"Meta" based builds contribute nothing to the team (and how to make a build)

[Poisenbery]

I was just pugging with some players who were using regular, team based builds when we had 4 man. It was really good because we all very clearly had our own defined roles to play. Mine was hoard clear, with the Arc Thrower. I had a peace maker sidearm and Liberator Explosive to deal with anything that got close to me. Stragems were Eagle Airstrike for clearing buildings, Railcannon shot for deleting heavies that were a little too close, and Airbust Strike for softening up breaches.

Games were fantastic and we were handling everything with ease, because we all were specialized to deal with specific things. All of the bases were covered.

One of the players left after a few missions, and for some reason....the other 2 players decided to use those "Meta" builds. Shield, Laser, Railgun, and something for buildings.

I noticed right away that the teamwork we had before and the synergy we had in build was instantly lost. I was already dealing with hoards with Arc Thrower, but for some reason, they were firing into the crowd with their shotguns, on targets that I was already killing by myself. IE, they were wasting all of their ammo.

We had a "Split up to cover objectives" thing going on, and whenever I noticed a lot of red near their positions, I would always move to cover them.

when they ran the "meta builds," they essentially ONLY had high single target damage, and no way to deal with groups of enemies. they were getting killed during their reloads and it seemed like they didn't even know how to position themselves.

Every time I came to their aid, the scene was a clusterf***.

That's kind of when it hit me: the "meta" build is fantastic for a stealthy, solo play session, but it contributes absolutely NOTHING to team play.



To be effective in teamwork, your kit cannot consist of purely "Big Number." If everyone is a jack of all trades, then your overall team strength is very weak, and the game will seem much harder than it is. Ants are such a strong species because they can hyper specialize into certain roles. This is how this game is supposed to be approached.


I think the BEST type of build focuses on one specific strategy, and using weapons/stragems to cover the weaknesses.

For Example: My strategy is to use the Arc Thrower to control hoards. However, the weapon has 2 main problems:
1.) It's slow at killing heavy targets
2.) It will almost always miss in close range

So now, my focus is on solving these 2 problems. Problem 1 is easy, I just bring something that can instantly delete large targets. I pick RailCannon Shot.

Problem 2 is a little more interesting. I actually bring the Liberator Explosive, and the Senator sidearm, because it seems to me that they have very good stagger on enemies. I don't have to necessarily KILL the enemy to solve the arc thrower problem, I just need a way to increase my distance from it.

So now I have my general strategy, and my weapons/stragems picked out to cover the weaknesses. We still have some extra slots open though!

Since my main playstyle is clearing hoards, it would make sense to get more stragems that allow me to do that. This is from personal experience with Arc Thrower, there is one situation where it struggles: and that is a breech or bot drop that consists mainly of large size enemies. So, with this in mind, I bring something that can deal with this specific situation: Orbital Airbust Strike. Now, when I see large enemies coming out of the ground, I don't have to panic, I can just kill them.


If you are counting, there is still an extra slot open. I just bring something that can destroy buildings and bug tunnels. Literally, anything. It's a free slot so I can just have fun with that.



So...to summarize:
1.) Jack of all trades is good for stealthy solo, but bad for teamwork
2.) Focus your build around 1 specific weapon or strategem
3.) Identify weaknesses of your strategy and fill the other slots with stragems that cover that weakness
4.) Find out what roles are already being fulfilled and try to find a role that isn't' already being covered

[McDinglefart]

Originally posted by Monk:

Originally posted by Wacky Jack:

If you played higher difficulties, you'll know how chaotic it can become. And it's not unusual for some to fail realize that 7+ is a kitting game and sometimes you just need to push forward to close stalker nest or destroy eggs instead of wasting respawns fighting in one spot for 5 minutes with a horde triggering new breaches.
At some point you have multiple chargers, titans and whole screen of hunters jumping on you. You need to move. Arc makes you slower. It's fine snd it is great agai stvrobots, but for bugs I like rail more.

