Worth reiterating: the best counter to light 'Mechs is shooting them.
I've been having a ton of fun in my
very nearly bone-stock Nova Cat-D recently, whose claim to fame is being able to fire three heavy large lasers at once without Spoopy Heat telling me to go cook myself. HLLs are...
not the shortest burntime lasers. Hell, I'm pretty sure they're the
longest burntime in the game unless they re-nerfed cERLLs again. I've got ~1.5s lightsabers and a shotgun, often considered the
worst anti-light weapons. Ye know what I do when a light 'mech starts nipping at me?
I shoot it.
Sure, I miss a lot. I don't/can't hold my lasers on the critters for much more'n half their burntime, if even that, provided the light is juking. I
am in T5, you'd be surprised how often one pulls a straight-line attack run and gets burned for his efforts. My autocannon ticks a few pellets here and there. And ye know what usually happens? The light ***** off and goes away, because even glancing hits are not necessarily insignificant when you have maybe thirty points of armor on a given extremity. Because
I shoot it, and thusly let it know it doesn't get to chew on my *** without me chewing back, it decides to look for someone else to chew on. With some fresh new dinged-up armor for the road.
Yeah, sure. Sometimes I get nibbled to death by a determined light pilot who knows their ****, or I get swarmed and cut apart. And sometimes I get a good, lucky burn in and harvest a ST or a leg, and the light proceeds to suck. One good, solid whack with that LB-10/X tends to remind them that I'm a fuggin' Nova Cat and they need to step careful around me. Not to mention my buddy Maker, who's made something of an art form out of heavy-goosing Commando kneecaps. Again - he shoots lights, and lights are significantly less of a problem for him.
Yeah, you miss sometimes. A
lot of times, to be honest. But you also don't have to hit nearly as hard as a lot of people think they do in order to get light 'Mechs to ********** and let you be. You just have to hit them enough to remind them that you know exactly what they're doing and you ain't having it.