Ammo based weapons worthless?

[damian2472005]

i just reached the madcat and so far i must say only energy weapons save the day. even the 40 lrms of the madcat do nearby zero dmg to anything.. youre wastet tru them in a few salvoes and then that was it. most missions i runned out of ammo after like 5 minutes.. now you can say "spare it for the right moment" but some builds have nothing left then and there are insane ammounts of enemys. the edo mission i was left with a single small laser anything else was blown off or out of ammo while still leopards droped more and more lances.

[BLaaR]

Same here. Ballistic and missles are very under powered IMO. Same for PPC's. Gets kinda boring being forced to use ER or Pulse lasers.

[VanHoven]

the solid shot uacs are kinda useful on a chassis like the direwolf. when you get like 3 tons of ammo per weapon it never ran out for me. uac 20's hurt a lot. you get a lot of inaccuracy when you fire too fast hough.

missile weapons are a strict pass for me, too. hvnt researched all their tech though and on a missile specialist warrior they might be worthwhile. but why bother.

[enderbeta]

damian2472005 eredeti hozzászólása:

i just reached the madcat and so far i must say only energy weapons save the day. even the 40 lrms of the madcat do nearby zero dmg to anything.. youre wastet tru them in a few salvoes and then that was it. most missions i runned out of ammo after like 5 minutes.. now you can say "spare it for the right moment" but some builds have nothing left then and there are insane ammounts of enemys. the edo mission i was left with a single small laser anything else was blown off or out of ammo while still leopards droped more and more lances.

I didn't use the missiles much but I did find a lot of use out of the UAC2 and UAC5. I didn't use the larger guns as much because they supplemented my lasers. The lasers are powerful.

If you go all lasers though you need crazy amounts of heatsinks or you have to really pick and choose when and where to fire and with the number of bogies at once that isn't a luxury that is afforded.

I found that the UAC5 will shred targets pretty fast and generate far less heat while firing faster then medium lasers. I use my lasers to snipe from a distance and anyone that gets too close gets shredded with UC5 and my lasers. That way even while cooling down I'm always moving and always firing.

You also don't have to go too crazy with ammo in the game. Keep an eye out for salvage. Duck behind a obstacle switch to scanners, collect the salvage to reload, exit scanning pop out and resume your attack. It doesn't take long.

I agree about the missiles not having much utility. I didn't use missiles very much either. They take too long to lock on and require upgraded sensors and components to lock on without line of sight. If you're moving and lining up the shot the time it takes to lock on you could have simply fired the laser once or a UAC5 two or three times.

In my Timber Wolf I stripped the missiles out and loaded the shoulders up with double heatsinks and ammo. I had less overall firepower but it ton for ton my TImber Wolf was savage.

[Sir_Blaze]

A lot of Ammo based are useful as they are extremely heat efficient, LBX's and UAC's especially, LRM's are good for indirect fire especially when you can decrease spread as there's a good chance of head shots, SRM's are fairly strong short range punch, the down side to ammo based weapons is needing to use a fairly decent amount of ammo due to the nature of the games play,

PPc's were always underpowered even in TT what made them good was the negative to hit modifiers that they gave for the rest of the turn that mechs hadn't gone got, unfortunately that doesn't translate too well into a video game and so are fairly undesirable.

lasers tend to be high heat for their weight and damage so have their own issues such as requiring extra heat sinks to stay fighting.

after all that is said and done, on the battlefield you will find crates that will replenish your ammo back to 100% and using the repairbays will also restore your ammo to 100%

if you are going to go a ballistic build though you're probably better off to tweak the build in the mechlab, adding extra ammo on some of the weapons ( i found the UAC 2&5's and LBX 2&5's to have enough for a mission without additions) 1 ton of their ammo is fairly high where as the 20's are much much lower so you will need more
with LRM and SRM's the ammo per ton is exactly the same no matter the launcher so you have to work it out on how many missiles you shoot to ammo and you generally want enough for 20-25 shots ( in other games 10-15 is plenty) but engagements tend to be longer with more mobs in clans so you do want that extra even with battlefield finds and repairbay resupplies.

admittedly i tend towards laser boats in this game as my preferred SRM boats are unavailable ( i like 6-8 SRM 6's on a mech with a few m'lasers ) but in this game that means spending a load of mech experience i'd prefer to use else were and not a lot of omnipods allow for that type of loadout either.

all in all you could probably get a very decent ballistic loadout that wouldn't need extra heat sinks but you'd be wanting to use 3+ different omni variants to get it working well.

though knowing what i do about the game i'd aim for specific mechs and try to run 4 of them to farm the mech xp and skip a load of main chassis ( i didn't realise that till near the end so i bought 1-2 of every mech along the way but at the end i bought 4 timber wolves, then 4 warhawks , and then bought 3 direwolves and skipped all the inbetween mechs as they didn't suit the way i was building my mechs allowing a bit more flexibility
my warhawk and direwolf builds were made up of 3 different omnipod varients each.