See this backs up my point, that you think 7+ has to be a kiting game shows how bad a full team with railgun and shields is.

Helldive can easily be controlled and done fast with a balanced group, playing as a team. I am talking random players here, not a fixed group.

It's all about covering each other's weakness', which heavily limits breaches.

I find a good team needs atleast 1 railgun (heavy armour) 1 autocannon (fast anti medium armour), then you'll want a pick from grenade launcher, flamer, mg/stalwart or arc with careful team work, vs bots you'll want a Recoiless / eat8 to counter drop ships, 4th is dealers choice.

By sticking together, with a mixed load out, no wasted slots on a shield or guard dog you have 4 extra strategems to make use of, which goes a long way to not needing to run away, or spend 5 minutes on every fight, plus, if someone dies go down, you can very easily call them back in on their equipment.

If only that would work in random groups. In reality there will always be players who picks unnecessary fights, triggering patrols without a good readon, wasting time and game becomes progressively harder and I'm forced to push forward and show initiative to finish the objectives and avoid running out if time before extraction.
When a team is not objective focused, but choose to farm bugs like it's some alien swarm game, I just choose to ignore neverending fights and push forward showing everyone an example.

Some matches are ok, some are not.
It only takes 1 fool who think he'll accomplish something by shooting at every patrol he sees to ruin smooth run.

Whatever builds your team is running won't matter in cases like this.

[McDinglefart]

Originally posted by Monk:

Originally posted by Wacky Jack:

That's why you airstrike first to kill. Then you use nade from distance to close burrow. You don't need to get into burrow spawn zone (be next to hole). If some bugs blocks your way, mag dump your way in with orimary. Sprint, move around, dive. If your shield is taken down, it'll recharge and be up again pretty quickly. Move around to avoid being surrounded and path blocked. Sometimes if I see I can't reach a burrow and bugs blocking my grenade, I just 500kg it.
Just because you lack skill, doesn't mean others aren't capable too.

And I'm pretty sure shield blocks more than 2 hits. I haven't counted, but I'm pretty sure it at least holds against 2 stalkers hits. It block 5 or 6 smaller bugs hits and recharges within couple of seconds.

How do you close 7 bug holes with a max of 6 grenades if you are not praying the aur strike closes a couple, plus you said you use incendiary grenade to help control small groups of bugs...

Because most of the time I have at least 1 teammate backing me up with his own grenades helping to close.
But sometimes I do it solo if team moves towards objective and I find a nest somewhat not too far away knowing I can deal with it myself. I can time 500kg to drop on 2 holes sometimes too.

Idk, I just do. It's not a big deal to me. Sometimes it takes several circles to do, especially when nest spawns vomiters who 1 shots you. This is where railgun comes to help 1 shooting those things.

[Poisenbery]

Originally posted by Wacky Jack:

You think arc is better compared to railgun and this makes you no meta or something?
Arc is good for bots, railgun is better for bugs. Arc is already meta.
What are your suggestions? Flamethrower, anti material, eat? They all are bad alternatives.
No shield? Why? It's broken and OP. Pretty much triples your health at minimum.

Arc is probably the worst weapon against bots. It requires that you stand out in the open and fire into crowds. That is a death sentence against enemies that can shoot back at you.

META means "Most Effective Tactic Available" and this game has too many different situation for there to be a "1 Size Fits all" solution.

It's like I was trying to say: people need to approach loadouts for solving specific problems rather than trying to cover all cases at once.

[McDinglefart]

Originally posted by Poisenbery:

Originally posted by Wacky Jack:

You think arc is better compared to railgun and this makes you no meta or something?
Arc is good for bots, railgun is better for bugs. Arc is already meta.
What are your suggestions? Flamethrower, anti material, eat? They all are bad alternatives.
No shield? Why? It's broken and OP. Pretty much triples your health at minimum.

Arc is probably the worst weapon against bots. It requires that you stand out in the open and fire into crowds. That is a death sentence against enemies that can shoot back at you.

META means "Most Effective Tactic Available" and this game has too many different situation for there to be a "1 Size Fits all" solution.

