So, the AC/2 had its fire time cut to 0.5, which ups its DPS to 4. And now there is the Cataphract chassis, with the CTF-4X variant which has 4 ballistic hardpoints. So.......
......I instantly decided to build this 16 DPS mech.
After a bit of testing, I realized it was easy to overheat. All the extra weight of the AC/2's, at 6 a pop and another at least 4 in ammo, made it difficult to stack the heatsinks up without sacrificing armor to a ludicrous degree. But I did have an absurd amount of critical slots remaining.
Double heatsinks to the rescue!
This helped a good bit, but I was still conserving ammo a bit too much to use the guns to really terrify the enemy. When you start getting hit twice a second, rocking your view around, it kind of frazzles you, and you panic, and you start to make mistakes. This especially becomes true after the cool-as-a-cat, pro pilots who aren't so phased by the intimidation of rocking or the damage, notice that they are actually taking ALOT of damage. Either pilots are frazzled from the attack and rocking alone, or they are quickly frazzled by the thought "Oh &^%$, I need to get away from this guy's DPS or I'm done". Regardless, quad AC/2 has a way of throwing people off kilter.
So to really stack this psychology to my advantage, I had to have the ability to be relentless. If I had to pause in an attack to cool off, then I now appear vulnerable and not so intimidating. So no running out of ammo or overheating. This is a pretty tall order given the weight of the guns. For the weight of 4 AC/2's, you could have 4 medium lasers and 20 heatsinks, a package which would never overheat. But the DPS would only be 5 vs 16, and it would be delivered over time to numerous areas.
But what do we have in adundance on this 'Phract? Critical slots.
So on goes the Ferro-fibrous. I cut 20 armor each on the legs to gain an extra ton and threw on more ammo and more heatsinks.
Guess what? EVERY crit slot is filled now at a full 70 tons with 8 ammo stacks, a 210 standard with 8 double heatsinks plus another 8 added in for a grand total of 16 double heatsinks.
The very next game after I adjusted it to this configuration, I ran a match with ~680 damage, 5 kills, 1 assist, won handily, and even ran out of ammo.
It was really something else to come out the clear winner after staring down an Atlas from orange armored core and just having a slug fest.
It was neat to have my theory fit closely to the results. There is no other solid explanation for other players reactions to my attacks other than what I described. It rocks your screen madly and you realize you are taking a ton of damage. Proceed to spaz out and play poorly. Die.
The next step is to max out this chassis with an XL 255, which would provide 2 additional double heatsinks from the engine, but take 6 extra crit slots from being an XL, ultimately leaving the heatsinks the same, while giving an extra 45 power, pushing the speed up to 59 from 48 and greatly boosting the acceleration. Mind you, I don't even have the basic accel and decel boosts yet, so all of these things combined will make this Gattling mech a terrifying machine.
Try it out guys.
edit: In all my chart reading and maths-ing, I made a bad-bad, so I fixed it
Edited by Analytic D, 19 January 2013 - 09:40 PM.