Good ole Trenchbucket.

Well just a heads up, I’m playing MW:Online. have been pairing up with some friends. Not say we are the most successful bunch of oddballs but we are having fun… 🙂

Anyway, patch notes for 19 Feb 2013 are here. Some thoughts, note that I didn’t have time to get in game yet today. Addition of the Trebuchet and Alpine maps are the big items.

Le Trench Bucket

Trebuchet, I took a look over.. if it wasn’t for the dedicated Missile slots, it could look like a Hunchback clone. Only, it has the potential to go faster (and carry less stuff), and some has Jump Jets, which Hunchies don’t get at all.

With most of the weapons in the arms, it’ll likely suffer from the Centurion disease — de-arming. Centurion’s model makes it easier to de-arm the mech, so it remains to be seen how easy it is to de-arm the Trebuchet. Overall, I’m not overly impressed with the Trebuchet, but having a dedicated missile platform is opening up avenues.

Alpine

Alpine, OTOH, remains to be seen. An overhead is here. I don’t quite like the way the Eastern base is in such defensive positions, but the scale of the map is not shown. By repute, it’s large, so it might not be such a problem. Hopefully it’s a big map so that the current meta of brawler mechs can be more balanced… I personally is more a ranged fighter. Meaning, 500+ meter is where I prefer to be, either Gauss/ ER PPC sniping or LRM dumping.

Other Adjustments

The much anticipated ELO-based matchmaking got yanked back because the solo players are taking too long to matchmake, so that went back out…

Centurion, a favourite.

Centurion tweaks are interesting. I prefer the 9D version myself, having gotten it while it was on sale. That’s a good mech, with the big-engine option, so it could — and I did — pace a basic Commando and thus in range to shoot at it (I smacked it with AC10 and SRM6 fire.. I think the guy must be quite annoyed something twice the weight could keep up).

Now, the 9A and 9AL are uprated to a 275 engine, still not quite good enough but granting the extra heat sink. The YLW however, gains the massive 300 engine both standard and XL.. of which the XL version gives it the ground speed of a unmodified Commando/ Raven, while packing an AC20 AND some addition Lasers, nearly full armour, enough ammo to last a game, all while on SHS (which you can upgrade if you got the C-Bills). That’s… impressive. Add on top the Hero-Mech status, with the 30% extra C-Bills.. I think I going to swap back to the AC20 tonight. 🙂

Other than that, the torso twist and turning rate increases for the 9A, 9AL and YLW versions may yet make it more relevant to turning fights against lights, which might turn some of them into good light-mech hunters (9A, with 3 SRM6s and an LB-10X? Possible to fit… better with a 250XL too). Slower to accelerate, faster to brake.. might get some getting used to, since I’m running a ER PPC 9AL at the moment.

Narc Improvements: Still useless.

PPC disabling of ECM: Works against the ECM Atlas, but not likely to work that great against the light. Would be nice if a near miss would also disable the ECM, that’ll go a long way to levelling  the ECM field. The ECM Atlas would just become a bit more vulnerable, but likely not change very much since PPCs still aren’t that common due to heat concerns. Overall, nice but may not have big effect.

Increase crit chances for flamers, MGs and LB-X: Well that’s nice to do something for the flamers and MG. Have to see the effects. The MG Spider might become more useful. LB-X cannon I’m normally using for the Flak effect.. easier to hit things. So the increase is just added bonus.

Sensor Module improvements: I don’t think there’s much of an effect. If the ECM mech is gunning for me, a Light ECM would clear the 20~70m really quick. The only non-light ECM won’t worry so much about that distance. If they aren’t gunning for me, they will get out of detection range very fast. So there’s really still a very narrow window to nail the slippery bastards…

Other stuff: looks to be a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, which is nice to see.

Overall it looks to be a set of incremental improvements. Good to see continual effort on this.