What's considered good damage for a light.

I just put some caramel vanilla snus in and was planning on checking the official forum to see if my hiring hall post had gotten anything other than nameless faceless "propaganda" mails, of course it hadn't.

But doing this reminded me of something that's been bugging me, what's considered good damage for a light mech in this game.

Now I normally play locusts or spiders and occasionally jenners, the ember or the ECM raven and for most of them I'm not so happy to walk away with 450 dmg and anything under 5 assists and components destroyed.

But when I go and look at my team score I see half the time I've done pretty well or I'm in the top 4 for damage.

So am I putting myself down and doing half decently or are public matches just so bad that I'm just as bad as the dire whales and crabs that can't get over 100 dmg, or maybe World Of Tanks has corrupted me into thinking anything under 1k dmg is bad.

PS. Just on the clan thing, you lot wouldn't know one for someone who plays casual but is interested in the new CW and doesn't introduce itself like you're at a job interview. The official forum is either that or roll players both of which I cannot stand.

 

Damage is one of those funny things. You start out and it sucks, but the more you play, the more it starts going up. Then something weird happens eventually, it starts going down again since you get better at isolating components and getting kills instead of spreading the damage around.

"Good" damage is something subjective. If you did 400 damage and got 6 kills, then your shots were more productive than if you did 1500 damage and got 1 kill. However, generally I try to aim for a minimum of 500 damage in most lights while getting as many kills as possible.

 

In PUG I expect the same damage in a light that I would expect if I was in another class, though it depends on the build.

That being said, it depends on your team and high damage is not necessarily a good sign, except for your ego: the best games are those were everyone deals 300-400 damage and get 0-2 kills, not those where a vet carries a team of rookies with 1000+ damage and 7 kills.

As for the appreciation of your game, instead of numbers I find it better to rely on: did I waste my time? did I make use of the opportunities? did I make useless and risky moves? did I miss shots on a mech I could have destroyed in seconds? etc...

 

Are you Swede by any chance? Snus is not a common habit anywhere else but Scandinavia and that sounds like a portion of Thunder? Not that I'm and expert but...

It's hard to measure how efficient you play going by only damage, I'd consider your intended purpose on the battlefield first and then find the measure. For example, if I'm in my Kit Fox "Dealer" then my purpose is NARCing and scouting. Damage is very secondary with my single ERPPC. If you are a Jenner, you may be more oriented to interceptor role and chase down enemy lights or kneecapping/backstabbing larger mechs. Etc.

As part of a lance, you might do higher damage score as teamwork means you (for example) increase shock value in a light pack or use heavier mechs as distraction more efficiently.

 

Nope English, my friend got me some when he went to Sweden and I've been ""importing"" General White and Ettan Los ever since. And it is Thunder .

And all good answers so far, after quite a few straight losses in a row I've started thinking it doesn't really matter how well I do when it feels like a 1 vs 23 game.

 

I bet that makes people go, "WTF are you doing?" when your countrymen sees what you are doing.

Yeah, sometimes it doesn't matter what you do and as a light you can't carry (ok, unless you are Mason Grimm in a Super Chicken) an entire team. Fullfill your intended role and be happy with that.

This is a video of me NARCing, one win and one loss but still happy as I did what I was supposed to.


This is a Spider video, from before HSR and hitbox improvements. Pinpoint killing.


The Sarah Jenner event, 12 to 24 Jenners duking it out in memory of Sarah.


Keep in mind that the current solo queue (public game. not CW) has a lower ratio of "true believers" then normal and a far higher of non-teamwork players. Pretty much all of the teamworkers are trying on CW I'm guessing.

 

Never that fond of high numbers except as ego boosts and I'm usually at the top or close but that's an experience thing. Its usually a very good sign as @epikt said when the kills and damage are even as that implied everyone worked well together.

Numbers just rarely tell you a story for example (the give away is in the chat lines):



Totally unbonused KCB in which I counterattacked to blunt the enemy charge, several players nicely filled in so we were in a spearpoint without me saying anything and we ripped through them. I barely got a kill despite ripping open chest after chest of mechs because our TTK was ridiculously short and every time we killed one their firepower dropped. I know its not a light but I have 220pts damage over the second placed Direwolf and a really good pilot, point is damage rarely says anything at all about the battle beyond you survived a long time (probably because you let others take all the risk) but sometimes its something else. When I see a massive damage, particularly with low kills I usually ask questions.... like all those CW peeps with 3k damage and 4 kills.....

 

Coincidentally that match is one of the example why I just don't believe it when people say all the team workers are in CW as everyone played their role really well without a word being said or any trash talking. The other side did not deserve the score line either but then that's the problem with a result - it rarely tells you much about the battle itself.

