I ended up completely retooling my CTF-0XP. The meta build of 4 med lasers and an ac20 is probably good in organized teams, or on FP maps, but it's just very inconsistent in PUGs. Sometimes nobody wants to push, or they start to push and the second someone fires back they run away, and when you can only fight within 400m or so, you tend to be pretty committed to the fight. I had a few excellent rounds in it, but I had a lot of terrible ones too.
So I gave up on having ballistics on this one, which is unfortunate, but in exchange I have 2 large lasers and 2 large pulse lasers. I stripped off a pretty good amount of leg armor to make it fit, and to jam in as many heat sinks as possible, ending up with something like 1.3 cooling efficiency. I do get ghost heat if I fire all 4 at once, but if I start the pulses after the LLs I can avoid that, and with the different beam durations it actually kinda works out. If I can manage to avoid the ghost heat the cooling is actually pretty good. I still have the option of a 40 damage alpha, although if I fire it as a true alpha it's pretty hot.
With this setup I've been getting pretty consistent 600-800 damage in matches, and I've yet to lose my legs, so I think it was ok to strip that armor. I seem to be just maneuverable enough to be able to get pesky lights off me, and not having to worry about getting my torso aimed at enemies means I can get my shots off quicker and get back into cover/shield. Speaking of shielding, although I'm not very good at it during trades, this chassis makes shielding pretty easy, and I've been able to retreat under very heavy fire thanks to that, although I usually end up losing an arm, or at least the lasers on it. Obviously I still need to get more disciplined at not overextending.
Of course, the cataphract is not the ideal laser vomit chassis, but long range coupled with ECM is nice. The worst part of this build is the super low arm mounts, if there's a slight bump in the ground there's a good chance my laser will hit it instead of the enemy. This makes trading difficult, but then, it was difficult with ballistics too.
I'm trying to decide now, once I have the cbills, which CTF to buy next. I know one comes with an XL engine, which may be a good idea, as I could swap it between cataphracts, but that's only worthwhile if the chassis variant itself is decent. Although I wonder, are there actually 3 worthwhile cataphract variants, or should I just buy the best value so I can elite the chassis, and maybe sell off the other two.
Do you guys find you actually use all three variants of a chassis you used to elite it, or do you usually stick to 1 or 2? I'm thinking I might sell off my blackjack-DC, as it doesn't get jumpjets like the other two, and there's actually not much special about it.
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Topic: Mechwarrior Online (Read 108353 times)