Learn to position yourself and prioritize targets that can rocket you. And use shield backpack to tank those hits.
It shoots fast, does mid damage, but ignores armor and hits 2-3 enemies with a single strike. And you can abuse environment to hit tanks/turrets. Just git good.
It's awkward weapon to use tho. Really changes perspective how you approach combat.

[Nick Walker II]

Originally posted by Katitoff:

Originally posted by Captain Michael Vulpi:

OPs entire discussion is about their swarm clearing build and then Wacky Jack is saying the rail gun is better the arc gun against bugs not specifically the big guns so they are very much implying they are in fact using it against swarms

I'm also running Arc thrower and I have to say, I take down chargers with it faster than meta clowns who power leveled on defense missions.

These people should wear triple-padded helmets for their own safety.

Gotta love how in an effort to own the elitist meta users, these guys end up becoming elitist dickwads themselves. It's beautiful seeing how annoying both sides are getting.

[Miro]

The way I see it, half the team needs to be good for killing heavies, the other half for hordes I ended up finding what people are calling meta on accident, not because someone told me. It was mostly because i hated dealing with heavies so much that i wanted to tailor my build to dealing with them, coincidentally it ended up being shield, laser, railcannon and railgun... but i only really use that for bots, i swap some of the stratigems for bugs in order to try and account for the differences in the enemy tactics. so i pack more bombs there.

I do agree there is a problem with stacking 4 of the same build in one match can be extremely problematic, because you are limited to only 4 stratigems, just because the "meta" is good for stealth plat and maybe dealing with heavy enemies, doesn't make it the best for everyone to use at the same time, we shouldn't act like stacking them is a good thing, but i also don't feel like we should bash the build too hard either cuz its still undeniably good at something, it just shouldn't be treated like the "be all end all" like some are treating it. if you have a 4 stack of my build, you have no horde clearing potential which is why we need other people with sentries, explosives and airstrikes to account for that shortcoming.

TLDR:
1. the build people talk about is good, but not for every situation
2. there needs to be some level of team composition
3. the meta build is only good for hit and run tactics, not good if you get overwhelmed which is why you need horde clearing builds too
4. 4 stacking 1 build is a bad idea.

[Bill Waggoner]

Originally posted by Poisenbery:

I was just pugging with some players who were using regular, team based builds when we had 4 man. It was really good because we all very clearly had our own defined roles to play. Mine was hoard clear, with the Arc Thrower. I had a peace maker sidearm and Liberator Explosive to deal with anything that got close to me. Stragems were Eagle Airstrike for clearing buildings, Railcannon shot for deleting heavies that were a little too close, and Airbust Strike for softening up breaches.

Games were fantastic and we were handling everything with ease, because we all were specialized to deal with specific things. All of the bases were covered.

One of the players left after a few missions, and for some reason....the other 2 players decided to use those "Meta" builds. Shield, Laser, Railgun, and something for buildings.

I noticed right away that the teamwork we had before and the synergy we had in build was instantly lost. I was already dealing with hoards with Arc Thrower, but for some reason, they were firing into the crowd with their shotguns, on targets that I was already killing by myself. IE, they were wasting all of their ammo.

We had a "Split up to cover objectives" thing going on, and whenever I noticed a lot of red near their positions, I would always move to cover them.

when they ran the "meta builds," they essentially ONLY had high single target damage, and no way to deal with groups of enemies. they were getting killed during their reloads and it seemed like they didn't even know how to position themselves.

Every time I came to their aid, the scene was a clusterf***.

That's kind of when it hit me: the "meta" build is fantastic for a stealthy, solo play session, but it contributes absolutely NOTHING to team play.



To be effective in teamwork, your kit cannot consist of purely "Big Number." If everyone is a jack of all trades, then your overall team strength is very weak, and the game will seem much harder than it is. Ants are such a strong species because they can hyper specialize into certain roles. This is how this game is supposed to be approached.


I think the BEST type of build focuses on one specific strategy, and using weapons/stragems to cover the weaknesses.

