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Exclusively using Burst in the Heavy Hwatcha?

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Corporal Ravioli:
Thank you all for your informed responses. I've been quoting as the replies come in but you guys are getting too fast for me, so I'm just gonna post!

I failed to specify that in my initial post, but I'm mainly focusing on when utilizing the Hwatcha as a main weapon. If it's a secondary/panic weapon, I totally agree that it's only worth bringing Burst. As a main weapon, I just think that there's so much more potential within reach.


--- Quote from: Solidusbucket on January 18, 2017, 10:58:12 am ---I have experimented with heavy clip vs burst.
--- End quote ---
Note, I'd like to focus on Heavy Clip AND Burst. Burst is always going to trump Heavy damage-wise. Heavy Clip is for the utility.


--- Quote from: Solidusbucket on January 18, 2017, 10:58:12 am ---Burst, even at range, is preferred for me. Even when half the clip misses with burst it still gets more disables than heavy clip. This is my personal experience and attempts at using heavy clip as both gunner and pilot in various scenarios, ships, and levels of play.

--- End quote ---
One of my favorite facets of this game is how, even with a fairly rigorous competitive meta, personal preference and style does play a role on an individual level. My personal experience has led me to try to land as many rockets in as tight of a cluster as possible when at long range. I've been gaining the confidence to essentially snipe by leading the enemy with a dense packet of rockets towards a specific target on the vessel. I don't find myself having to rely on the AoE and missing half the shots when most or all of them hit dead-on. It's also more scary to receive a well-aimed stream than a cough when at long range, IMO.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi on January 18, 2017, 09:40:55 am ---Well, if you have even a single side stacked with more than one Hwacha, why bother engaging the enemy at anything more than point-blank range?
[...]
There's no point in hitting them from afar with Heavy Clip if it's just going to alert them to your presence, fire fewer rockets, and have less AoE spread. It pays to wait until you're close enough to give them a punch in the gut with the Burst Hwacha.

--- End quote ---

I agree that the one well-placed Burst volley is devastating, and that it pays to wait when the battle allows for it. What about if the enemy already knows where you are and is making moves to eliminate you? Say a Mobula/Spire plucking away at you from a decent range, or backpedaling away from a pair of brawlers? When on the defensive, giving them as hard of a time as possible as early as possible can discourage an aggressive attack, harass a member of a formation, or draw a line in the sand. This could just a be a contrast of the silent opportunist versus the loud and angry... keep your enemies close versus come up and get me. Doesn't it pay to be both?


--- Quote from: BlackenedPies on January 18, 2017, 09:41:54 am ---An alternative to gunner with heavy clip is spanner mallet buff burst engi. Buffed burst increases range through increased damage, and the spanner mallet give full repair power - which is especially useful on heavy guns. A well timed mallet can be the difference between winning or losing your gun and the engagement

--- End quote ---

This is a great suggestion. I usually fly on tri-engineer ships when the weapons are predictable and simple. As of late I've been affording to play Gunner to get my hours in, and have taken that as an chance to be diverse and opportunistic when flying with a crew I trust.

If it helps, my inspiration for this post came last night when flying on a Whirlwind/Banshee Banshee/Manticore Spire. I brought Burst, Heavy, and Greased. This allowed me to get a volley of Heavy off when I could, run to the Banshee for either Burst or Greased, and then stam the rest of the Hwatcha reload (if necessary) with Burst for the real whallop. The crew I flew with was an absolute treat, and facilitated the shooting style we decided on for that series of matches. The results left me warm and fuzzy, and with a real sense that I was being a /proactive/ Gunner with the support of our Pilot and Engineering/Engigunning team. As an aside, what are your thoughts on that ship loadout?

Fynx:
This is not a comment about low/medium level matches where you can do what you like and most likely you're going to get away with it.

It takes a number of very high level matches, players that focus on what they want to do, do it right, and a bit of ingenuity on your side to prove or disprove some sort of theory.

