animation is very resource-intensive. That is to say, you could kinda troll peoples' framerates with it. So PGI made it as terrible and useless as possible until they have the people available to do a rework on the animation. This is happening Soon™. Maybe in the next 3-4 months.

Machine guns - these are kinda in the same place as the flamer, but not quite as bad. There was a time when machine guns were quite good, and then PGI said "hey, we found an issue that was preventing MGs from dealing full damage! Now that we fixed it, we'll have to reduce the dps on MGs to balance things out." and ever since then MGs have been just about worthless.

AC/2 - these are bad for a couple reasons. One, they're kinda hot, even though they've been drastically improved recently. Two, they are low DPS. Some mechs that have 25% rate of fire quirks like a couple of the Blackjacks can do well with these weapons, but mechs without such quirks can't really do anything with them. Three, they require facetime and a steady aim. That is to say, you have to stare at your enemy for an extended period of time to deal significant damage, where as most mechs in the game have the capability of firing off a single alpha in 1.5 seconds and then return to cover and torso twist away so that you can't consistently hit the parts of them you're trying to hit. Four, they used to be really good and people complained about them, so they were nerfed. PGI is still worried that if the AC/2 is buffed again, it will cause problems once more.

LB-X - honestly there's not too much wrong with these. They have a significant downside, however: they are not pinpoint. So firing even at optimum range, almost every pellet will hit a different component on a mech. For that reason, it's good to use LB-X at super close range so that you can ensure that all the damage goes to the same component on a mech, before the pellets spread out. This makes the the LB-10-X inferior to the AC/10 on the Inner Sphere side, and on the Clan side the better alternative is the UAC/10, which can double-tap for double damage. Generally, LB are not worth it, and even with mechs that are specifically quirked for it they aren't great weapons. But they are sure a lot of fun.

TAG - it's a laser pointer that leads the enemy towards your location, so if you're a spotter or an LRM boat, that's bad news. They can improve lock times on streakboats, but not all streakboats have the hardpoints to equip one, so they generally use AP instead, which is just simpler.

Narc - the problem with Narc is that it costs a significant amount of tonnage and it doesn't deal damage to the enemy. It's a great support weapons and I love when teammates have it and use it well, but I would never equip one myself because I'd rather be selfish and deal damage myself. That's how a lot of people feel. Also, Narc is not an acronym and doesn't need to be all-caps.

AP (BAP and cAP) - it doesn't really do much. It can cancel ECM, but so can well-placed alpha, if you know what I'm sayin'. The sensor range boost is ... meh situational, but that's probably my favourite part about it. It's really only good for streakboats to be able to cut through ECM and it doesn't much more than that.

[GotShotALot]

One important concept I am trying to keep in mind for weapons builds is 'face time'. Similar to the FL part of PPFLD, it means 'how much time does this weapon require you to be staring your enemy in the face, and thus a perfect target for return fire'.

A large AC or laser weapon, with a noticeable reload means you can face your target, unload 8 or 10 or 20 damage, then turn away OR move back into cover - either spreading return fire damage across your components as you turn or possibly avoiding it altogether if you get back into cover quickly enough.

Weapons like flamer, MG, AC/2 have high 'face time' for the low damage they deliver - meaning the other guy gets to dump his big PPFLD on you, then HE rolls/spreads/avoids your return fire.

Making for a situational weapon, at best.

[Luscious Dan]

Too much face time gets you killed, it's very true.

A lot of gear exists in MWO because it exists in the tabletop, the mythical land where infantry, tanks, fighters etc. exist and few IS mechs have access to advanced tech (endo steel, XL engines, CASE, gauss rifles, double heat sinks, etc.). So they are there because they exist in the lore, and not because they are especially useful at killing enemy mechs.

[Rogue Jedi]

all those weapons are situational, but as for the Machine Gun, that is an excellent weapon,

Put 4 MGs on an FS9-E or a SDR-5K with energy weapons and you have something moving at 120+ that uses the laser(s) to punch through the enemies rear armor (most people foolishly mount 10 or less armor on their back) then the Machine guns can quickly obliterate your internal structure, many times using those I have downed a fresh assault who was focused on something else inside 5 seconds, that is completely undamaged, then 5-10 seconds later ^{(depending on how lucky you get with the critical hits)} dead, on Mechs like the Stalker, Warhawk, Atlas, Timber Wolf, Dire Wolf ^{(essentially anything which is standing still, and preferably also concentrating on something else)}

[DrRedCoat]

As said before, the TAG and Narc are both good for group play if you're playing with friends mounting LRMs. For the longest time, I played only as a Raven spotter. I've had games with lots of TAG spot bonuses that have been immensely helpful for my team (the psycological and physical damage of the LRMs can help you control the other team). If you can also deal some damage of your own, you will start seeing payouts of over 300,000 c bills.

