The dominant archetypes of competitive Last Raven.

[Mom]

What would you consider the most dominant and typical types of power ACs in Last Raven's competitive environment? How and why do they play into the metagame of PvP, and how do they fair against other archetypes?

 

The Lightweight Gaea Runner: Accuracy in Last Raven is abysmally low; and as a result, most weapons' viable ranges are relegated to 300m or less. You wouldn't even try to fire on a red lock if the target were further than that-- you'd probably have a better chance of dry-firing and hitting them than using your FCS. Jinking in this game is very powerful as well, so a lot of the lower velocity stuff that tends to overpursue, and the higher velocity stuff that underpursues can be shrugged off with ease; this is very true for missiles. And then of course, there are a lot of weapons that don't pursue at all.

 

Gaea solves this problem two-fold. It keeps pressure and fires without your worrying of locking on. It keeps an opponents' rush game and mid-range defensive game honest, leaving valuable shots for your other weapons to get nice shots.

With smaller lockboxes and high ping times for a lot of weapons in Last Raven, tracking becomes an issue as well, and Gaea has no problem popping aerial targets as they try to get an angle on you and force an overheat.

 

Gaea also has unlimited ammo, so the user would seldom have to worry about wasting its shots.

 

A lightweight gaea runner will potentially have a decent amount of AP considering its core and other competitive frame choices (mid 8000s) and it finds a nice balance of speed and armor to play AP game throughout the match.

 

 

Do list more archetypes.

Edited January 31, 2010 by TMRaven

[LCC]

GL, G3, 98G Quads in general. I'm not being more specific because so many quad types work equally as well as each other.

 

All kinds of quad designs have great success in LR. I'd say LR is probably the game where quads excel the most, relative to previous games. Canon accuracy is decent enough to be able to get a big lead with a high damage shot. You can drop canons after getting AP lead to play a better defense game or have light close range hand weapons to keep off lights and use the canon as your staple gun. Both styles can work quite well.

 

Generally you want to play either a light quad or a heavy quad. The reason being that light runners can usually stay away from mid quads enough to play attrition and eventually get a lead. Lighter quads can keep up with lights and have an easier time rushing down defensive mids. Heavy quads start off with a big enough lead to better control the fight, have the option to increase speed by canon dropping, and tend to kill mids/heavies fast with the canon.

 

All core types work well on them depending on the design.

[Harakiri Tiger]

Shade + Dingo2 Lightweights.

 

They come into the game with enough ammo in a single gun to knock most AC's out the game. Shade's low equip stats, high ammo count, and good attack power/velocity lend it amazing spamming power. The weapon alone is a problem. When paired with one of the best legs in the game to underweight, a pretend midweight set known as Dingo2, it creates an easy to pilot wonderbot. Dingo2 can be easily underweighted. Once underweighted enough, and given a decent booster, it gains the ability to juke well over 50% of the weapons in the game and control range with ease. All this little wonderbot needs is a little support fire and to stay somewhere between 250-350 meters of their opponent to win a match. It's very easy to come into a match with 8500AP on this setup.

 

On heavier AC's that can't juke as easily the Shade becomes less of a problem. While it maintains the ability to spam, it can be countered with a number of other weapons because the host AC no longer has the ability to avoid counter-fire with ease. Shade's actual damage and velocity aren't so amazing as to be able to enter into a damage race and win every time when juking is effectively taken out. A number of cannons and normal hand weapon combos can keep up with Shade's DPS, even with Shade is paired with other weapons as well.

 

What makes this bot more annoying than it should be is the incredible ease of turning it into a Gaea Runner, if you find yourself unable to, or unwilling to, maintain a safe state of mid-range combat.

[Mom]

It's pretty funny how one would consider quads to be favored for Last Raven. I mean when you look at the cannons individually, they really don't excel all that much (with exception of 98G) to other powerful weapons in the game.

 

Take SL, and you can make an argument for GL and LQ15 to be very dominant weapons. I guess it has more to do with how well tanks fare in either game though. Last Raven has it rough on tanks, while I'd make an argument for lightweight tanks in Silent Line to be one of its dominant archetypes.

 

I also feel tanks in LR can pull off 98g better than quads can. The most important factor is their ability to keep a lock and shoot anytime they want to with the 98g, making for way better chances at hitting another person with both shots. Yaka's 98g/RS/R3 tank was a great example of that. R3 would herd for 98g shots, while the ability to shoot it in the air made for much larger windows of opportunity to get secured 98g shots in.

[LCC]

They excel in that they can grab a lead in an instant rather than putting yourself at risk for a longer period of time with lower attack weapons. 98G works perfectly fine on quads, but tanks do have OB jousting at their disposal, which is great for canons. The problem with tanks is that they have a tendency to need to be light boar1/2 tanks, which don't have much more defense than a mid/heavy biped and can't dodge as well.

 

You can kinda use 98G in the air on quads, just just gotta fire on the ground first.

 

 

Standard Fenrir heavies are great at stalling with high AP to start, high damage accurate shots, and a big speed boost after drop. They rape quads n tanks.

[Terminator98]

Dual HP + GL Quads, along with hangered H69s.

 

These things can simply rape people down like hell. The GL will usually be useful at middle range, while those HP can easily put your foe in a world of hurt at close range.

 

Spam that GL, when it's empty, close in with Dual HPs for the kill. If the guy's not dead, dual 69H should be more than enough.

 

Light Quads work very well using this strategy.

 

That's my opinion though, feel free to contradict me.

[LCC]

RS in place of the right HP would make that more dominant.

[Dark Dragon XXII]

PIXIE3+HP Defensive types

 

Usually placed on heavyweights and Quads, this serves well as a decent CQC weapon, in terms of Ammo, WS sight, DPS, and part Weight. Coupled with HP, or 69H/R3, opponents are left with lesser offensive options in battle because they tend to tank more damage than what they send on you, unless they're riding cannons in your face. I believe this is one of the best weapons in SL, but it still does well enough in LR due to the Mag system.

 

Maybe I stand to be corrected here...