Recognition Guide: IlClan Vol 29
Witty intro goes here.
Dragoon Battle Armor: I will be completely honest, I read the TRO entry for this one and then did not even look a single time at the record sheet. This was a good choice by past me, because I am immeasurably disappointed. With one Ground MP and three Jump MP, the mobility is fine but everything else here is not great. Five points of armor is just Not Enough for a medium suit. A Flamer is an alright battle armor weapon in a vacuum, but the Light Mortar is not. If the range was triple what it was, it'd be okay, but having effectively no short range is awful (Minimum and Short are the same range, meaning we're looking at +1/+2/+4 for ranges), and on reflection I have a really interesting question about what happens when you shoot it at range 0. I feel like my instinctive conclusion is “+2 to hit” which I even worse. The BV at 167 for a squad of four and 225 for a squad of five is very aware that the offense on this unit is writing checks that its offense can't cash, let alone its defense, but that doesn't stop it from being a “try a different unit” level of bad. D
Dragoon Battle Armor (Upgrade): This is absolutely an upgrade in every sense and meaningfully competes with some other Medium suits that don't go hard into armor. Seven points of armor is enough to survive most secondary weapons, which is The Benchmark for a decent Medium suit even if it's light for the maximum potential of the class. The Flamer has been replaced with a Micro Pulse Laser. The Mortar is still bad, but the MiPL is an extremely good battle armor weapon and I'm here for it. There's even a credible answer for “why should I use this instead of an Elemental III?”, that being that it's over 25% cheaper. In real terms that's only about 90 BV, but sometimes you're crunched for points and this can be where you find it. It's not better, but it has a use and sometimes you can't ask for more. C+
Firefly FFL-5A: There are a handful of 'Mechs I really want to like but that are just absolutely crippled by some design choices that keep them from being something that I will actually pick for a serious effort. Every kind of Firefly prior to this one is one of those. The 5A is one I might take on a lark sometimes, having overcome the worst sin of its forebears by adding more jump. This 'Mech is 30 tons and move 6/9/8, thanks to a Partial Wing. This gets it over the critical threshold to reach +4 TMM while jumping, so it'll have use as a scout and skirmisher even if that's the only thing you're getting out of it. Offense is mixed, with a decent if not spectacular battery of ER Mediums (three, one in each torso), supplemented by a single LRM 5s with a ton of ammo. Unfortunately, the ammo is in the opposite torso from the launcher, but the impact here is mitigated by the fact that if you're taking crits in either torso you're basically done for already, thanks to the XL Engine. The LRM and AMS ammo is CASE'd, which means precisely dick in a pick up game but might make your pilot feel better. Ten doubles and the Partial Wing dissipation bonus is enough for an exactly heat neutral jump when you're only using jump and offense. You can just barely heat up if the Anti-Missile System in the left arm triggers. Between the extra TMM you get from jumping over running and the almost exactly heat neutral nature even in optimum range, this is... honestly this is kinda boring, but it's an effective kind of boring that contributes little offense and even less sudden inescapable tragedy like the older 5/8/4 Firefly variants do. BV is 996, which is low enough that I'd consider it even though I'd probably rather take something still cheaper that also jumps 8. Short list candidates include the Javelin 12N and Wasp 5A, right off the top of my head, putting this solidly in “not first place”. You can definitely do worse. B-
Assassin ASN-109: Oh hey, it's worse. Okay, that's a bit unfair, but my initial impression of this sheet is not great. You still get the +4 TMM from jumping with a 7/11/7 profile, that's positive. There's Stealth Armor here to make you that much harder to hit, also a solid thing to have, and it's powered by an Angel ECM which is great when you don't have it active for disrupting advanced electronics. The big problem there is you're mostly going to be using the ECM effect on yourself while the Stealth is active, and you probably want the Stealth active most of the time for defensive benefit. The armor amounts, to their credit, are not awful, typically a point shy on each location and full on the head, so we're exactly seven points short of max