Posted 05 January 2016 - 05:49 AM
I haven't dipped into the King Crabs yet, but I've recently finished up my Maulers, and I really enjoyed using them. I didn't run meta builds, but in spite of their slow speed, they don't feel as painful to use as, say, an Atlas or Highlander. Like the Awesomes, I just had a great time running them... well, all but one.
My Mauler 1R and Daboku didn't really need altogether much to get them working nicely. I just stripped out one of the AC2s on each in order to either add ammo, armor, heatsinks, or a combination thereof. That made them great machines nearly straight out of the box. The 2P treated me nicely, as I used my underutilized dual LBX-10s instead of smaller ACs, a sextuplet of small lasers, and a brace of SRM6es... It made a surprisingly effective brawler. My 1P didn't treat me as nicely. The 4XPPC, 4XMG, 2XSRM6 wasn't easy to get a hang of, but save for copy-pasting some other guy's meta build, that was the best use I could come up with for the presented quirks. When it was successful, it cleaned house. When I got flanked, I was chewed to scrapola.
But from my perspective, I chose mechs based on what I know my faction makes/uses in the lore, not because I'm chasing the meta.