219 replies to this topic

[ROSS-128]

Assaults do have a lot of armor if you're spreading damage effectively. However, they also do have other advantages as well.

Ballistics are heavy, assaults and heavies tend to be good platforms for heavy ballistic builds for this reason. Lights and mediums tend to struggle to cram more than one ballistic weapon into their weight budget.

Assault mechs can also carry more total DHS because their large engines have bonus DHS slots. This effectively gives them more critical slots to work with, but also means their energy weapons can run cooler. This is more relevant to IS where 3-4 engine DHS slots can free up 9-12 criticals, but even on clans extra crits is extra crits. This means that even if a low hardpoint count makes it hard to crank up the alpha, an assault mech can at least fire more volleys before overheating.

For IS mechs the engine DHS are doubly relevant to ballistic builds, because IS ballistics are also bulky. Being able to run with zero external heat sinks makes room for those big cannons.

Both of these factors make assaults really good at pushing, because they can apply pressure and keep that pressure up with their large heat budget and/or low-heat weapons. A lot of Battletech weapon profiles basically give you a tradeoff between tonnage and heat, and assault mechs have plenty of tonnage to trade.

The big catch there is that one mech does not make a push. Obviously the rest of the team has to push too for the push to succeed, but the assaults form the backbone by continuing to apply pressure when other mechs would be overheating.

[Khobai]

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Assaults do have a lot of armor if you're spreading damage effectively.

but with poor agility and large hitboxes most assault cant really spread damage effectively

thats the assault paradox

[Vellron2005]

DjPush, on 13 December 2017 - 02:13 PM, said:

I get it. New players like to spam missiles because it's easy and a decent way to learn the game. However, if you can't move and shoot yet.. Get out of an assault mech. You are a detriment to the team. You are not ready to pilot one. I have seen too many 90 and 100 ton assault mechs just standing there lobbing LRMs. Get yourself a heavy mech, load that up with your LRMs, and learn to shoot while walking. Once you have mastered the art of looking at your minimap and repositioning, then you can try your hand at assaults.

The optimum range for LRMs is 200-500 meters. Anything beyond that, don't even bother firing. You will lose the lock before your missiles reach their targets. The one caveat to this rule is if you have a spotter or someone has put up a UAV, then fire away. Move with the team or they will leave your *** behind to be picked off by the enemy NASCAR. You need to learn how to reposition and fire as you are doing so. DO NOT load your mech with LRMs only. You need to be able to use other weapons when the LRMs are not able to gain a lock or too close to be ineffective.

NO.

You're not my dad and you can't make me

All jabbing aside, sorry, but again.. NO.

Right now, only assaults can carry enough LRMs to do what they need to do. And they can do it just fine from longer ranges if the situation allows it..

Like on Polar.. or other open maps..

I do agree with you advice about moving with your team, positioning, and bringing backup weapons. Those are solid.

Learning how to move your fat rear torso enough to not get nascar-stomped is a vital skill..

Edited by Vellron2005, 18 December 2017 - 01:47 AM.

[Horseman]

MrMadguy, on 17 December 2017 - 08:38 PM, said:

But this is the only thing, this piles of junk are useful for. Isn't it?

No. I've ran ballistic, energy, SRM and MRM assaults with a fair degree of success.

MrMadguy, on 17 December 2017 - 08:38 PM, said:

Armour, that should make them tanky, doesn't serve it's purpose due to too high firepower of Lights and Mediums, whose strength should be mobility, but not firepower. What's the point in playing big, slow, clunky 'Mech, if any Medium 'Mech still can two-shot it?

If you're engaging the medium solo... which you should not be doing in the first place. You should be in the middle of your team, supported by at least one other mech, ideally within LOS of your team's other assaults.

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Ability to pack largest amount of LRMs - is the only advantage, Assaults have

No. I take it you never ran an Annihilator, KDK-3 or (non-LRM-boat) Supernova?

The advantage they have is the ability to pack the biggest payload of weapons and heat sinks. Only some assaults make even passable LRM boats, mainly because a good LRM boat needs to stay on the move.

Heavies may be able to reach comparable alpha, but not sustain fire for as long.

Vellron2005, on 18 December 2017 - 01:39 AM, said:

Right now, only assaults can carry enough LRMs to do what they need to do.

A properly built heavy such as the Catapult can do much the same. Hell, I've had similar level of success with a LRM45 Huntsman (even though ammo is kind of tight in that one).

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And they can do it just fine from longer ranges if the situation allows it.

Range is one thing, sitting at near-maximum range and using missiles to landscape is another.
You need to have LOS to take advantage of Artemis' clustering bonus and you need to have LOS to see that your missiles are actually hitting the target and not landscaping. You also need it to lock your own targets, otherwise you're risking loss of lock - and a wasted salvo - when your spotter turns, dies or moves out of sensor contact.
You also need close range to minimize your missile spread and the amount of time the missiles need to reach the target (giving them less room to evade).

