0
First some credentials so that people can get more creative with their insults, if you're just interested in the loadout it's somewhere below this. I don't know, I'm not your mother.
My skill rating is half way through the 'E' in "TIER 2". I don't know if that means I'm good but Baradul was in my last two games and someone ingame said he's the best player in the game right now so I'm going to listen to the voices and say that I've done enough time to be able to speak up without ending up in a corner wearing a cone.
Here's my current stable:
Despite what the line of Atlases would indicate my favorite mech right now is Spot the C4.
Sorry, I put the eyes on to scare away lights. You know, like a butterfly.
Here's the current build:
And here's all the builds I've tried:
Now to justify my love to the court. Or at least explain why the hell I'm running case-less with an XL engine.
While playing around with smaller engines I discovered that what was killing me the most was being slower than my team's death ball. Or at least the slowest members of my team. Being able to put friendlies between me and the enemy lights was almost as important as being able to quickly move to a better position to guarantee my missiles a clear path to their target. Speed also lets me keep most mechs outside the 180m minimum range while being chased and to get my juicy LRM boat butt out of collapsing rotations. Also if I lose half my mech, I've probably screwed up somewhere long before my ammo starts cooking off.
So going fast is mandatory. Next I need to answer 'Why are you calling yourself a boat with only LRM40? The Supernova can boat more ATMs than that.' That's annoyingly true! I started playing before Clans came out and I don't care to shell out for a second weapons stockpile. Still, I'm of the opinion that the C4 is the best IS missile boat currently for several reasons.
First is that it's not an assault. That may seem strange but good play requires sharing armor with the rest of the team and assaults bring a lot more armor than heavies do. An assault LRM boat that stays in the back reduces the heat the other team spends to kill the front line more than a heavy does. In general boating as a heavy leaves tonnage available for better brawlers.
Also I've tried boating LRMs on an Atlas, it was pretty terrible. In my defense it was the only big mech with an ECM at the time.
Second, the perks for the C4 are NUTS. They were good before the rework and now they're on the verge of being broken. Here's my current enhancements:
(Quick note, if you swap the Tag out for a medium laser heat mgmt is ~1.87 which is still high enough that you can ignore shutdown.)
That's 32% missile cooldown, 25% range, and 25% velocity. When lurming these are key stats, the only one missing would be a mech bonus to missile spread.
The 1125 max range means that only ER large lasers and ER PPCs can make you keep your head down. Fights also are bizarrely likely to happen at around 1k away from where you want to be. Either way the better range lets you start firing sooner than other boats.
A higher missile velocity gives AMSs less time to shoot down your missiles before they land. Additionally, Inner Sphere LRMs have one advantage over ATMs in that they all come at once rather than in a string making it harder for an AMS to stop. This all contributes into turning potential damage into actual damage.
Also, having more LRM ammo than your enemies have AMS ammo helps.
When the changes to missile health values came out I tried four LRM10s instead of the two 20s. It seems smart; more health per individual missile, faster fire rates, same damage. But those of you versed with LRMs know that firing four LRM10s at the same time would cause ghost heat. To avoid that we chain fire which reduces the 40 missiles an AMS would need to shoot down to just 10 and even with the heath buff it's not a 4x difference. But lets ignore the ghost heat of Christmas Past for a moment. There's another reason to not bring more individual missile launchers. Heat management goes down for each individual weapon you have on your mech regardless of if you're firing it or not. To be able to sustain fire you want a few really large weapons, at which point the question becomes how fast can you fire them.
A 1/3rd cooldown quirk is something that you normally only see on mechs with very limited weapon slots so to find one on a missile boat feels almost wrong.
So what does the heat look like?
Well in actual matches where you're switching between targets as you lose and gain locks the between time lets the mech cool down. Even with the medium laser you never really need to pay attention to your heat. I distinctly remember a match on Terra Therma where I sat myself down behind a ridge and proceeded to go through all 2484 missiles without stopping or overheating.
But what about missiles missing? What about pin point damage? You can't head shot with LURMs! Get out of here boat boy! Neeeeerrrr.
(note: for some reason 9 tons of LRM ammo is exactly enough to last a long match. I've had multiple games where I came within a couple shots of being out.)
Edited by Captain1nsaneo, 26 July 2019 - 01:40 PM.
