DAEDALOS513, on 25 December 2020 - 10:34 AM, said:
He's right in that having a variety of non-related weapons on a mech forces you to think much harder than just pressing alpha all the time..
No he's not because a lot of them you don't alpha all the time as well as the word alpha gets lost in context (not all alphas are equal, calling UAC builds alpha designs kinda misses the point of the build since most of them don't have weapons that all fire on the same recycle). Most mechs can't sustain alphas, at some point you get heat capped so at some point you are using reduced damage, but also weapon location matters for certain mechs as well. If a mech is meant to peak but has some split between sides, you might have a weapon group for each side of the mech to use to peak with. Both heat neutral and location as much brain cells as using different weapon groups depending on the range of the mech, ie none because really the goal should be to bake that into muscle memory such that you don't have to think about it and can focus on other things like positioning, it is no different than controlling predictive recoil ie you want that to be a reflex.
Utlimately it is all moot because I think there are some terms that typically get thrown around that don't mean what people think. Bracket builds is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but a bracket build at one point was meta (ERPPC + ERSL/ERSPL Hunchie II) but would be frowned on by the same people that want bracket builds because it isn't a kitchen sink build which is what people are typically referring to. They want a mech with a little bit of everything to be effective, and most of those weren't effective in TT so expecting mechs with a bunch of disparate weapons to somehow be effective in this is just.....silly. Expecting builds that use weapons that have no relation to each other even if they are the same range bracket just does not make sense. Why? Why should that be good? What playstyle does that honestly reward because typical bracket builds are skirmishers and we already have that (they are typically meta mediums/heavies that aren't called the Night Gyr).
TBH, I blame the books which for building up drama obviously had to emphasize each weapon firing separately and put more emphasis on the pilots struggle aiming/piloting more so than actual tactics like concave firing lines or trading shots. One sounds good but makes for boring gameplay (or more of a sim, where it is more you versus the machine than the actual enemy) while the other doesn't read as well, but makes for more engaging gameplay (at a higher level when you aren't playing spuds).
Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 25 December 2020 - 10:23 PM.