ALSO, as I catch up for the morning and recall this...
w0qj, on 03 August 2021 - 10:31 PM, said:
Why not use Mad Dog MDD-Prime, with good missile quirks using full Set-of-8? Just curious!
Because the Doge Prime has all of four energy as backup armaments. Any 'Mech serious about Lurmishing needs TAG, so one of those hardpoints is spoken for. That leaves exactly three energy hardpoints to do stuff with, and 3E does not accomplish much by itself. What makes my Stormcrow and Timberpuppy builds work (acknowledging that I'm in T5, so for a given definition of 'work') is that they are not 100% reliant on their LRMs as a Doge Prime is.
The Stormcrow moves fifteen to twenty klicks faster than a Doge does and when people press in close to it because they see lurms, it can eviscerate them with its huge battery of dagger lasers. Or I can drop on a map where lurms don't work well and just decide to lean on the lasers instead and operate as an admittedly-too-hot striker/brawler, pushing aggressively with those lasers to murder people. The ol' Rainy Chicken is also
phenomenal at dealing with backrow-kicking stealth lights like Fleas or Pirate's Banes - LRM-stabbing light 'Mechs are
not prepared for a Stormcrow with ten dagger-fighter's lasers and a TAG to peel off their stealth armor and reveal their position to the whole-*** team whilst being more than capable of keeping it in view and blasting it to bits if it stops juking for even a second.
In the Stormcrow's case, the LRMs are honestly the secondary armament - they're weapons of opportunity I use when the team is chickendicking and there's no good opportunities to harvest limbs/lives with the lasers. The 'Mech wins games by tearing people apart with the daggers; the LRMs are there to make that stage of the match easier later and give it reach the daggers don't have. Same, if to a lesser extent, with the Timber Wolf. The Mad Doge simply can't do that. It's outright bad at direct fighting and can't readily switch between pounding folks with missiles and tearing them up with beams.
The Doge is the better LRM delivery system, but in Puglandia that doesn't matter. Lurmishers have to be able to handle their own defense and their own finish-the-job. I've found, over and over, that in quick drop matches 'Mechs with
just LRMs lose for free to 'Mechs with LRMs-and-also-other-stuff.
Edited by 1453 R, 04 August 2021 - 08:50 AM.