After another day playing the LCT-PB, I think I've got a pretty good handle on how to use it right, and throughout the day, two things started to emerge as the leading causes of it exploding during a match, lol, which led me to make some changes. The two things are...
#1 Doing things I know I need to do in order to help my team win the match.
~ i.e. run amok in 3rd person through a grouped up enemy team, and shoot at everything wildly, because my team is getting hammered out of position and we need a big distraction to buy them some time, and help us win the game (or we just have a ton of LRM boats that are having trouble getting locks), or I need to latch onto, and kill, a specific 'mech that I know needs to die, or we're going to lose. Even if it means diving a grouped up enemy team to get at them, which often results in me dying as well... with
honor that is. HUEHUEHUE... moving on.
#2 Losing a Side Torso.
~ because, despite my best efforts to be the "juke master", some players are simply fantastic snipers, and
can hit my ST around my guard arm when I'm blocking, no matter what I do. (Particularly bad from Gauss users)
Conclusion~ Well, There's not much I can do about #1, when you gotta take one for the team, u gotta take one for the team. But #2 we can do something about.
Behold! Mr Butt-stab's final form~ the "IS Shikaku"! aka "Inner Sphere Assassin". Since the house I'm in has Japanese people in it I've decided that my pilot is Japanese. Why? Because I am a positively
filthy weeaboo. On to the new build~
Main things I changed~
1. Dropped the Mobility and Auxiliary skill trees entirely, and moved all of their points into Firepower.
2. Dropped all armor by half or more, except the on the legs.
3. Switched to a 170 LE instead of a 180 XL engine.
Why I changed the things~
1. ~ As for mobility, I felt like I was getting better with positioning, and didn't need the speed to get me out of a jam nearly as often. Also, since I never did, and still don't, peek corners like a sissy, and I felt like I was getting better at ganking and staying behind people, I didn't feel like I needed the extra Acceleration or Brake anymore either.
~ As for Auxiliary, simply, I felt like the opportunities were too few, or it was simply too risky for me to take that half a second to line up, to use an airstrike. It could be that I'm just no good with them yet but, for now, I don't really dig 'em. I feel like they're a waste of cbills, and that I'd have better results if I just attacked normally, and secured the kill myself, rather than hoping to get lucky from an airstrike. (Though I admit, it is hilarious to bait pursuing 'mechs around a corner straight into an airstrike.) Anyway, I just run 1 regular old adv. UAV now, since I find good times to use a UAV come up much more often, and don't require any fiddling/setup to use. Damage=time=money friend! and I most often deal more damage with my guns than the airstrikes ever do in that same amount of time.
~ As for Firepower, I felt like what I was doing was effective, but the murdering was capped at my damage output. I therefore maxed out all relevant stats in the firepower tree, to bring that potential up to the highest it could be. I also wanted just a tiiiiiiiny bit more ammo for the MG's, and this did the trick. Lastly, It gave me enough range to easily engage just outside of 100m, which means, those 'mechs who only got 100m seismic sensors never see it commin, which is surprisingly quite a few people. (Your guns are also a lot quieter at that range too, which makes them even less likely to notice what's going on, especially if you pick a target that's already getting hit from elsewhere. They often don't notice there's a new source of damage before it's too late. The difference between a clean assassination and a brawl is about ~2 seconds of reaction time depending on target size, so it matters. A
lot.)
2. I wasn't dying to getting legged, or taking too much "regular" damage anymore. I was always dying to skilled players who could manage to shoot around my guard arm, and hit my side torso anyway, with a very high power ballistic weapon. These were 1-shotting me since I had an XL engine, and would require something like 30-40+ armor to
not 1-shot me, so it was pointless to try. If I ignored the stuff that was 1-shotting me, by all accounts, I actually had too much armor. So I reduced it by over half. I also now have a better understanding of stealth use, and how I can use it during a fight to deny ssrm locks, and hide which parts of my 'mech are damaged. If an enemy can see I'm nearly legged, they are going to shoot for that leg, but if they cant see anything, they're much more likely to shoot at whatever they think they're most likely to hit, which is whatever side you have exposed to them. You choose which side to expose, therefore, you control where the damage goes. Allowing you to spread it out nicely. They also don't get to see it when they score a nice hit (unless something explodes), which means they never know if they actually did score a nice hit, or to which part, which is demoralizing for them. It's also good for pretending you're hurt when you're really not, (just act like you're panicking) which is great for luring out some poor unsuspecting mech to a 1v1 to get stomped with no support, all good things.
3. This was my answer to the sniper deaths. If a good player is bound to land a good shot around my guard arm and inevitably blow a ST from time to time, I need to be able to shrug it off at least once per match. It's extremely rare to get both ST's blown in the same match, but I'd say there's a decent chance it'll happen once. Also, if you need to kill a particular enemy 'mech very badly for your team, this will give you a much greater chance of surviving their team's support fire while you take them out. (making it more likely you actually finish the job)
*edit* Also, in case anyone was wondering, I switched the side I put my heat sink on because I found myself unconsciously opting to use my right guard arm first all the time, so I figured I'd move it out of harms way. I also found myself in situations where I actually had great opportunity to do cockpit shots at close range, so I tried rolling with adv. zoom to see if it ever came in handy, and, what do you know, it did! So I keep it on full time now.
So far, this build is phenomenal for my playstyle, I'm trying to get a round where I break 1500 dmg, but winning the game comes first, so who knows if that'll ever happen lmao. Also, as I move up through the last few tiers, I'm sure I'll run into much stiffer competition, especially when I hit tier 1, which will give me a much harder time. I would say this build is pretty difficult to play, but it sure is fun. Good hunting!
Edited by bdotalex, 03 May 2018 - 06:42 AM.
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Sir Kyle, on 16 February 2018 - 03:09 AM, said:
