King Crab very early impressions

*snap* *snap*

Being unable to "attach" to a 'Mech for so long, I've been suffering a lot from the lack of C-Bills releases in the past few months. Since I bought the Warhawk and the Timber Wolf for real monies, there has been no worthwhile C-Bills release 'Mechs to try out since the past four months. Two months of that period was spent writing my Master's Thesis so it wasn't that painful, but the last two had a lot of tumbling weeds in them.

As someone with a 'Mech ADHD, I almost burnt out in this period. I re-bought Locusts and snagged some missing variants here and there from sales, but the craving for a new chassis was always there. When I found out that the King Crab and the Mad Dog was being released on 20th of January, I became fixated on this date. Theoretical builds on Smurfy's were made and I also got opinions from those lucky enough to have these 'Mechs. Meanwhile I grinded out a respectable 55 million C-Bill cache.

. . . and last night I spent it all on crack new 'Mechs. I started out with the King Crab, because, you know, King Crab. Then as I played with my unit, I bought all of the variants and managed to basic them.

In order to keep this short, I'll just do a short list of my opinions on KGC.

• Holy Blake, this thing is beautiful. It looks intimidating and the design also makes a lot of sense. The animations are really smooth, unlike many other recent releases. It's obvious PGI crafted this thing with love.
• The design is also advantageous from a gameplay perspective. The arm weapons are almost at the cockpit level, while the other hardpoints are extremely high mounted.
• Unfortunately arm hardpoints are separated a lot. This means you get really bad convergence at range (when you're aiming ahead of something). Corner peeking is also difficult, by the time your cockpit makes it out of the cover there's a high possibility that your peeking arm will be blocked by something else. It's annoying. I prefer to offset this by putting meaningful weaponry in my torso hardpoints.
• Dat torso twist. Seriously, not only it's very responsive (due to 25% twist speed bonus) but you also have a 100° twist range. It's amazing for a 100 tonner. It's so hard for someone to get to your back armor when you're aware of them. Damage rolling is easy.
• The hitboxes seemed pretty balanced to me. They don't naturally spread damage but with mild twisting the results are acceptable. I think its torso tanks better than the Atlas while still not having bullet magnet STs, but it's still not as good because the arms don't block much if at all. That's why I take armor off from arms (they get a +17 armor bonus anyway).
• The speed, it's painful. If you're going crazy with ballistics then you pretty much have to use engines closer to 300. This means being left behind constantly or just flat-out missing the action completely. I'll try dropping some weaponry to get more speed from now on. I might even dip my toes into the XL terroritory just to see if its workable (hordes of XL Crabs I killed says no though).

That's it for now. More on KGC later when I finish eliting and mastering it. If you want to see some KGC action, you can try watching my Twitch VOD. I wouldn't blame you if you don't want to go through 5.5 hours of footage though.

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About Rak

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