36 replies to this topic

[Minamitsu]

Lately I have been getting really annoyed and stressed out over this struggle I am going through with the game.
This is how things feel to me, and I might be wrong about them but it sure feels right.

I play assault mechs. it's what I do and what I am best at.
My tier isn't great so there's a lot of... questionable players, and a lack of tactics.
Lately my teams have generally been... pretty damn bad. I am constantly getting left behind with no support, and when I try to lead a push everyone else pokes then runs away so I get focused and die.
So at this point it just feels like a cycle of... Get bad clueless teammates, play my role and help the team, die because I get left alone and have no support, team loses because they have no idea what they are doing, tier drops and I get worse teammates.

It feels like 75% of my games nobody knows what they are doing and plays everything like a standard TDM shooter. Even when I get wins it's mostly because the enemies are even more clueless than my team and just spread up and walk into our guns.
With people that can actually play as a team, communicate, and know how things work, we can win and I can do well. But I can't reach that level because of the pit of players I am stuck in.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Which assault mechs and what builds are you using? An assault in low tiers is capable of being rather game changing with or without the team if he can position well with a good build.

You may want to look into power positioning, you move into a position of power that you know will be overlooking the battlefield but yet has decent cover to fall back into. You move here and fire withering barrages of firepower at enemies, removing components with ease and punishing any who dare to take a peek at your team.

Have you been playing your assaults as the anvil, taking hit after hit for the team, or have you been playing as the hammer, crushing all those who would oppose?

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

Sounds like you need a unit to join.

[Bohxim]

"Have you been playing your assaults as the anvil, taking hit after hit for the team, or have you been playing as the hammer, crushing all those who would oppose?"

Be neither. Be 1 prong of a pincer that closes in as the flanking lance. Taking hits and dealing hits in the process! (no offense there dakota)

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Bohxim, on 12 January 2018 - 03:52 AM, said:

"Have you been playing your assaults as the anvil, taking hit after hit for the team, or have you been playing as the hammer, crushing all those who would oppose?"

Be neither. Be 1 prong of a pincer that closes in as the flanking lance. Taking hits and dealing hits in the process! (no offense there dakota)

None taken, that was my Executioner's role before every weapon it ever tried to use got nerfed to oblivion.

[Scyther]

All of these 'match you with couple dozen random players' games have these stretches, where it seems your team always gets the bads and the other team is somehow made of sealclubbers.

To some extent it can happen (random choice has bad stretches) but keep in mind that over time everyone else gets the same MM and the same matches you do.

The thing to do is focus on things you can control. You cannot control the MM. You cannot control the quality or actions of your team.

You can:
-Bump up the engine in your assaults, making it less likely to get left behind. A faster assault with less firepower is better than a slow, dead assault.
-Choose assaults which are a little faster to start with.
-Adjust your playstyle to expect and anticipate faster mechs abandoning you (means, stick with the slower mechs as a pack).
-Learn the maps, watch the mini-map, and control your positioning to be less vulnerable.
-Take a 'calling' role where you are more active in suggesting team moves that keep the team (and you) alive and effective longer.

When you stop griping about things you can't change, and start using the ones you can, things get somewhat better.

Edited by MadBadger, 12 January 2018 - 05:11 AM.

[Bohxim]

Or as I personally like to play it, bring so much firepower, most people don't wanna trade with you. Ultra 35 dwf, ultra 30/40 kdk, annies
Doesn't work against organised teams or the better players as they know how to abuse the trades against you.

[Asym]

I own one, (1) Assault the MAD-II-C and hate every moment of being an assault pilot: for, many of the reason you've mentioned. Just won't do it anymore unless forced.

I have a feeling that as MWO digresses into the "no teams chaos" paradigm, if assaults are what you really like, focus on those moments when you're forced to kill alone.... That may help you for when Solaris comes into being because there aren't any teams in Solaris at all.....

