I bought a few new mechs with all the money it gave me but for most of my existing ones the loadouts remain unchanged. I had to figure out how to manage without radar derp (which I considered essential previously) or speed tweak (which I never really paid much attention to tbh) but that is mostly a matter of cover and positioning. 90% of my skill trees look very similar to each other, zoom if the mech needs it followed by mandatory operations, one point in consumables, then firepower and structure investment depending on the mech.
A few of my mechs like Maulers, my Summoner, my Nova (which already was unreliable) and one of my Riflemen were gimped into less than usefulness and were summarily stripped of equipment, painted noob green and put into long term storage.
Others like my Mad Dogs and Gargoyle got hit hard by the engine decoupling, making them a bit harder to use than before...
For all the complaints about IS mechs being ruined by the skill tree I swear I don't notice any difference. Sure the quirks got hit a bit but the skill tree usually makes up for it and in some cases even buffs the things. I always have and still do consider my IS mechs to be on par or better than their clan counterparts and the main reason I rarely use them is the lack of quality among the playerbase on the IS side in faction play....
My old Gargoyle loadout ended up being scrapped entirely (due to cooldown nerf) in favor of a new one made viable by the skill tree. It is the only mech I have that has no need for the operations tree and is thus able to almost max out both firepower and survival trees. Which is good, because I had to strip a bunch of armor off the thing to fit the heavy weapons... Only other changes were some mechs and loadouts getting switched around on the IS side between my close and long range drop decks depending on whether they had range quirks or not.
My Kitfox, Vipers and Marauder 2Cs got a nice survival boost as well. The things were way too fragile before. Yes I know the Marauders could take insane amounts of damage already but walking around at 15% with most of my firepower gone is not my idea of tankiness.
Edited by GRRRT, 07 June 2017 - 04:21 PM.