[Hexsyn]

DrRedCoat, on 22 December 2015 - 02:38 PM, said:

As said before, the TAG and Narc are both good for group play if you're playing with friends mounting LRMs. For the longest time, I played only as a Raven spotter. I've had games with lots of TAG spot bonuses that have been immensely helpful for my team (the psycological and physical damage of the LRMs can help you control the other team). If you can also deal some damage of your own, you will start seeing payouts of over 300,000 c bills.

Actually that was another question I was going to ask--how viable is a light spotter armed with both TAG and NARC in group play? And what actual weapons would you put on such a mech? Conceptually (haven't checked tonnage limits) I was thinking of a raven 3L with a NARC, a TAG, and some sort of energy weapon, maybe LL or ML, plus a few SRMs or LRMs depending on how the gameplay feels. Is something like this actually a thing?

[Koniving]

Use of flamers.

NOTE: The shutdowns are from ghost heat punishments on SRMs -- which I didn't know at the time had suddenly changed to include my number of SRM-4s.

[Leone]

Honestly, I would run narc or tag, not both. In fact, of my Jenner IIC mechs I've just gotten, one has four flamers an Narc and another has five flamers an tag. These are, of course, support only mechs, meant to follow a brawler and draw lrm assistance along with me.

Oddly enough, while I don't score high, I've had a disproportionate amount of wins doing so. It's kinda eerie.

~Leone.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

Hexsyn, on 22 December 2015 - 02:57 PM, said:

Actually that was another question I was going to ask--how viable is a light spotter armed with both TAG and NARC in group play? And what actual weapons would you put on such a mech? Conceptually (haven't checked tonnage limits) I was thinking of a raven 3L with a NARC, a TAG, and some sort of energy weapon, maybe LL or ML, plus a few SRMs or LRMs depending on how the gameplay feels. Is something like this actually a thing?

Spotting with the RVN-3L is a good deal. It'll get you some decent bonus cash and XP.

I agree with above, that you should NOT attempt to combine TAG and NARC on that one mech. It's 35 tons, and the combination weighs 4 tons already, WITHOUT any NARC ammo. So, 4.5 tons MINIMUM, out of 35. You've still got armor, engine, and weapons, not to mention the can't-live-without-it internal structure. It's a lot to give up one or the other on the Raven, but BOTH is just foolish.

If you can swing it, I'd take NARC and forget the TAG. I say that only for the RVN-3L, because it has some RIDICULOUS quirks for the NARC missile beacon. I might humbly suggest something like THIS. Or THIS. (Never mind the armor distribution front-to-rear, just the values overall matter.) Or, if you're more comfortable getting in close to your opponents once you've NARCed (see what I did there?) on them, maybe something like THIS.

TL;DR- Pick one of the two systems and go with it, but having BOTH is needlessly redundant and most light mechs just CAN'T spare all those tons.

[Johny Rocket]

Some points that were missed or where I disagree completely.
Tag and narc both give a bonus to the carrier even if the don't do the damage. They earn money. They should not be carried by the Lrm mech though. He should never be in the front line he should be right behind the center of the line where he can support both flanks with just a turn. In pug if you have the ton to spare on an lrm build bring your own tag, because its often every many for himself. Narcs big draw back is it uses a missile point and weighs 3 ton and requires at least 1 ton of ammo. Not great for doing 0 damage on its own.
Tag can/will give your location away. Its a red beam they can follow back to its source.

AC2/5, LBX, flamer, lrm5s these are usually used with what is considered a dirty play style but is my preferred style and I use all of these weapons. Enemys that have their nerve shaken, that are blind, or are experience severe screen shake can not fight back. No its not nice or fair, but, this is for the cbills and I didn't come to fight fair, I came to murder mechs for money.