For Example: My strategy is to use the Arc Thrower to control hoards. However, the weapon has 2 main problems:
1.) It's slow at killing heavy targets
2.) It will almost always miss in close range

So now, my focus is on solving these 2 problems. Problem 1 is easy, I just bring something that can instantly delete large targets. I pick RailCannon Shot.

Problem 2 is a little more interesting. I actually bring the Liberator Explosive, and the Senator sidearm, because it seems to me that they have very good stagger on enemies. I don't have to necessarily KILL the enemy to solve the arc thrower problem, I just need a way to increase my distance from it.

So now I have my general strategy, and my weapons/stragems picked out to cover the weaknesses. We still have some extra slots open though!

Since my main playstyle is clearing hoards, it would make sense to get more stragems that allow me to do that. This is from personal experience with Arc Thrower, there is one situation where it struggles: and that is a breech or bot drop that consists mainly of large size enemies. So, with this in mind, I bring something that can deal with this specific situation: Orbital Airbust Strike. Now, when I see large enemies coming out of the ground, I don't have to panic, I can just kill them.


If you are counting, there is still an extra slot open. I just bring something that can destroy buildings and bug tunnels. Literally, anything. It's a free slot so I can just have fun with that.



So...to summarize:
1.) Jack of all trades is good for stealthy solo, but bad for teamwork
2.) Focus your build around 1 specific weapon or strategem
3.) Identify weaknesses of your strategy and fill the other slots with stragems that cover that weakness
4.) Find out what roles are already being fulfilled and try to find a role that isn't' already being covered

Sure, sure, except no. I supported a player last night using that exact meta build. He was clearing ♥♥♥♥ with the arc thrower and I stayed behind him slapping down anything that got close.

Whenever a charger would show up I would delete his leg armor in 2 shots making chargers almost as easy as a regular mob, especially when more than 1 would spawn in(difficulty 8). Your claim that meta builds do nothing for group play is uninformed at best, and idiotic at worst. Meta builds have their place alongside off meta builds and they work perfectly when someone plays the role they assigned themselves. Railgun and arc thrower can coexist and make the mission fun as hell.

Your claim of railcannon taking care of the large mobs must be on difficulty 3 or 4 cause anything past 7 will see you dealing with a couple bile titans and 3-4 chargers at once.

This incessant dogging on what works best is like jealous children not wanting someone else to have fun cause they said so.

Go bother someone else.

[Lvl1 Goblin]

Originally posted by Bill Waggoner™:

Whenever a charger would show up I would delete his leg armor in 2 shots making chargers almost as easy as a regular mob, especially when more than 1 would spawn in(difficulty 8). Your claim that meta builds do nothing for group play is uninformed at best, and idiotic at worst. Meta builds have their place alongside off meta builds and they work perfectly when someone plays the role they assigned themselves. Railgun and arc thrower can coexist and make the mission fun as hell.

That's my main gripe when not playing with friends. The synergies don't come up enough in public games. You absolutely don't want to be the arc thrower user on helldive with teammates that won't soften chargers.

[McDinglefart]

Why people meta?
I just tried to use orbital ems and gas. WHAT A F DISAPPOINTMENT!
That's why nobody uses this crap. You feel naked and useless.
Imagine strike one tiny space to kill and waiting 75 seconds do it again! I can use 5 eagle cluster bombs in a row with only a couple seconds cooldown, then again after 2 minutes cooldown to spam it again. I tried playing with gas and ems and failed the mission miserably where my usual meta build would've granted easy victory.
This game has terrible balance. Don't ask people to downgrade themselves to crap with useless strategems.
The only gas and ems use is, to drop directly on a breach. But it's so niche and suffer from long cooldown, it's just useless.

[Monk]

Ems is for control and gas / napalm work wonders on breaches.

[McDinglefart]

Originally posted by Monk:

Ems is for control and gas / napalm work wonders on breaches.

You don't need EMS if targets are dead after continous barrage of eagles.