The Join a team mantra is the first thing the older players tell younger players to do.... It's not bad advice, but, it's old advice; that in many cases, just isn't as valid as it use to be. FP is dead. With it being dead, team centric play is just about dead..... Solaris is where this game is going and smart teams should be practicing 1x1 and 2x2 right now !!! Because, their 12x12 days are just about over and at some point, depending on how PGI rolls out Solaris, teams may become structures of the past...... Because, in the end, the competitive and elite players will, if Solaris is successful, chase their needs first and it is and has always been a "First Person Shooter" and that is an individual condition.... JMO.

[Paigan]

I play(ed) like 90% Assaults, always solo queue (no time for a unit/clan/corp anymore) and I climbed the Tier-XP-bar pretty quickly.

Some advice:

1.)
Don't be too slow. Anything below 60 kph is unacceptable. The slower you are, the more coordination in the team is required. Don't join a casual team of randomly selected people and hope for big coordination. It's not lack of player skill, it's just too much to ask for in a casual random team.
65 kph (e.g. WHK) is barely enough to keep up, 70+ is better, of course.
That being said: I have watched SO many assault pilots who just dawdled, ran off, suicided and then complained about the others moving too fast. A lot of times, the actual speed is not the problem. Dawdling is.
60, 65 kph can be enough. But for that, the time for dawdling around is down to 0.

2.)
Don't use romantic crap fittings like 1 AC, 1 large laser, 1 LRM and few short range weapons as a "supplement". That is romantic nonsense. It is NOT good or stable or whatever some poetic Sarna description from some fantasizing guy states. Good, even versatile is having a lot of the same weapon to SIMPLIFY the usage. Maybe 2 weapon systems, like LRMs and lasers or Gauss and PPCs are okay. Anything else is too complex to use properly. Some weapons fire at 300 m, some at 700 m. Some with ballistic arc, some not. Unmanageble.
Everyone complaing about "tryhard" being dumb or whatever is saying nothing more than "I don't want to learn how to create proper loadouts. I want it to work magically without making reasonable decisions". It's like driving a race car but refusing to change gear in necessary parts of a track. Or playing an economy game but refusing to care about resources. It is an integral part of the game to build proper, working, efficient loadouts in order to succeed. Denying that is nothing but amusing.

3.)
Be careful. Hanging back alone is just as bad as pushing forward alone. (I did both a lot myself ).
You can go off alone if you know what you are doing and where the enemy is (e.g. flank them or assume a good sniper position) it can work very well a lot of times, but it can also blow up in your face (or rather blow up your face ^^).
It's best to stay with the rest, especially in solo queue. Or at least with 2-3 others. Hence the speed requirement.



Please don't take it as an offense, but as an experience report from a fellow assault pilot:
If you struggle with assaults, it's usually like 90% your fault and maybe 10% the others'.
But that's not tragic. The next match can already bring improvement.

[Water Bear]

Minamitsu, on 12 January 2018 - 03:40 AM, said:

Lately I have been getting really annoyed and stressed out over this struggle I am going through with the game.
This is how things feel to me, and I might be wrong about them but it sure feels right.

I play assault mechs. it's what I do and what I am best at.
My tier isn't great so there's a lot of... questionable players, and a lack of tactics.
Lately my teams have generally been... pretty damn bad. I am constantly getting left behind with no support, and when I try to lead a push everyone else pokes then runs away so I get focused and die.
So at this point it just feels like a cycle of... Get bad clueless teammates, play my role and help the team, die because I get left alone and have no support, team loses because they have no idea what they are doing, tier drops and I get worse teammates.

It feels like 75% of my games nobody knows what they are doing and plays everything like a standard TDM shooter. Even when I get wins it's mostly because the enemies are even more clueless than my team and just spread up and walk into our guns.
With people that can actually play as a team, communicate, and know how things work, we can win and I can do well. But I can't reach that level because of the pit of players I am stuck in.

I don't have enough information to help here. I have seen assaults wade out into the open, and I think they think they're leading a push, but it doesn't make sense to do that. For example, if both teams have good cover separated by an open area, it doesn't make sense for either team to just push out into the open unless they are particularly bloody minded.

