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[Bdawg87906]

Hello I'm a relatively new player who is liking this game but needs some assistance in learning and also is interested in Faction Warfare and also wanting to find people who are active and able to have fun pm me with any advice / tips / recruitment tyvm

[Xiphias]

I'd recommend asking for advice in the new player section of the forum as this really isn't the place for it.

That said, a quick look at your stats tells me that you aren't ready for FW quite yet. Learn the game in QP first since it is far more forgiving and actually has a matchmaker. You won't have a good chance to work on fundamental mechanics in FW due to the nature of how it plays out.

There are two things to consider before starting faction play, your personal piloting skills/ability and your in game mechs and skills.

Own in game:
At least one complete and optimized dropdeck. All mechs should be fully kitted (doubleheatsinks, endosteel, meta loadouts). And should be fully skilled in the skill tree. It's beneficial to have consumables on your mechs too, though this can be expensive for a new player. If you can't afford a fully skilled dropdeck of mechs you own you aren't ready for FW. Ideally, you should have two dropdecks, one for hot maps and one for cold maps. Further mechs can be swapped in and out but the general decks are hot/cold and brawl/mid/long range. As a new player you probably want to start with a mid-longish range deck (ERML, LPL, LL, type weapon ranges). These depend less on your team and are usually the most versatile

You should have a good grasp of the following skills before jumping into FW:

Positioning (Probably the most important skill in MWO)
Where you are is essential to doing well in MWO and this is true in FW. Things like being aware of how visible your mech is to other players (are you in cover or not) and how to use the terrain to hide yourself from as many enemies as possible while still being able to shoot back and damage the enemy team. In general you want to maximize the time that you have to shoot at the enemy team while minimizing the time they can shoot at you. Know how you plan to get to a location, how you will move out of that location, and how to move back to your team if necessary. Watch the map and pay attention to where both your team and the enemy team are. If your team is starting to drift away you will have to adjust.

In FW once you die, don't immediately run back in. Usually, the first wave will die off and if you are there with your second mech you will die to the enemy team pushing out, leaving you down two mechs. Group up with the team's newly drop mechs before reinforcing.

Aim/General mech knowledge
Decent aim is important and you should be able to identify and focus open components on enemy mechs. Being able to recognize different mechs on sight and having an idea of what loadout they are probably running is quite useful. Even better is knowing where on a mech the majority of the weapons are loaded. Some mechs for example are left/right stacked (all/most weapons are on one side) these mechs will shield with their weaponless side (centurions left arm/torso). Destroying this side gains little to no benefit and is a waste of firepower. Other mechs such as the Jager mech often run XL engine which will cause them to die from a single side torso destruction. On mechs like this it's faster to kill the side torso first rather than the center torso. An experienced player can usually tell from the combination of mech chassis, weapons, and speed whether or not a mech is likely to run an XL engine.

For FW you don't have to be an expert, but you should have at least a rough idea of what the mechs are and what they might be running. For example as an IS light it is good to avoid Maddogs and Stormcrows until you can verify whether or not they are carrying streak SRMS.


Heat Management
Know how to manage your heat on every mech you have in your FW dropdeck and have practiced with them on both hot and cold maps (Frozen/Therma). Overheating is bad and it's best to just avoid it as a newer player. Once you get a bit more experience and can manage heat well you can start adding things like override or using a tactical shutdown (pretty rare).

Hopefully, some of this is helpful to you and that you'll be able to find a group since that is the fastest way to get brought up to speed. Good luck and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer as I have time.

I'm going to put an obligatory DON'T BRING LRMS here though I'm not going to go into the reasons for why I think that using them is a bad idea.

As a final recommendation, when you are listening to people's advice it's a good idea to look up their pilot name on the leaderboards to determine whose advice to listen to. Players with poor stats can have good advice, but players with better stats will usually have better advice. There's a lot of bad advice given out on these forums and if two things are in conflict you're probably better off going with the player with higher stats.

Finally, here are some useful references:

Outreach HPG on Reddit
Overall, advice here tends to be better, it's also where more of the competitive pilots hang out. Less tolerance for bad ideas than on the official forums though.

Meta Mechs
Good reference for mech/skilltree builds and the general ideas behind mech builds. Currently a bit out of date but still a fair amount of useful information. Make sure to try and understand the reasoning behind the builds rather than just copy pasting them and running them. It's okay to modify these builds based on your piloting ability, e.g. if you struggle with heat management drop a ERML and pick up an extra heatsink, or if you get rear cored a lot increase the rear armor a little bit (not a lot though).

Smurphy Mechlab
Amazing tool for building mechs that I can't recommend highly enough. It can save you a lot of c-bills when theory crafting mechs.