 

It is worth reiterating something that was mentioned a bit, but you also do have some games where your mech will limit you, and it's not your fault. For instance, the best Jenner/Firestarter pilot in the world might still have trouble breaking 200 damage if he has a team of 11 LRM players who refuse to do anything but back into a corner. That's PUG life for you, always another way to feel pain. Just try to focus on playing your best in your role, and learning how to get every last speck of potential out of each chassis, and you'll do fine.

 

Or games where you just get cornered early on and taken out.

 

I just spent thirty minutes reading articles about snus- an interesting read!

On the subject of Light play... Lan is speaking the truth!

Though I've only just gotten into my Jenners, I will have a high-damage or many-kill game sometimes. But I most often feel satisfied with my performance when I pull off skillful maneuvers in that role, such as legging a few enemies in a row for my team to clean up, backstabbing an LRM-boat in the rear of the enemy formation (or any mech-butt caught unawares... Try this out, it's so much fun to be sneaky! And it's great practice, though best done with a lance or partner.), and being squirrelly in general so that I can scatter and distract the enemy team for their more efficient destruction.

 

Light damage is something that is subject. As many of my esteemed light pilot colleagues in this thread have mentioned; high damage doesn't necessarily equate to a better player. Especially if their kill count is low. Doing 1000 damage and 1 kill just means you spray all over the place. Doing 500 damage and 6 kills means you are one accurate MF who knows either how to kill steal or how to finish off an enemy quickly and efficiently.

Yes, we have 1000 damage kill clubs on the forums, and a few 1500 damage kill clubs but that is a "Look, I did it, I got in the club, got the tshirt". But really once that is done you focus on getting better and not bigger; especially in a light.

Don't measure your success by other peoples scores. Measure it by whether you won or lost and how many enemies you took down with you.

 

I prefer to look at it less as "Have I taken many enemies down with me..." and more, "Have I contributed to the victory in any meaningful way."
Case 1: If I push with an Atlas and then get focused down, as long as I lasted a while and allowed my team to fire unimpeded until my death - I don't care how much damage I did or how many kills I got.
Case 2: Light 'Mech on conquest. Even if do miniscule damage, if we win via cap points because that's what I was doing... or if we win on kills, but stopped the enemy from winning on cap because I decapped, again, don't care.

Both of those may end up with low damage, kills, and scores - but I still feel like what I did was important.
Likewise if I get cored in the first few second of the game to pinpoint gauss... well... obviously I contributed nothing more than sucking up someone's Gauss ammo...

 

It also depends on what mech you're in. A Jenner is going to have the capability of doing more damage than a spider with the same amount of combat time, due to the Jenner having more firepower.

Something like a SDR-5K should do low damage but have a lot of destruction.

A light player may also spend time providing ECM for the heavies, scouting, or capping, at which point you are helping the group but not dealing damage.

 

You can make a game out of it...I strapped the Clan Wolf warhorn onto my Ember. If it doesn't howl at least 3-4 times per game, then I had a shit game.

In the vein of "damage vs usefulness", there is one other metric beyond kills, and skribs just brought it up: component destruction. Sometimes, you may not get the damage, you may not get the kill, but you strip pieces off mechs left and right, taking weapons away from the enemy. It makes you a bit of an unsung hero, but that shit starts dictating the terms of a match quickly. You take the left torso off a Nova or Hellbringer, you've just ruined their match.

So, basically, the TL;DR version of this thread is that there's no real answer or goal to shoot for Just have fun, and burn/fight/kill.

 

But note that if you consistently die at sub 100 in anything other than a narc specialist then you really need to work a lot harder at your targetting, tactics and situational awareness.....

Had to say it after having gone through the last 4 matches where we were murdered and our lance got almost our only kills in each match ... sub 150 damage for most of our team.

When you have a lance soloing off at the start into the main enemy route from the drop off points (ignoring your request to join the other 2 lances then logged as soon as died) and half your team gets under 50 damage.... *shakes head*. They weren't even from bad units looking at their tickers.

The rest of my lance just called it and went off in disgust.

 

I do wonder what of this is bad play, and what is due to the HSR bugs that seemed to crop up with the CW patch?

That much is pretty bad.

 

My rule of thumb for a decent game is to do as much damage as the armor you bring. So in a light, I feel okay with 200ish, but if I'm dropping in a Direwolf, I would like to hit around 500-600 damage.

 

Thanks for the replies guys, I think in the Huggin I've found a mech that can both give me the damage to be happy and rend the other teams mechs apart.

Now I just need to find a way to rip of seat out of it so I can have more than 6.5 tons of ammo.

 

So if I go with one of those absurd builds that sacrifices all armor and efficiencies to get an alpha over 100 on a 50 tonner it should be easy to break the limit!

I think this is a good rule of thumb, though. Thanks for sharing it.