Pushing is very situation specific. If your team has a firepower or numbers advantage, but the enemy team is behind a choke point, that is the moment when an assault with a standard engine should lead a charge. You tank the damage while your DPS comes in behind you and mows down the inferior enemy.

I'm just saying, never rule out that there's something you are missing. I play plenty of assault 'mechs and all systems seem nominal.

[OrmsbyGore]

Asym, on 12 January 2018 - 07:30 AM, said:

The Join a team mantra is the first thing the older players tell younger players to do.... It's not bad advice, but, it's old advice; that in many cases, just isn't as valid as it use to be. FP is dead. With it being dead, team centric play is just about dead..... Solaris is where this game is going and smart teams should be practicing 1x1 and 2x2 right now !!! Because, their 12x12 days are just about over and at some point, depending on how PGI rolls out Solaris, teams may become structures of the past...... Because, in the end, the competitive and elite players will, if Solaris is successful, chase their needs first and it is and has always been a "First Person Shooter" and that is an individual condition.... JMO.

Oh man, I've never stopped to think about it, but what you're saying makes perfect sense. Now I'm depressed

[CFC Conky]

Minamitsu, on 12 January 2018 - 03:40 AM, said:

Lately I have been getting really annoyed and stressed out over this struggle I am going through with the game.
...

Well, there's the problem right there, you should not stress about a video game...

What I am finding pretty effective is asking Charlie lance, (I'm assuming you drop in Charlie if you are in an assault class mech) at the start of the match, to stay within fire support range, say, 150m-200m. You'd be surprised how many times this works in qp, just a little direction goes a long way. Doing this will help you focus down enemies faster and help you defend against light mechs .

As Paigan has mentioned, pay attention to your load out, I rarely load more than three weapon types on my mechs, usually aiming for two. I try to have weapons with similar cooldown rates, ideally one will have a bit of range while still being useful in a closer-range brawl. I never take lrms, rarely PPC's and/or Gauss rifles. Please bear in mind these are my personal preferences and I do intend to practice using those weapons, at least to the level where I am competent, if not stellar.

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

Edited by CFC Conky, 12 January 2018 - 09:42 AM.

[ANOM O MECH]

For me in quick play running any assault under 70kph is not fun. Some mobile mechs like the Cyclops get away with a bit lower speed, but it is generally just easier to be quick than it is to convience people not to nascar. Much, much easier actually.

If you must be slow, then the guys I see doing it well are masters of using terrain and positioning and even they get over run by light packs if left completely alone.

One thing I can tell you as a guy who likes to run fast heavies, mediums and lights, my first move in a game is to run to you assaults.

It actually does a few things for me. It gives me something to do other than run up front and die horribly (I am impatient and used to over extend almost always...). It gave me kills and assists when I run back and find an ACH or Commando hunting Direwhales. It gives me a bunch of extra armor since I won't be the focus.

I swear doing this alone improved my game dramatically.

Wish we could get the word out to more folks to go towards your assault and not chase the lights.

[El Bandito]

Pilot MAD-IIC. All worries gone in 60 seconds.

[Mechrophilia]

#1 rule when playing an assault. Do not loiter in the dropzone for even a second. You must be moving toward the objective as soon as you drop...and commit to memory the shortest path to the objective. Don't take the long way around. An isolated mech is usually a dead mech, and assaults are easily isolated.

#2 Unzoom. If you're zoomed all the time you wont see the arty-smoke in front of you, and assaults are THE primary arty-targets.

#3 Actually look at ALL of the stats of the assault before you build it (or even buy it). Some assaults have much faster torso twist, some have very limited yaw, some have a lot of extra armor in the chest, etc... If the assault cant twist, then you need to frontload the armor and you must calculate enough firepower to be able to win at least one face to face assault-fight, otherwise its build wrong or is a bad mech. If it has great torso twist, then you can use more diverse loadouts and win by spreading your damage and getting more shots off while maneuvering. These things sound complicated, but they're not. They are important though.

#4 Constantly look at heatbar and minimap. Constantly.

