May I present, "LMG - Light Machinist Guide for PvP"

[Kalia]

I've been doing a handful of frontlines on machinist and I completely agree with Lace about not starting ammo. It's a great lesson - starting with ammo will greatly delay your heat gain unless you're willing to lead with an early stun gun, which has the gauss barrel lockout drawback which greatly reduces your overall output.

However...

I do see what Geryth is getting at. Let's bring some numbers into the argument. Let's argue a situation where you go into enemy lines to get to an ice, solo, to try to get credit, and you get roughly 11 seconds of uptime on the ice before it shatters. Small ices have roughly 55k HP (could use an update if anyone knows the exact value), and are worth 70 points. That's roughly 785 damage per point. Forgive my makeshift "burst opener" and any errors in it - I'm not much of a Machinist. This assumes 5 QR uses (so no enliven) and 0 TP at the end for blank.



The damage gain over this VERY SPECIFIC AND IDEAL FOR 3 AMMO situation is massive - more than 5000 extra potency (4000 if you subtract stun gun as the 0-ammo rotation still has that available). It falls of very fast after the 11s mark though, but this is meant to be a hypothetical where the damage after 11s isn't important (since the ice is dead and you're now running for your life). Alternatively, if you're dueling a player, the 3-ammo rotation will kill significantly faster. Am I missing something?

Anyway the damage drop-off is huge without gauss (250 potency per combo action and 5% on top of that for 10 seconds, followed by the 2 hot shot ramp-up after to get back to 50 heat), but I think there is merit to 3 stored ammo + 5 QRs in overheat for outer-map skirmishes, 7 points can definitely be significant.

Edit: 2k potency on BTE with stun gun, not 1k, whoops

[Guesswhat]

Yes, the meta should be not to pre-load ammo.
Keeping heat at 50 or above at all times isn't hard, and is best for most sustained damage.

However, wit the "situational" nature of frontline there are times pre-load+stungun can come in handy, but don't rely or gamble on it.

Personally I find it fun to pre-load and use stungun at start of a frontline match, as it will usually burst my 1st target down. It's not the smartest thing to do, consideing overall damage, and loss of utility, but it's fun to try. I wouldn't do this if I knew the skill level of enemy teams was high, but in most cases they aren't. So why not lol. There often is a mindless monk or sam running straight to their stungun-death early on.

[Geryth]

snip

I'll load up advanced combat tracker and whack on some wolves den dummies and run some tests with both rotations, to see how your charts hold up. I might have slight differences in the rotation.

Other scenarios are when I can land all my burst on an enemy ice before too many enemies start showing up and then I high tail it out of there. With the amount of bots in this game, you'll almost never lose those points to them letting the ice reset because people just don't know about that mechanic and the bots don't care. I've tried many a time to let ices reset after killing enemies on them but dumb teammates just wail on it anyway.