Which still ends up with you at relatively close range even if you initially engaged the enemy from quite far away.

[MrMadguy]

Horseman, on 18 December 2017 - 05:04 AM, said:

If you're engaging the medium solo... which you should not be doing in the first place. You should be in the middle of your team, supported by at least one other mech, ideally within LOS of your team's other assaults.

No, I'm intended to be armor shield in front of my team.

Assaults are designed this way. Most of them have low wide hardpoints, that make it impossible to play poke-poke game. You have to attack enemies openly - as tank.

[Horseman]

MrMadguy, on 18 December 2017 - 05:49 AM, said:

No, I'm intended to be armor shield in front of my team.

Which is done by being one of several simultaneously attacking targets and being too much of a threat to ignore, while at the same time lasting long enough to deliver serious damage to the enemy team on your own.

If you're the only target exposed to the enemy, you're doing it wrong. If you're too far from the rest of your team to be supported by them, you're doing it wrong (also because this means you're too far to effectively support them yourself). If you waste your armor too quickly to do meaningful damage, you're doing it wrong.

In all of those scenarios, all you've done is make yourself an easy kill, which is quite the opposite of doing your job.

The key to being an effective assault mech is not in acting like a damage sponge, but in knowing when to conserve your armor and when to expose yourself to deal more damage.

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You have to attack enemies openly - as tank.

Which does not equate YOLOing straight into their position, alone and unsupported. Playing too aggressively is a common problem, and one that you have to actively stop yourself from in order to be effective (don't take it personally, I've been struggling with it for a long time myself).

Edited by Horseman, 18 December 2017 - 08:27 AM.

[Khobai]

MrMadguy, on 18 December 2017 - 05:49 AM, said:

No, I'm intended to be armor shield in front of my team.

Assaults are designed this way. Most of them have low wide hardpoints, that make it impossible to play poke-poke game. You have to attack enemies openly - as tank.

And assaults tanking might work if the survival tree wasnt completely terrible

This is my take on a better survival skill tree, one that doesnt waste half your points:

Edited by Khobai, 19 December 2017 - 12:44 PM.

[Dark Wooki33 IIC]

MrMadguy, on 18 December 2017 - 05:49 AM, said:

No, I'm intended to be armor shield in front of my team.

Assaults are designed this way. Most of them have low wide hardpoints, that make it impossible to play poke-poke game. You have to attack enemies openly - as tank.

In qp your assault is a second/third line damage dealer, a glass canon. The only time an assault can be played as you imagine it is with 11 other fatties in a first wave fp drop... no wonder you are struggeling in tier 3

Edited by Dark Wooki33 IIC, 19 December 2017 - 01:19 PM.

[MischiefSC]

We'll, depends on the assault. Zeus, MAD IIC, those are up front mechs.

Even MC MK2 has some up front builds (2xlb10x, 4xsrm6a, some mpls).

[YueFei]

Spreading damage in an Assault is more difficult than in other classes, since they have larger hitboxes and less accel/decel. Even for some of the Assaults with a better combo of hitboxes and agility, to spread the damage requires you to simultaneously leg turn and accel/decel, as opposed to most Heavies (and of course Mediums and Lights) where you can spread the damage with only accel/decel alone.

That probably reinforces the feeling many players have that Assaults are "glass cannons" and un-Tank-like.

But with proper leg turning + accel/decel, and decent hitboxes, and sufficient investment into the agility skill tree, you can spread the incoming damage. However, you have to coordinate your movements to make sure they are "additive", and avoid cancelling out your own maneuver. That is, you want to accelerate and turn "outward", or decelerate and turn "toward".

I first realized this upon watching the streams of some of the better players, and being very surprised to see that they had invested partially into the agility tree for their Assaults. Most players would probably assume that they wanted to extra agility to keep up with lighter and smaller mechs in a short ranged knife fight. But these players are skilled enough in counter-maneuvering against smaller mechs that they don't really need that extra agility for a knife fight, and besides that they are good enough at moving with the team that they will typically have support from teammates to help peel lighter enemies off of them if necessary.

However, the other aspect in which agility helps is in damage spreading. When I sat down to run the numbers on it, I realized that those investments into the agility skill tree were necessary to bring their mechs up to the bare minimum needed to reliably spread the incoming damage.

-------

Even then, in some cases, with some Assaults, it may be simply "impossible"... that is, a bad combination of hitboxes and turn-rate + accel/decel, such that if the opposing enemy player aims well, there's no juking a hit to an adjacent hitbox.

So yeah, some Assault mechs are glass cannons, but others can dish it out and take it, too. It just requires proper investment into the agility skill tree (not necessarily a full investment, but sufficient investment), and then the proper technique for maneuvering.

