poltergoost, on 28 February 2018 - 09:48 PM, said:
It is getting a bit stupid tbh. Atm the team with the most Piranhas wins.
Just had a game where each team had a Piranha, both did over 1k damage and 5 kills.
Rest of the mechs were irrelevant. Basically 11 mechs on each team cowering in fear while the Piranhas massacred everything that moves
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TBH, a large portion of this can be attributed to poor threat analysis and attention issues (imho).
I've been watching my match replays where the little fish have dominated, and i've started to notice a pattern.
How many lights do you see as being the attention of focus fire, if there's a nice, fat assault within twitching distance of a pilot's crosshairs instead?
[clickbait]
The answer may surprise you! [/clickbait]
Well, maybe not, because it's close to 0. I call it Urbie syndrome - where an enemy light can be standing still in front of you, pouring fire into your CT, but will be
completely ignored if there's anything larger than a BlackJack that can be shot at instead. I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. Thousands of matches of horrifying alpha strikes have conditioned me to ALWAYS shoot the fatties - plus, you can't rack up
dat damage when you waste precious laser ticks on the air around a Piranha's legs .
Likewise, you can take fire for a few seconds from a light, before it ducks away - to be seemingly erased from your memory as a threat, because you can't see it, and you KNOW there's something fatter and slower about to peek. Queue cored rear.
With the Pirahna, the issue is compounded, because of the way it's peak performance times work out in a match. Early on, when armour is intact and people are positioning aggressively, it's ****. Pure poop. It's a fragile nuisance at best, and it's extremely vulnerable to an early and ignominious death.
Past the 5 minute mark and/or first contact, however, when components aren't wrapped in armour like they used to be, and the concept of moving out of cover becomes less and less appealing, the Piranha becomes a freaking
nightmare. They can rack up damage incredibly quickly, yet people will
still prioritize larger targets, even if the little fish is fresh.
If you see a Pirahna, or ANY light with MG's, stop trying to line up that Banshee at max range of your lasers and
shoot the fish instead. If you have any open components, it's a bigger threat than any assault - and it should have been a priority long before that became an issue - because when people are in a position to recognize the threat, it's too late.
It's the same as any boogey-man mech from the past. Boom Yagers, LagRavens, Streak/Splatcats... they are terrifying, until players learn to recognize them and deal with them as a priority. Piloting a BOOM Yager towards the end of it's reign became... tense.
You focus on the larger threat.