#5 Don't shutdown from overheat
#6 Don't get isolated
#7 Don't shut down from over heat
#8 Don't get isolated

...you get the idea.

[IllCaesar]

If you're pubbing in a weaker tier you should pilot something a bit faster, no way around it. Too many faster assault mechs around to reliably stick in that lance without getting left behind, let along not falling behind the team as a whole. 60 KPH is a minimum to ensure that you don't get left behind on maps before the nascar race even begins. There tends to be a lot of slower heavies so if you can up your engine to 65 KPH this shouldn't be much less of an issue.

[Judah Malganis]

The problem with assaults is that even with all their armor, you get one or two mistakes at most due to their lack of mobility. A fast light can often survive more "oops" than an assault. Avoid finding yourself isolated or in the fringe of a group. Always try to be in the middle, but don't sit still. Most games are lost because one side becomes inactive and gets rolled. Being aggressive will usualy win matches, but you need good team support in an assault to pull that off. You can try some drop calling. Tell people where to roughly go and call out any nearby targets that you are shooting at. Communication is terrible in this game, but you can help create some.

[Troa Barton]

1. Stop caring about what tier you are in. Being out of your depth before you are ready will be infinitely more frustrating.
2. A big part of playing as an assault is paying attention to your teammates. Where are they? Are they aggressive? Skittish? Passive? What kinds of builds are they running? What mechs are they in? Are they Brawlers, Snipers, Boats? If you try to force a push with a skittish team made up of ranged builds you're gonna have a bad time. Also 9 times out of 10 leading a push in an assault will just get you killed and will more often than not throw a game. Wait for an advantage before you push.
3. Make a mid range weapons platform ANH, Mad Cat MKII, MAD-IIC, Mauler, ect and be good to go for any situation. This is a big reason why the Laser / Gauss / Ballistic meta is so prevalent, it works at every range. There are patterns people go though in quick play (NASCAR, Missiles, Sniping, NASCAR, Brawling, NASCAR, Camping, more NASCAR) when they can't make up their mind I jump into a mid range build.
4. Stop caring if you win or lose, throw out a gg and load up another. Getting all bent out of shape is only going to tilt you and make any subsequent games worse. You're going to spend 10 minutes yelling at your team when you could get into another match and make more cBills, XP, personal experience, and have a better gaming experience instead.

Edited by Troa Barton, 12 January 2018 - 01:15 PM.

[blood4blood]

OP is 1.68 W/L and 1.31 K/D according to the leaderboard. Seems like you're doing fine overall, maybe just had a bad streak of luck with teammates that don't play how you play.

I made a new, Tier 5 account recently just to see what it's like. (My other accounts existed before Tiers and Seasons so they all started at Tier 3.) After seeing someone stand still in the open and not shoot back while I shot him not once, not twice, but three times from the same position, well, yeah, there's definitely some terrible players in this game. But at Tier 3 and up, I see more of players who are OK, good, or even great individually, but thrown together into a random PUG they just have different play styles and expectations so their teamwork goes to chaos. Easy example: two people decide to take the lead and call targets, half the team follows one, half follows the other, the other team sticks together in a death ball and your split team gets wiped. It may be that both callers had strategies that could have worked, and it may be that all the individual pilots were decent, but there was no unit cohesion.

You being in an assault doesn't make a big difference if you decide to take the role of leader and call targets and you can get people to follow you. Otherwise, as others pointed out, you need mobility and speed to stay with your team even if they start to NASCAR or whatever. Sorry to say, but the easiest way to do that is to switch weight classes, since heavies are often 20kph or more faster than assaults these days.

[SOL Ranger]

In terms of Assaults I only run MCII's nowadays because they're more like heavies than assaults, they have the speed and capabilities to do almost anything. Other assaults are just too sluggish and suicidal to be used optimally even though they can be fun at times in very 'shooty' builds.

In reality there is little room for them in the current gameplay because the best tanking is done by evasion by orders of magnitude, not armour, and the best damage is done by poking, not sustained presence which is what assaults would otherwise favour due to their sluggish nature.