[Darbbo]

It cracks me up about the amount of complaining people make about LRM's. The point of long range missiles is to soften the enemies armor before the main allied body moves in so what you should be doing is retraining yourselves accordingly and if you rush in to battle mechs that havn't been softened up then that is your fault for not using your LRMers correctly.

I have a Cyclops with 6 LRM10's and 3 ER M Lasers. I move with the main body as I fire my LRM's. I find that moving laterally against a target keeps my radar blip moving and missiles are more effective that way.
On average I get 2 kills 10 assists and 450 - 500 dmg per match running solo.

[Xiphias]

Darbbo, on 21 December 2017 - 06:06 AM, said:

It cracks me up about the amount of complaining people make about LRM's. The point of long range missiles is to soften the enemies armor before the main allied body moves in so what you should be doing is retraining yourselves accordingly and if you rush in to battle mechs that havn't been softened up then that is your fault for not using your LRMers correctly.

I have a Cyclops with 6 LRM10's and 3 ER M Lasers. I move with the main body as I fire my LRM's. I find that moving laterally against a target keeps my radar blip moving and missiles are more effective that way.
On average I get 2 kills 10 assists and 450 - 500 dmg per match running solo.

LRMs are terrible at trading though. ERLL, Gauss, PPCs and Autocannons all do a better job of softening things up at range and can easily out trade LRMs.

[MischiefSC]

Darbbo, on 21 December 2017 - 06:06 AM, said:

It cracks me up about the amount of complaining people make about LRM's. The point of long range missiles is to soften the enemies armor before the main allied body moves in so what you should be doing is retraining yourselves accordingly and if you rush in to battle mechs that havn't been softened up then that is your fault for not using your LRMers correctly.

I have a Cyclops with 6 LRM10's and 3 ER M Lasers. I move with the main body as I fire my LRM's. I find that moving laterally against a target keeps my radar blip moving and missiles are more effective that way.
On average I get 2 kills 10 assists and 450 - 500 dmg per match running solo.

Humans do this thing called confirmation bias. Your brain is a liar, and a prolific one. Everyones is. Your memory is incredibly unreliable. You remember things that agree with what you want to believe is correct. In fact when you remember something you don't remember the original event; you remember the last time you remembered it. So you literally change your memory a bit as you remember things.

According to the leaderboard you win less than 1/2 your matches and you kill 1 enemy mech for every 2 times you die, on average, give or take and you average about 160 damage per match.

That's okay, there's no 'stat shaming' here. It's a game, play it and have fun. However I can say that your average performance on any mech is nowhere near 2 kills, 10 assists and 450-500 damage. That is more likely the periodic best game in that mech which is offset by games with 0 kills and less than 160 damage.

Your Cyclops build is not very successful. You're either staying too far back or getting too far forward. My sincere recommendation is strip all your mechs completely and rebuild them. Try SRMs or MRMs, try pure laser builds, try dakka builds, try LBX and gauss. What you're currently doing is not winning matches or killing enemy mechs very effectively.

This is a consistent issue with LRMs. They are a feast/famine weapon. You get this occasional big damage matches that feel good - however you have a lot of crap damage matches that you likely forget. So you remember the big win matches and don't realize they are like 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 of your actual matches played.

Change it up. Put LRMs aside for a bit, try MRMs and LBXs. Not saying you need to go Clan Laservomit but what you're doing currently has room to improve. Come back to LRMs later if you like after you've done something else but see what you can do to get the needle on your performance to move.

[Mystere]

This epeen-waiving thread is still alive?

[Khobai]

Mystere, on 21 December 2017 - 04:11 PM, said:

This epeen-waiving thread is still alive?

[Brain Cancer]

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It cracks me up about the amount of complaining people make about LRM's. The point of long range missiles is to soften the enemies armor

So are lasers, only they're better at softening specific armor sections and melting what's actually beneath. In a game where you can precision kill far easier than you can sandblast for the win, "softening up the enemy" translates to "minimal real damage while your opponent conducts his XL check on you."

Now, maybe if said spread damage was exceptionally accurate? But it isn't.
Maybe if it did exceptional damage to counter it's scattering? But it doesn't.

It's Russ's favorite weapon though. Because it's mediocre.

[OmniFail]

MischiefSC, on 21 December 2017 - 03:46 PM, said:

Humans do this thing called confirmation bias. Your brain is a liar, and a prolific one. Everyones is. Your memory is incredibly unreliable. You remember things that agree with what you want to believe is correct. In fact when you remember something you don't remember the original event; you remember the last time you remembered it. So you literally change your memory a bit as you remember things.

According to the leaderboard you win less than 1/2 your matches and you kill 1 enemy mech for every 2 times you die, on average, give or take and you average about 160 damage per match.

