Unstruck Fury, on 17 December 2012 - 10:39 PM, said:
Artemis is a must, while it is true ECM does negate it. more often then not an ECM equipped mech is not nearby negating it. Even so, I test this before I put artemis on it and with artemis on I have cored mediums in 1 salvo, before the spread was so wide I would basically have to be touching them to do that. With artemis I can be at a good 100 meters and core a medium in 1 salvo. at 270 meters I can still do a good amount of damage, where without artemis at 270 meters ill be lucky if 25% of my missiles hit.
The reason I don't have 6 SRM6's and have the 2 SRM4's is precisely to increase my heat efficiency without requiring me to waste more slots of DHS, instead, I gain slots. In the end 32 missiles with good heat eff. + artemis is better than 36 missiles with mediocre heat eff.
I do agree with you that having 1 jump jet would be a good move currently, which I will probably swap out 1 ton of ammo to do that seeing as the majority of my matches end with me having between 3-4 tons left over.
However, armor wise I am keeping my armor how it is. The mech is maxed in armor everywhere but the legs, and with having played over 60 matches in this mech and only being legged once, i think it is a very good sacrifice.
as you said, artemis comes in handy when there's no ecm mechs around. but generally the only time that'll be the case is against pugs who you can crush just as easily without artemis, so there's really no need.
also, if you learn the convergence ranges for srm's, non-artemis srm6's actually match the spread of artemis ones at point blank range, spread out more after ~100m, but then converge back at ~150-200. controlling your engagement range allows you to get comparable clustering without artemis
actually it's the same heat efficiency, since removing artemis lets you take more heatsinks, you're not wasting more slots on dhs, you're wasting more slots on artemis.
and while you may not notice being legged much now, it's an unnecessary sacrifice, when you can max out head/torsos/arms and still take 57 in each leg.
most importantly, if you do add jumpjets, you'll start taking fall damage, sometimes even when you're burning jj for a soft landing. you'll want the extra armor