and using eight point half ton lots. I'd probably have sprung for the extra half ton of armor but I can't complain too hard about its absence. What I will complain about is the offensive capability on display. We have a Light PPC in the Right Arm, an MML 5 in the Right Torso, and an iOS SRM 2 in the Left Torso. This is an art-driven weapon loadout, and it's not great, but I'll also be completely transparent and say I don't really see a good way to improve it, either. The original Assassin's loadout was bad, this is still bad. We have a small fringe benefit that the two tons of MML 5 ammo are both in the Left Torso and protected by CASE II. We have some massive fringe downsides with having to take a Small Cockpit to even fit this amount of gear. There are 13 free crits on this design, so Ferro-Fibrous is out of the question, but Ferro-Composite could have been, and I'd be leaping for a variant that did that and had a regular size Cockpit instead. Things get worse when we contemplate heat. We have the base 10 doubles, which can jump with Stealth and fire the MML and be neutral. Adding the Light PPC takes you to +5, on the turn you fire the SRM 2 you could go all the way to +7. There's not really anything that will reliably stop you from jumping away to cool down again, but an every-other-turn cadence might be good if you were going to do more than 11 damage a turn if you hit with both weapons. This is all capability we've seen before, and I've even given good grades to before, so the kicker is naturally the BV. You pay 1158 for this 'Mech, which is not ideal. I feel like I'm pretty consistently harsh on designs that cost over a thousand BV but fail to force a PSR even if the stars align, and this one doesn't even come close. D-
Dervish DV-11DK: I will admit immediately and up front that this is another design I'm disappointed by what kind of batshit insanity we could have gotten. But that's not fair to this 'Mech, which I'm not thrilled with but is a damn sight better than the Assassin we were just looking at. Starting off, 5/8/5 is solid speed for a 55 tonner, powered by an Inner Sphere XL that is vulnerable but your alternative is worse. Armor is very good, with good coverage (2-3 points shy of maximum on each location) but gets high marks for using Ballistic-Reinforced, one of my favorites. Weapons are a bit of a mixed bag. We have two Medium Re-Engineered Lasers, one in each arm, two Clan Streak SRM 2s, one in each arm, and two Clan LRM 10s, one in each side torso. All three tons of ammo (one Streak, two LRM) are in the Right Torso, protected by CASE II. That's the most efficient way to do the ammo so no complaints there, but that's not the end of the equipment. AES is in both arms, which is a bit of an odd duck here. Your accuracy is improved, but the things you've improved the accuracy on are... Streak SRM 2s. These do not inspire fear. If Streaks were available, and the art weren't what it was, I'd take Streak SRM 6s and no AES every single day of the week and twice on Sunday. AES in the arms without hands to punch with is also a bit of a miss, but that likewise is down to the art. Other interesting things include the Compact Gyro, which is necessary on the sheet to even fit all this stuff without running out of crits. Ten double handle the lasers and LRM 10s with just movement heat, which is slightly more than would be ideal with this jump speed. Holding the trigger down on the Streaks is probably pretty safe as far as heat goes, just drop a laser on the turns you need to cool down and you'll be fine. If there's one problem that this design has, it's that it's got weapons built like it should have two distinct brackets, and then it just... doesn't. This is a problem not unique to Clan LRMs but certainly more on display here than elsewhere. Your most effective weapons at every single range outside of 3 hexes are your LRMs, and you should be holding the trigger on them down all day long until you run out of ammo. Your Streaks are fairly inconsequential next to those, and purely in terms of optimizing the design they'd be the first thing I tweak. That brings us to BV, which at 1919 is not unreasonable but it's definitely more than I'd like. At this cost you're competing with efficient brick shithouse Heavies or fast striker Mediums that will match better into more opponents than an admittedly pretty durable Medium trooper. C
