Warhawk: First Impressions

This is another cross-post from the official forums on a thread where someone asked people to post their opinions on their Warhawks. I intend to do a full-fledged review of this 'Mech, so just treat this as an appetizer.

I went ahead and A la Carte'd this last week, knowing fully what I was getting into. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't total garbage that people made it seem to be. Yes, it's challenging playing the Tetris with critical slots, its gimped by arms missing lower arm actuators(and the only one that has an arm actuator is nerfed by a huge cooldown quirk), its sides pop too easily when flanked and so on . . . Yet, it's a 'Mech that has the staying power, cooling efficiency and firepower when you get used to it. I'd say it's still outclassed by the Timber Wolf and the Dire Wolf, but it has its niche being a mobile energy heavy assault. 

What I like about the Warhawk:

• It's a great face tanker.

• Interesting energy build possibilities with huge targeting computers.(PPCs are almost OK with a TC Mk. VII).

• It is a great in-your-face brawler with excellent heat capacity.

• It synergizes well with energy and missile builds.

• Decent speed.

• Great torso mobility, especially if you also use the omnipods with torso yaw bonuses. It twists really fast.

What I don't like:

• Only one omnipod with lower arm actuator.

• Generally low hardpoint count. The most you can have is 9 with 5E and 4M on WHK-B. This quickly takes a dive if you want to use a ballistic. For comparison the Dire Wolf can have as many as 15 hardpoints and the Timber Wolf 12.

• Left torso is completely locked by fixed DHS' there.

• It is forced to have an ammo side(Protip: pop the right ST of a ballistic/missile WHK and it's useless)

• Almost exclusively arm-mounted weaponry, yet arms soak a lot of damage.

• It's almost the size of a Dire Wolf while having 5 tons less armor.

• Generally negative quirks dragging it further down.

What to do?

• Remove negative quirks from omnipods. Slightly buff the less desirable ones with quirks instead.

• Give the Prime variant arms lower arm actuators.

• Re-evaluate the fixed critical-slot 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.