21 replies to this topic

[Pat Kell]

I am not in favor of calling targets unless it is absolutely critical. Far too often we have too many people yammering over comms, causing a lot of confusion and generally preventing truly dire sitautions from being communicated and dealt with. To me it's simple, see a target, shoot it. If there are 3 mechs standing in front of you, don't wait for someone to call a target, shoot any one of them and while doing that, the hope is that your buddies will shoot some too. During your weapon recharge, you should be assessing damage on your current target, watching to see which of the 3 your buddies shot and making a quick decision on whether or not to focus a different guy. Your goal should almost always be to kill the one that looks like it can be killed the fastest. Take his firepower out of the match and then move to the next. I would always advise firing first and then asking questions later because in the 2-3 seconds it takes to call a target, find the target, aim and shoot the target, you have already been shot. Shoot first, switch targets if needed and this should all be done internally with as little comm chatter as possible. People screaming over comms for help or there's a light behind me or that guy just messed me up just tends to incite panic in your unit and should not be done.

My drop calling is about as basic as it can be. Go to right gate, get it open fast and move in as a unit. I rarely call targets unless it's a close match or I feel the need. The problem that tends to lead to is that other people seem to have a problem with silence and end up filling it with information that confuses and panics people during tense situations. Comm discipline is important.

Probably the best advice I can give you is keep it simple. For as long as you can muster it, use the aggressive death ball and you will win more often than not with it. I can only remember a handful of matches in the thousands of matches I have played that we tried and were successful at a split push because it is inherently risky. Some people do it well but the moment an organized team recognizes that you have split up, they will immediately push one side or the other. The key to a split push is not letting an enemy know you are doing it until it's too late....which is harder than you might think.

Also, you should almost always push out with surviving mechs of each wave. The only time you shouldn't push out with every single surviving mech is when you have generators and omega to protect and honestly, you should be doing it almost all of the time when this is the case as well. You also try to have one guy that has their sole purpose of being to survive and stall them for as long as possible. Buying 5-10 seconds by torso twisting, running past them and forcing them to turn around etc etc, gives the rest of your team time to form up and meet the now wounded mechs at the gate instead of at omega.

Edited by Pat Kell, 31 August 2016 - 09:28 PM.

[Carl Vickers]

What Pat said, words to live by for any and all DC's. I follow the same formula myself when DC'ing.

Keep it simple and with a bit of time and experience the wins will flow, even when you pug DC.