Charger C: There are a small handful of 'Mechs that point to a particular thing I talk about making for a bad design, then make me eat the page it was on. Introducing, the Charger C. Not to be confused with the Charger CGR-C. This is a Clan Assault 'Mech (usually too expensive) with multiple speed boosts (usually too expensive) that can only do 7 damage outside of 9 hexes (usually pitiful) on top of what is historically a pretty lackluster chassis. By all of those measures, this should be dogshit. It is one of the most finely tuned and horrifically optimized designs to come out of this series and it will eat the lunch of most (not all) things that it shares a weight class and BV band with. First, it dodges the worst of the speed boost BV by being able to actually make it to a +4 TMM reliably when both are in play. Second, it cakes damn near maximum Ferro-Lamellor armor onto an 80 ton frame that's already outrunning most Light 'Mechs. Third, it takes the very limited tonnage it has left after doing that and pours it into only the most ruinously damage efficient guns that tonnage can buy. Four Improved Heavy Medium Lasers and a Clan ER Medium, supported by a (one ton) Targeting Computer. Hey Dominator? This is how you do a Targeting Computer. This puts the Charger C at 47 short range damage with good accuracy and it will be in range to use it, you cannot prevent or meaningfully dissuade it with firepower from doing so. It also brings with it a Bloodhound Probe (ehhh) and an Angel ECM Suite (much better), meaning not only is it going to be in your face performing an unkindness in your direction it's going to do so blasting radio static at max volume into your missile guidance systems and C3 networks. Fifteen doubles is Enough but this thing can still get a bit toasty, climbing to +5 on a run with all weapons firing. The speed boosts are probably enough to keep it moving the next turn without suffering significant penalties, but it's something to be careful of when playing. There is one actual honest to God downside here, and that's the Inner Sphere XL engine. When you have this much Ferro-Lamellor that's fragility by degree, though, and you will almost certainly live long enough to do awful things to your opponent. At 2756 BV, it's expensive but it also embodies the very essence of a good diversionary piece: your opponent must deal with this, or they will simply lose the game, and it is a hell of a thing to have to deal with. A
Sagittaire SGT-14R: In many ways, this 'Mech is the opposite of the Charger C. It's still big (it's meaningfully bigger), but it is slow (3/5/3), its weapons are massive and not nearly the compact efficient killing machines on the Charger. It is, however, still very dangerous and I'm a big fan of the design philosophy in play. Armor is very close to max (I count five points short), which for a 95 ton 'Mech is no joke. There's a Light Engine, so on top of having more armor it's also going to survive losing a side torso a good amount of the time, making it pretty categorically more durable. Weapons on this beast include two Large Variable Speed Pulse Lasers, and that's where the Inner Sphere equipment ends (also the Targeting Computer, but that's less important). The rest of the weapon load is a Clan ER PPC, three Clan ER Medium Lasers, and three Clan Small Pulse Lasers (one forward, two back). That heat load is handled by 17 Clan doubles, which makes for a fairly interesting set of brackets. At long range you have the ER PPC, of course, but at 15 hexes the choice is not as easy as it looks. The Large VSPs have a built in -1, but each of them is the heat of two Clan ER Mediums. With both Large VSP and the ER PPC at a jump, you build +4 heat. I haven't had time to put the math to paper yet, but I think whether you fire both Large VSPs or one VSP and two ER Mediums is going to be something that varies by base target number and will not always be the same output at the same ranges. Up close the calculus gets much easier: you drop the ER PPC for all of your ER Medium Lasers, and you tear someone to pieces with hideously accurate laser fire. There's a space in between 6-8 hexes where the exact most efficient combination of weapons is not immediately apparent, but fortunately for whoever is using this thing there's not an inefficient combination as long as you're minding your heat. Being all energy, that's less impactful than it could be otherwise, but you still don't want to be shutting down in the middle of the street. The BV here is high, at 2626. When you pay that much on an Assault, you better be getting something that can go toe to toe with anything else in the game on even footing. I think this manages. B+
Units by rating:
F: none
D: 2
C: 2
B: 2
A: 1
S: none
Cumulative Units by rating (Including bonus content):
F: 42
D: 106
C: 227
B: 237
A: 118
S: 19