[Sir_Blaze]

@enderbeta i took out he LRM's and through in SRM6's on my timberwolves and they were quite decent having a goodly amount of punch

[FunkyBacon]

Dual UAC/10's on the Hellbringer works quite nice. Ballistics gets a generous amount of ammo per ton in this game so you don't need that much per gun.
Tho I can agree that missiles are very starved for ammo. A UAC can live on 2 tons of ammo for nearly a whole mission but a missile systems runs dry very quickly with just 2 tons of ammo.

[Harukage]

LBX and UAC are pretty good. But Mostly 2s and 5s. 10s are situational, and 20s will make you take too much damage.
ERPPC are a blast. Not sure how they are underpowered. Warhawk with 4 ERPPC is probably my favority assault here.

[enderbeta]

Sir_Blaze eredeti hozzászólása:

@enderbeta i took out he LRM's and through in SRM6's on my timberwolves and they were quite decent having a goodly amount of punch

True but for the weight of the missile launchers and amount you can add in another smaller gun and have just the one bit of ammo. Two UAC5 firing on the target in alternating firing for a interval of about .5 seconds between shots seemed like more damage faster then trying to mix in a third weapon type.

I'm sure it would work fine with lasers and missles but I don't know if I would go with all three in one mech. Too jack of all trades. It's not really possible in this game but in Battletech I liked to reserve missiles for a long range missile boat that would hang back and lob off the missiles while the other mechs went in for the direct kill covered by the fire support.

This really makes me wish Battletech got more content now.

[swordsman422]

I'm going to confess that while the Timberwolf will always be my favorite battlemech, I have always sucked in it and the Summoner better matches my play style. I get more mileage out of the LBX with cluster rounds than I do the PPC, and that's been true since Mechwarrior 2.

[Inverted Polarity]

Ballistic weapons seem fine.

LRM's definitely need a buff as they don't seem to do a whole lot of damage.

[striker2521]

PPCs are also pretty forgiving on how they hit. I was reliably one shotting mechs with cockpit shots witha dual PPC build on a timber wolf. SO while they wont chunk through armor as quickly as a laser build there still VERY effective if you can hit things like the cockpit as 2 shots are generally enough to either take out the cockpit all together or on some of the tankier mechs remove all its armor and put it to red health.

[Kraig]

Agreed, I tried several variants of missiles and ballistics but they always seem strictly inferior to energy weapons.

50 Small ER laser spam is stupid, but the game thinks it's awesome.

[Kraig]

striker2521 eredeti hozzászólása:

PPCs are also pretty forgiving on how they hit. I was reliably one shotting mechs with cockpit shots witha dual PPC build on a timber wolf. SO while they wont chunk through armor as quickly as a laser build there still VERY effective if you can hit things like the cockpit as 2 shots are generally enough to either take out the cockpit all together or on some of the tankier mechs remove all its armor and put it to red health.

You know PPC are energy weapons (basically lasers) right?

[striker2521]

Kraig eredeti hozzászólása:

striker2521 eredeti hozzászólása:

PPCs are also pretty forgiving on how they hit. I was reliably one shotting mechs with cockpit shots witha dual PPC build on a timber wolf. SO while they wont chunk through armor as quickly as a laser build there still VERY effective if you can hit things like the cockpit as 2 shots are generally enough to either take out the cockpit all together or on some of the tankier mechs remove all its armor and put it to red health.

You know PPC are energy weapons (basically lasers) right?

im aware of what they are but when i refer to something as a laser build or laser boat i mean ER or Pulse lasers or binaries (MWO and mercs)

[xt6wagon]

LRMs are great. Punch holes in the armor and enjoy the endless crits they provide.

Downside is they hit nearly every location so expect a LRM10 to hit for a point or two in a given spot. LRM60 kills fast in MW5 mercs but MW5 clan missions are a bit long to try and feed 4XLRM15 or more.