This answer is not a proof that heavy clip is useless in hwacha. Maybe you will find, one day, a repeteable situation where it is. More likely the game will die or get completely rebalanced, still.
Last of all, some questions can be answered only by statistics in specific situations and it's damn difficult to provide those.

It's an answer based on competitive and casual experience, but also lengthy discussions. And I probably forgot about a number of situations.


As of the time being, the only situation where heavy clip can be negotiated, is when you need to use hwacha as a close range defense weapon, rather than something for offense.

It may be hwacha on long range side of a sniping galleon, where gunner takes over the hwacha while some evil mobula gets into dangerous arming time of lumberjack. But hey, in most such situations, the huge majority of legit pilots will put another long range gun for better support and let's hope we can turn to close range side when we have to. If one of enemy ships is close range, it's already better to bring burst for engineer in the first place.

It may be hwacha on a long range spire that pretends to be a mobula (double art plus hades/merc). In most matches with long range ships enemy pilots will instantly switch to double mercury pyras, cheese pyras, double hades pyras, mercury mobulas, hades mobulas, meta galleons etc. while congratulating themselves the knowledge of how to bring proper ships in proper situations against proper enemies or because they wanted to. Assuming this situation didn't actually happen and we have some sort of hope that it's going to work, we'll have the gunner shooting one of the light guns usually from long range. But, since the hwacha sits idle, he might as well fire a heavy clip of hwacha occasionally. The problem is, either he's going to miss, or the enemy will intentionally dodge, or the hwacha will hit and not do anything, because it's heavy clip and not burst.

Finally, there may be a super weird situation where you need to stay at range for some reason (like first enemy just died, ally finishing off an enemy, we're waiting at their spawn), or charge to enemy spawn in a long range map where you just died and hope your ally will survive. At such times, you will have time to reload the hwacha before getting close to the enemy, so there's a tiny little little chance that it's going to help something, even on a hwachafish. Most likely though, you'll be wasting a gunner ammo slot instead of using something that has low probability of being useful, but still better than long range heavy clip hwacha (such as heatsink).

Otherwise, the most mistaken notion is shooting the charging enemies because they're still far away.
You're wasting your time getting close to them, not giving enough fire support to your ally. This also happens regularly in so-called high level matches.
Or they're going to get close much sooner than expected and you will die because no reloaded burst hwacha.
Or they're not coming any time soon anyway and you might as well be shooting a harpoon at a passing skywhale instead.

Unarmed Civilian:
Usually if you're carrying a hwacha, you typically want to be the aggressor and be on the offensive. Even if you're no the aggressor you still want it to hit hard since it has a whopping 14 second reload. If you're using Heavy Clip, compared to Burst you are reducing your potential damage output by 37.5%. If that doesn't sound like a huge deal, then I don't know what would.

Not to mention that one of the Hwacha's past nerfs was reducing the speed of its rockets, making it harder to snipe with Heavy Clip. This was on top of Heavy Clip being nerfed to have -25% clip size. You're better off trying to snipe with Charged, or just plain Burst.

Corporal Ravioli:

--- Quote from: Unarmed Civilian on January 18, 2017, 07:59:29 pm ---If you're using Heavy Clip, compared to Burst you are reducing your potential damage output by 37.5%.

--- End quote ---

Doesn't this rely on every rocket landing on target?

BlackenedPies:

--- Quote from: Corporal Ravioli on January 19, 2017, 09:20:36 am ---
--- Quote from: Unarmed Civilian on January 18, 2017, 07:59:29 pm ---If you're using Heavy Clip, compared to Burst you are reducing your potential damage output by 37.5%.

--- End quote ---

Doesn't this rely on every rocket landing on target?

--- End quote ---

Yes, but it's not counting the +50% burst radius: from 7m to 10.5. For normal hwatcha, full burst damage is dealt up to a 3.5m radius, and damage decreases linearly to 20% at 7m. With burst, this is increased to 5.25m full damage

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