This is a very good build. High on fire-power, armour and speed, with pretty good heat efficiency too. A quintessential Assault class brawler build. The only possible Achilles' Heel would be the short range of the MPLas, although you have the speed and armour to soak up the damage as you advance into striking range. I had a look at improving your builds range, without significantly degrading any of its other stats. This is what I came up with as a possible alternative build: An easy fix would be to downgrade the MPLas to standard MLas, but this would reduce your builds Alpha Strike by 5 points. To retain the original builds max. fire-power, but improve its firing envelope, downgrade the arm MPLas to MLas and drop a DHS. This allows you to upgrade the CT MPLas to a LPLas, thus bringing the max. fire-power back up to 59 and increasing the max. range of the builds Alpha Strike from 180 to 270 metres. Also, LPLas have a similar range profile to MLas, so they can still be linked together in the same firing group. To improve survivability, I looked at moving your AC20 ammo into the arms and then filling the remaining arm critical slots with DHS. This may seem like a bad move, but Stalkers generally tend to spread their received damage over their torso sections rather than their arms and legs. Also, filling all of the critical slots within a section reduces the chance of a critical hit cooking off any ammo by essentially increasing the chance of it hitting something else. Shave a bit of armour from the arms and legs and, along with the spare critical slots gained from dropping the DHS, you can add Artemis to the SRM6 and another ton of AC20 ammo. Artemis tightens up the missile spread, focusing the damage dealt on a smaller area, therefore increasing the chance of a critical hit on that area. As I said, your build is already very good, so this redesign might not be of any use to you. However, from what I've read online, MWO is currently something of a Sniperfest, so the sooner you can engage an enemy, the better, otherwise you could be picked off before you can get into optimal striking range. Hope this helps. Good hunting!
The main reason for using the MPL is for the quicker snap of damage compared to the ML. Given the extra pulse of damage from a ML might help you get a cricical, but when I need to focus fire and then roll my torso, MPL gives you a half second more of reaction time. The build does have a very strong range limitation that what you build out does not have.
A fair point, although the difference in firing duration between MLas and MPLas is only 0.25 seconds, not 0.5 seconds. I've had another think, this time leaving the fire-power alone and concentrating on survivability. As with my previous post on your thread, moving the AC20 ammo to the arms and filling all of the available critical slots with equipment reduces the chance of a critical hit striking the ammo. Currently, Dynamic Structural and Armour components do not count towards filling critical slots in that respect. So, with that in mind, I detuned the engine to an Standard 275 and shaved a ton or so of armour from the arms and legs, downgraded the Internal Structure to Standard and used any remaining tonnage/critical slots for DHS and Artemis for the SRM6. DHS compliment increases by 1, pushing the Heat Efficiency and Sustained DPS up to 33% and 5.03 respectively.
SPLs are 0.5; SLs, MPLs, and LPLs are 0.75, and MLs, LLs, and ER LLs are 1 second. In general, I find MLs to be better, especially on a build like this which is already hurting for range. For 1 ton, in 0.75 seconds you do 3.75 damage, vs. 6 for 2 tons. At 270m, you will still do 3.75 damage, whereas the MPL will do 3 damage. I personally find adding a LL to the mix of MLs to be a better option than going all MPLs (so in this case it would be LL+4xML). That's just a personal opinion, though. There is an advantage to the wub wub. I find that taking *some* armor off the arms and legs of a stalker build is rarely an issue. People normally shoot around the arms to hit the torso (just don't go so low that an errant shot will knock your weapons offline). However, I question whether it's a good idea to reduce the speed on a Mech with an optimal range of 180m.
