Brawler of the week - "That crazy flying Trebuchet"

I try to come up with unique BotW's every time, trying to pick mechs and builds which are fun and effective, but also force you out of your comfort zones. Last week, we got some serious airtime and mobility with the shotgun Shadowhawk and hammered away at enemies with our godly LBX/SRM shotgun. For this week, I wanted an energy/missile brawler for a change and the first choice was obvious.

LRMs? Where we're going, we don't need LRMs.

Today, we skew the balance towards more mobility and I present you one of the most fun mechs to brawl with, the Trebuchet!

Now you might say, "Rak, this guy has all its ammo crammed into a side torso. You also have an XL engine, are you suicidal?". And I would say "F***, what's wrong with me?" . . . if this wasn't a Trebuchet. I can confidently say that after 569 matches in my Trebuchets, I came to the conclusion that it's impossible to die to ST's in these things. It's also the only mech where I took armor off the side torsos and it didn't make any difference. You will get the occasional unlucky AC20 shot to the sides, but that will be an occasion you will want to pop a champagne for.

Another note on hitboxes. Trebuchets essentially run on two timers, one is your CT health and the other is your legs. Whenever you're on ground, your CT will tank and when you're jumpjetting your legs will tank. Be careful to balance these two, know when to facetank and when to fly away. From sides, your arms tend to tank, so excessive twisting will result in premature loss of arms and most of your firepower along with them. When arms are destroyed, CT will take damage when twisting.

Now that the warnings are out, lets take a look at what we have here. It's a Treb with 3xML's, 2xSSRM2's and 1xSRM6. It does 107KPH with an XL300 and has 16xDHS' to cool a notoriously hot E/M combo. 5JJ's for ridiculous jump heights. If Spiders were redesigned as mediums, this would be it.

3xML's are your main weapons. Arm mounted SRM6 offers a chance to fight heavier mechs and 2xSSRM2's allow you to fight lights and offer suppressive fire against heavies. Before SSRM2 shake nerfs, SSRM2's essentially stunned mechs, as LT missile hardpoint only has one tube giving you essentially three salvos. Not so much now, but still annoying.

How do you play it? This guy plays like a big Spider; it's mobile, has a lot of jumpjets and require balls of steel to play effectively. You probe flanks, get into enemies' rear, try to find isolated targets, outmaneuver them, kill them, piss off enemy main force and try to pull them out of position. You have the speed and armor to dive into enemy groups in brawls, pick off wounded mechs and get out. What you can't afford is fighting when two or more targets are focusing you. You will quickly lose limbs, take an unfortunate shot to the CT and will be an easy kill. Still, it's easy to disengage considering your speed and jumpjets.

Here's a very quick video I made this morning to demonstrate my point, my aim is sketchy because I wasn't fully awake yet, but it does a good job at demonstrating the kind of pace you should play this build at. Skip to 2:24 for action.

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About Rak

I'm an engineer who likes to write extremely long articles about games that border simulation and mainstream.