Something has to change for assaults to become fun again. I would personally suggest weight based matchmaking so people can play whatever they want and be rid of the nascar at the same time that plagues the slower mechs. Alternatively slight normalisation of mech properties to bring things from the extremes of polarised interaction somewhere where grey areas of interaction can exist better.

Regardless of how one wants to proceed, there is a reason why my assaults in general gather dust. I can bring to bear more potent mechs at half their weight while "tanking" ten times more by just avoiding enemy fire. Whereas in an assault you will take all that damage like a piñata and get busted up in your first peek before you even have time to back up again, and you're easily flanked and taken down if you make any mistakes whatsoever. In essence you're a tunnel vision behemoth with a very limited use, essentially everyone should be using lighter mechs for optimal performance.

The front loaded damage heavy meta is only one part of the problem, when mobility discrepancies dominate, evasion tanking reigns supreme and armour/sustained damage is being overvalued by PGI in terms of balancing.

What needs to happen is, for this and the good of the game as a whole:

- Alpha/burst damage is brought down while sustained spread/streamed damage remains unchanged, creating a more ongoing interactive process of combat rather than favour heavily the instantaneous peek burst tactic that dominates today.

- Speed and agility balance value raised.

- Slight normalisation of the mechs to reduce the extremes of interaction, truncating 20t lights into proto-mediums and assaults into high end heavies and everything inbetween accordingly.

I get it though, people like their 70pt alphas thrown on a twitchy whim at anything with easy fast kills and think that's perfectly nice gameplay to have. I respectfully disagree. Alpha peek warrior online has gone on long enough, it should be a viable tactic to utilise for some specialist builds, but it should not define the game as a whole.

A fine combat dynamic equilibrium is easily reached where sustained damage solutions are the most potent in terms of raw practical damage given at least some engagement time, because they will always also allow any and all more elaborate forms of gameplay to succeed in parallel given cunning use. This due to their inherent benefits of increased safety and quick application. Whereas the opposite is not the case due to all the drawbacks of sustained fire solutions, and instead sustained fire solutions become only options for dakka fanboys and fun builds. Even dakka has been heading to higher and higher alpha builds, with the current 40-80pt alpha/bursts being commonplace. This is where PGI should put much focus on, we do not need these alpha builds to exist in such a capacity.

Ask yourselves why are low alpha and stream fire weapons so inherently weak(and often incredibly heavy) compared to alpha/burst weapons. It is because PGI overvalues raw dps, overvalues long ranges and undervalues alpha/burst properties. Why do weapons so easily allow burst/alpha fire as if the only firing mode PGI knows. Why is SRM spam actually massive alpha spam, why is laser vomit actual pinpoint alpha spam, why is dakka nowadays pinpoint alpha spam just as much. Why does ghost heat not address alpha vomit, why is there no mechanic that actually prohibits insane alphas, something that simply cannot coexist in a meaningful involving and interactive combat dynamic.

All these issues are about how PGI decides to balance things, the damage values applied, the cooldowns and rates of fire accompanied with "alternative" weapons as opposed to alpha compatible weapons. Even weapons like the AC2 is heavily overvalued for its properties while giving rather anemic damage capabilities as a whole. How many weapons are there currently that don't offer a practical use over another more bursty/alpha heavy weapon anyway.

There are many aspects to these things and I do not pretend that I have all the answers immediately, but I would just like to see PGI consider another approach to balancing than what they have created and seem to be stuck with without budging. Because no amount of tinkering with properties matters very much if the relationships between all the elements of the game are heavily skewed, which seems to be the case at least as I see it.

What I'm trying to say, as to this topic at least, is that an assault wandering out into the enemy wouldn't be having very much issues instantly if the enemy didn't have PPFLD they just point and click at you for even trying to attack them, and there goes your torsos. High damage can exist in the game, but the highest damage has to be sustained damage, alpha/burst damage has to be made manageable and lower.

Edited by SOL Ranger, 12 January 2018 - 03:52 PM.