That's okay, there's no 'stat shaming' here. It's a game, play it and have fun. However I can say that your average performance on any mech is nowhere near 2 kills, 10 assists and 450-500 damage. That is more likely the periodic best game in that mech which is offset by games with 0 kills and less than 160 damage.

Your Cyclops build is not very successful. You're either staying too far back or getting too far forward. My sincere recommendation is strip all your mechs completely and rebuild them. Try SRMs or MRMs, try pure laser builds, try dakka builds, try LBX and gauss. What you're currently doing is not winning matches or killing enemy mechs very effectively.

This is a consistent issue with LRMs. They are a feast/famine weapon. You get this occasional big damage matches that feel good - however you have a lot of crap damage matches that you likely forget. So you remember the big win matches and don't realize they are like 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 of your actual matches played.

Change it up. Put LRMs aside for a bit, try MRMs and LBXs. Not saying you need to go Clan Laservomit but what you're doing currently has room to improve. Come back to LRMs later if you like after you've done something else but see what you can do to get the needle on your performance to move.

Disregard this guy he pads his numbers with stacked teams in CW. He then uses his padded stats as leverage to stat shame you. Then he says there is no stat shaming. Its called gas-lighting.

[Xiphias]

OmniFail, on 21 December 2017 - 06:16 PM, said:

Disregard this guy he pads his numbers with stacked teams in CW. He then uses his padded stats as leverage to stat shame you. Then he says there is no stat shaming. Its called gas-lighting.

You can't pad QP leaderboard stats by playing CW, FYI.

[MischiefSC]

OmniFail, on 21 December 2017 - 06:16 PM, said:

Disregard this guy he pads his numbers with stacked teams in CW. He then uses his padded stats as leverage to stat shame you. Then he says there is no stat shaming. Its called gas-lighting.

Gas lighting is telling someone that something that happened didn't happen or something that did happen, didn't. It's an attempt to make people feel insecure about their perception of reality.

I'm pointing to the actual stats - you know, actual reality. The numbers from your stats are your stats.

Also, as Xiphas already pointed out, FW stats are seperate from QP stats. Group queue and QP stats are mixed - however I rarely play group queue and when I do I lose more than I do in QP, because it's usually just a couple of us playing stuff we can't play in FW.

We could also get into 'padding his numbers with stacked teams'... the part where I play FW in a team, which to you apparently is some sort of exploit?

There is no shame in stats. Good or bad. They're simply a measure of the results of your actions in game. I was horrible, absolutely horrible, at this game for at least a year. Low end of mediocre for a good year or more after that. I'm only just now above mediocre. It's something I enjoy working on, seeing if I can move the needle and what does move the needle. Probably the absolute best thing I've done to improve is 1 v 1 with better players than me. You can really see exactly how and why certain things do and don't work, which you then take into QP.

If you're not happy with your stats then you should take steps to change them - doing what you've always done is going to get you what you've always gotten. If you are happy with them, good on you! Nothing wrong with being contented if you're having fun.

However if you're not successful at winning matches then what you're doing.... isn't winning matches. Then saying that you're very successful at winning matches and saying that things like armor sharing don't exist when people who win about 2x as often as you say that it does and it wins matches, well, you're going to get called out on that.

As to who I was talking to I hope he plays and has fun. If he loves playing LRMs then awesome. He should do that all the time. However being honest is an important thing. Honest with yourself and honest with other people. Usually when people say something that is incorrect (like that persons statement about how many kills he gets and the average damage) it's rarely an intentional thing. Usually it's confirmation bias or backfire effect and the like.

All that starts with being honest with yourself. Based on the stats that record what actually happens as an outcome of the matches you play, how you play doesn't win games. So what? If you're having fun, you do you. However that does mean the advice you give on winning games (like armor sharing is a lie, which you seem to be fond of) is not only suspect but demonstratively incorrect. You're mistaking a personal opinion for an actual fact. People do that all the time. That's why you should first trust the stats over your opinion and be willing to set your opinions and perceptions aside when trying to improve.

Otherwise you do silly stuff like imply that FW stats impact QP leaderboard when trying to ad hominem someone who keeps pointing out that you're wrong when you are, in fact, wrong. It digs a bad hole to try and get out of.

I don't know you, I don't dislike you, none of this is personal. It's a game. However new players read this stuff and average players wanting to improve read this stuff and it's important that incorrect information gets corrected so people don't learn bad habits or pick up misinformation they have to unlearn later. You've made some incorrect assertions. We all do that. Trying to drill down on them after they've been pointed out as incorrect isn't going to change the reality of them or change anything else really.

[Bombast]

OmniFail, on 21 December 2017 - 06:16 PM, said:

Disregard this guy he pads his numbers with stacked teams in CW. He then uses his padded stats as leverage to stat shame you. Then he says there is no stat shaming. Its called gas-lighting.

CW stats are not tracked like this. He cannot 'leverage' them against you.