The Enforcer early impressions

NO HONKING $350 PENALTY DON'T HONK YOU WILL BE BANNED

As you're probably aware, the Enforcer has been released for C-Bills with the last patch. Looking at the hardpoints, I was not particularly enthusiastic about this 'Mech but I decided to buy one to get a feeling for it. I ended up buying the 4R. Be warned, these impression are with an un-elited Enforcer. Take them with some salt.

First things first, the scaling if this 'Mech is spot-on. With the Resistance pack PGI has finally shown us that they're finally paying attention to the gameplay implications of scaling. The Enforcer is the smallest 50 tonner out there and it's even more compact than the Hunchback. To be honest, every 50 tonner should have this scale. Actually it's so small that I noticed this (excuse the crude hand-trace):

No, an elephant did not draw this.

Can you guess which is which? I'll give you a hint; one of them is a 45-tonner and the other one is a 50-tonner. You guessed it right, the green area is none other than our beloved Vindicator! In an exceptional feat of engineering, the designers of the Enforcer managed to cram 50 tons worth of stuff into a smaller area than the Vindicator! Seriously, this comparison made me so sad for my Vindicator that I had to shed some tears.

Looking at the hardpoints, the 4R has 5E+B which makes it instantly attractive (and the reason why I bought it) while 5D has 3E+2B which is very "meh" and 5P has 4B+E which makes it the weakest variant. The thing is, we don't want many ballistic hardpoints in a medium as they lack the tonnage to mount them (6xB Arrow excluded). So you end up mounting a big AC/Gauss while the rest of the ballistic hardpoints stay unused. Which makes for incredibly underwhelming builds, just like the VND-1X.

Even then, 4R doesn't offer many build variety. The best you can do is either take Gauss+5xML (simply amazing) or AC10+5xML (not bad) or if you want to peek, ignore the B and go for laser vomit builds like 2xLPL+3xML and similar with a shield side.

To keep this short, here's some random observations:

• When I dropped with it, the first thing I noticed was how narrow this 'Mech is. Even though your weapons are mostly arm mounted, they're so close that you don't have silly convergence problems or have to worry about the other arm being blocked. You can shoot pretty much everything you see without problems. 
• The second this I noticed is how durable it is. The scaling really pays off with this 'Mech. It's very hard to hit and even then, it's very hard to focus a specific component. The opponents don't know how to deal with this and they just aim for the center mass, which distributes the damage pretty nicely.
• On the flip side, the arms tank a lot and they tend to get shot off pretty easily. Very annoying considering almost all of your weapons are arm mounted. Especially the laser arm becomes a shield arm if you mount three lasers at once.
• Lastly, the side torsos tend to tank more than the CT. I ended up dying a lot to ST's due to XL usage. The "bullseye" at the center of the torso is almost fully CT, but people don't seem to shoot it much often. Probably because it's more of a belly bullseye and people generally aim just below the head for CT.

So, there you go. I'm not sure if I want to buy the rest of the Enforcers yet (I'm out of Mechbays too, so unlikely). It's a good chassis, but it seems to be hurt by its arm-mounted weaponry and B heavy hardpoint distribution.

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About Rak

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