1
Max armor
C Streak SRM 6 (RT)
C Streak SRM 6 (RA)
C Streak SRM 6 (LA)
C Light TAG (LA)
C Active Probe (RA)
C ECM (LT)
+ 4.5 Tons of Ammo
Ok, slightly misleading, maybe not the ultimate battlemech. You can put your pitchforks away.
That being said, installing streak SRMs on a Shadowcat produces a stunningly versatile and surprisingly lethal mech. I've gone very far with it. So let's break down why the Streak-Shadowcat might be one of the best mechs in the game:
Clan Tech
It's an omnimech with swappable pods, so you can get exactly the hardpoints you want. It also comes with endo steel + ferro-fibrous armor, so it's not gimped like some Clan omnimechs for failing to have both. Clan weapons are also lighter than IS weapons and have longer range, and we'll put that to good use.
ECM
Unless you're building a machine-gun troll build, or need a fourth missile hardpoint for some weird reason, the ECM hardpoint costs you nothing. ECM maximizes your chances of sneaking into Streak SRM range without the enemy really knowing what you're up to. Also it's good for the rest of your team.
MASC
Oh yeah, the Shadowcat has a sprint button! It's one of very few mechs that has this awesome feature, and the base speed is high enough to readily make use of it. Granted, there will be instances where you want to get from point A to B slightly more quickly, but the real use of MASC on a Shadowcat is the acceleration it gives you! You can go from a dead stop to over 100 KPH in under a second. MASC has the disadvantage of making your reticule jitter around randomly, but because we are using streaks, we don't care about that one bit.
Jump Jets
Normally jump jets are nothing more than an afterthought - but not the Shadowcat's. With a whopping jump height of 70.1, you shouldn't be driving a Shadowcat in combat. You should be flying it! The vertical acceleration you get from the jump jets is sufficient to make a lot of enemy fire that would have hit your torso miss you entirely, or strike your legs. Jump jets also make your reticule jump around, but again, we're using streaks. We don't care.
Hardpoint Placement
With arms above the cockpit, and the torso-launcher hardpoint approximately even with the cockpit, the Shadowcat needs to expose very little of itself to open fire. If you can see it, you can shoot it.
All of this produces an exceptionally agile medium mech, but its agility usually comes at the cost of being able to aim accurately. Most of the time, this makes it a very poor substitute for a light mech, and somewhat undergunned for a medium mech.
...Unless you use streaks. Then you end up with something that is just as fast and agile as a light mech, but packing more armor and more streaks than any light mech should. Because Streak SRMs take care of the aiming for you, you are now free to jump and MASC all you want, and focus purely upon piloting the mech.
Streaks do have the disadvantage that they scatter your damage all over the place, and a 36 damage alpha strike isn't that substantial. Combined with the abysmally slow reload of the Clan Streak SRM 6, you are not going to instantly devastate heavy or assault mechs. This weakness is counterbalanced with an awesome strength: You're so agile, they are not going to instantly devastate you either.
Because of your hardpoint layout, you can peek just as well as a Jagermech - and in fact, you can even beat Jagermechs and equivelent targets at their own game. You have a spaceship of a mech, rocking NASA-grade jump jets, with a weapon system that doesn't care about liftoff-induced vibration. Flying a Streak-Shadowcat, you can force Jaegers, Riflemen, Blood Asps, Stalkers, and even Kodiaks to break off from their firing line.
Three SSRM6's is also the ideal number. If you had a fourth SSRM6 launcher, you would have to chain-fire or deal with ghost heat. Furthermore, without any heat sinks or quirks, the Shadowcat has an ideally synergistic amount of heat dissipation - by the time your launchers reload, your heat bar has almost entirely emptied.
With range quirks, your streak SRMs have a maximum range of 414 meters - which almost makes them homing MRMs! The 414 meter range puts you well outside the ideal striking distance of most light mechs - and no light mech can ignore your blast of 36 damage. AC20's, heavy gauss, and medium lasers, some of the dominant brawling weapons, all have notably reduced damage at 414 meters, and hostile SRMs literally cannot touch you at that range.
The Light TAG defeats hostile ECM and also accelerates your missile lock (BAP is there for the same reason, and to provide ECM-busting capacity in case the left torso gets wasted). You should always be using your TAG when shooting things, unless you are doing a sneak attack vs. a target that doesn't know you exist. If two ECM-equipped mechs are covering each other, you can switch your ECM to counter & use the TAG to guarantee a lock. If you end up brawling three ECM mechs at once, pop a UAV and use comms to alert your teammates.
The one type of target that the Streak-Shadowcat doesn't excel at fighting: Stealth armor mechs. If the match score is 11-11, and it's just you versus a stealth armor mech, you're going to have to force them to shoot you until they overheat. This might actually be a niche for flamers - you do have 1 unused energy hardpoint, and you could give up a half-ton of ammo.
The role that the Streak-Shadowcat plays on the battlefield is a very important one: It's a chaos-generator. Just like fast light mechs, you will be looking for those random opportunities to break a stalemate, a nascar, or a peek-a-boo game, by zipping into the line of fire and doing ultra-high-risk shenanigans. Because you have more armor than most lights, you have bigger margins for error. Your arms are the right shape for torso-twisting and spreading damage, the torso is the right shape for controlling which part of your mech gets hit, and the shadowcat is fast enough that some people will try and leg it - so the enemy's damage tends to end up distributed very evenly over your entire mech.
The few mechs that can match your agility will disintegrate quickly under SSRM fire. For everything else, just fly the mech like a daredevil & patiently dismantle them. It's not a rambo-build (nothing is), but I have successfully dodged incoming fire that would have quickly cored assaults.
Last week I vaulted over a Fafnir because I could, and kept him tied down for a good thirty seconds or so, which gave my team the time to wipe out theirs. A few days ago, I came delightfully close to soloing a positively hellish gargoyle brawler. Just today, I got engaged by half an enemy team and thought for sure I was dead - but went on to finish the match alive (albeit legged). I regularly get 500 to 700 damage per match in this mech, along with a fair number of kills, solo kills, and KMDD's. Not bad at all for a medium!
It seems like Shadowcats and streaks were made for each other. The synergy between the two is perfection. The Streak Shadowcat is so bizarre and alien in playstyle. Nothing else in the game seems to put streaks to use as fantastically as a Shadowcat. The tonnage, the speed, the heat dissipation, the MASC mechanics, the overpowered jump jets...it's an ideal streak-emitter.
Edited by Falconer Sword, 12 September 2020 - 03:19 AM.