Cannon fire scares the hell out of people on a gut level that is hard to master. As was said you can't tell the difference between a pair of AC2 or Quad AC5 the rate of fire feels about the same. The pair of AC2 are not damage you should ignore and Quad AC5 will eat you in seconds.
AC2 have great range and you should use them at the longest range you can. Get outside of short and medium range weapons optimal range and the face time is much better to manage. On really long range maps Like Alpine or Tourmaline I will waste 4-5 AC2 rounds on targets as far away as 2km. No damage but Im going for the psych affect, letting them know the are coming into range of someone who can hit them with a cannon at 2km. Real ballistic mechanics apply here, luckily no windage, they add wind it would get tricky. The AC2 has the longest optimal range of all the ACs and smallest projectile so has the least drop out to those ranges.
Reload time is really the issue here, mechs used to have size specific quirks like ballistic cooldown +10% and AC2/5/10/20 cooldown +20% but these in most cases have been folded into a generic ballistic cooldown +30%. This hurt the AC2 alot, because though the range is less a pair of AC5 with the same quirks out damages a pair of AC2.
The AC2 are 2 tons lighter than the AC5 and are single slot so some mechs can boat 6 of them fairly well.
AC2 are hot AC5 you can go wide open with a pair while you are cooling down, one of the lowest heat weapons in the game.

Flamin flamers. If a light can keep a flamer in your face you quickly become disoriented and can't tell exactly where he is anymore, if he has friends you're dead in seconds. I single flamer will cause very little heat to you, though it might keep your heat from going down so your other weapons will run you into overheat if you keep the flamer on.
They do have a psych affect, its fire, lots of fire, gut instinct fear once again.

MG, a single mg is nearly worthless but 3 or more are pretty effective at critting components once the armor is already gone and they have very low heat. Good on Lights because they weigh .5 ton and 1 ton of ammo goes a long ways. On my Spider 5K I run 1 LPL and 4 MG, Get behind them and hit a side torso with the LPL and then open up with the MGs, if I can stay on that side, if the torso hasn't gone already the 2nd LPL shot usually does it. Only a couple of jump jets, I like to hop up on something and use seismic to know when to jump down behind them.

LBX great long range suppression weapon. Perfect example, we dropped on Alpine and the enemy got Gamma as their base. They got the top of the slope so instead of charging up the face we took the road around the back, I ran out wide in my OXP and used the LBX and a pair of erll at nearly max range to keep them back from the edge of the slope where they were shooting down on my team. I rolled along the ridge tops as my team turned the corner to where you can climb up the back. They all dropped off around the next corner to cut us off from their base so joined up with my team and got up on the slope so I could shoot over my teammates and keep their snipers pinned down. My damage was low but I kept my team healthy until we got in brawling range and basically screwed a LL 4N's whole game.

LBX cause lots of fire when they hit, gut instinct again. Up close the shotgun effect works pretty well on lights and paired with some lasers is pretty nasty, specially on low back armor. Once the lasers punch a hole in the armor the LBX is great for critting stuff.

BAP gets no bonus but extends sensor range which can net scouting bonuses before your teammates can even target them. If you can get all 12 scouting bonuses it adds up to 24,000cb. It counters ecm at double ecm's effective range. It can only counter 1 at a time though.

Command Console (ccon) can only be equipped by Heavies and Assaults but also increase sensor range, additionally they increase zoom range but don't counter ecm.

Try them for yourself in pugs, play around and see if they are worth it to you, often players will tell you a weapon is bad because its not what top tier comp players use(the meta) or they personally don't like it or are clueless how to use it properly. So advice, yeah...

Edited by Tractor Joe, 22 December 2015 - 05:10 PM.

[Hexsyn]

Tractor Joe, on 22 December 2015 - 05:08 PM, said:

Try them for yourself in pugs, play around and see if they are worth it to you, often players will tell you a weapon is bad because its not what top tier comp players use(the meta) or they personally don't like it or are clueless how to use it properly. So advice, yeah...

Thanks for the thorough feedback, Joe, I appreciate the knowledge injection. I am usually the kind of person to do exactly what you suggested--try everything even if people say not to--I just was wary of dropping too much of my currently limited CB pool on things that might turn out to be objectively worthless, as has occurred in other games.

[Johny Rocket]

Hexsyn, on 22 December 2015 - 05:40 PM, said:

Thanks for the thorough feedback, Joe, I appreciate the knowledge injection. I am usually the kind of person to do exactly what you suggested--try everything even if people say not to--I just was wary of dropping too much of my currently limited CB pool on things that might turn out to be objectively worthless, as has occurred in other games.

NP, I hate the meta because poking, trading armor like playing chess, is the single most boring thing in this game. Always willing to help someone who wants to buck the meta.

Fortunately these weapons are cheap and come equipped on a lot of stock builds. Once you get the hang of this play style it is very profitable. I currently have 56 mechs and have sold around 40 to try something new with out spending real money on more mechbays, most of my bays I won or came with the couple of packs I bought. Only 20 mechs from packs though, play the events, they are worth it.

Check this thread for info on Scout mechs specifically the Ewar Ravens.
http://mwomercs.com/...60#entry4900960

Edited by Tractor Joe, 22 December 2015 - 06:39 PM.