You may not have the opportunity to play "with" your team in matches below 2000 mmr, but you should still be thinking about how to maximize the benefit of your actions. Usually you can watch your teammates to figure out how to best approach a battle. If your teammates do damage but aren't able to push the enemy team off an objective, it might be a good idea to sneak behind the other team and finish off two or three enemies who retreat to heal. You're still acting as lone-wolf, but now you're doing something useful.
Maybe the rest of the enemy team finds you, kills you, and your teammates fail to take advantage of your distraction. Seeing as your flank didn't work, you decide to spawn as a tech to improve your teammate's survivability so they can push more. You find as soon as you start healing your teammates, they play more aggressive and walk right into a crossfire, getting you both killed. You can't out-heal stupid. Pull back and look for a teammate who was smart/skilled enough to disengage from the fight to heal up. THAT's the person you want to stick to with when he heads into a fight. Again, you're acting as lone-wolf, but now you're doing stuff in a way that invites others to start playing as a team.
Dawn_of_Ash, on September 20 2014 - 03:05 PM, said:
Positioning is what I feel is my main problem. I pretty much play 3 mechs, Predator, Rocketeer and Tech. As I understand, those three mechs would need very different positionings which I where I feel like I'm going wrong. I'm positioning my Rocketeer where my Tech should be.
If you have sustain weapons, you should play differently than if you have burst weapons. The Incinerator and the Scout are polar opposites: The Incin requires near-constant line-of-sight to deal damage, while the Scout is king of corner play and footwork. A good Incinerator can suppresses an entire team, preventing them from sticking their heads out long enough to deal significant damage. A good scout can kill opponents in quick succession by taking full advantage of his high speed (to stay out of enemy crosshairs) and high burst damage (to attack whenever his crosshairs happen to be on target during maneuvering). Other mechs and weapon loadouts fall somewhere between Incin's sustain and Scout's burst. Learning where each mech lies on this scale is important to both how you play a mech to its maximum potential and to how you can most easily defeat it. Similar concepts can be applied to weapon range, weapon dynamics, mech class and mech type.
This bears repeating: Don't spam your weapons just because they're off cooldown... especially your secondary weapon. It sounds trivial and obvious, but it's very easy to forget you should aim _before_ you shoot.
If you can, fight dirty. The only 1v1 duels you should get into are the ones you can't avoid, or the ones where you're confident you'll come out on top because the enemy has low health. Before engaging a 1v1, think about whether or not more enemies are likely to show up before you can escape. Buy items and use them. Ignore your conscience saying EMPs and health orbs are for people with lesser skill. They're a tool just like your weapons, and you should learn to get the most out of them.
Retreat is a perfectly valid and often very beneficial strategy. You need to start thinking of your health and heat pools as consumable resources, rather than progress bars to your doom. How much can you get done with 300 health_ If your heat bars go above half full, consider breaking off and let teammates finish the job. Plan escape routs, then plan for at what health you'll use them. Plan how you advance or retreat around cover if your opponent reacts one way or a different way. Plan where to stop following a retreating enemy so you don't overextend.
Set mental timers in your head and add tasks to do when those timers are up. If you haven't done this sort of thing before, you can start by reminding yourself to do these tasks when you respawn, heal, and while you travel long distances. Evaluate the big picture and the flaws in how you've played for the last minute and over the entire match. Try to shorten the time between these evaluations. Once you're doing it every time your mind is idle, it'll become easier to remember these things when it is semi-idle, like just before or just after entering direct combat. Other things you should put on timer include checking your radar, planning escape routs, guessing teammate and enemy positions due to respawning, predicting hot-spots and retreat-spots in the next minute due to player positions and objective status, and probable behavior of the most dangerous people on the enemy team. The ultimate goal is to almost constantly plan for worst and best case scenarios so you know what to do without hesitation based on how the situation plays out.
All players have experience. Good players can combine experience with planning. Great players can combine experience, planning, and predicting. As you get better at planning, you'll discover you have more time in combat and at the edge of combat to think about the patterns you're seeing in teammates and enemies. If you can predict their actions, you can take advantage of their habits. The best players take it even further by playing mind games to throw off each other's predictions.
As others have said, radar is important. It's vital in corner-play and cover-play to track your opponent(s) without actually having line of sight. It's also useful to discover enemy positions. As you pay attention to it more, you'll notice the radar in some mechs has much less range than in other mechs. Remember which mechs have short range and which have long range. Eventually you'll be able to take advantage of occasions when you know the enemy's radar range is short.
You will hit walls, where it seems like you can't improve any more. At these times, change what you're doing. Play with a different primary, a different mech, a different game mode, or even a different game for a while. Search the forums for advice and youtube for Hawken videos (full-length gameplay, not montages). Watch somebody worse than you and analyze where they go wrong. Watch somebody better than you and analyze how they play differently from you. Typically somebody better than you does more things deliberately, so pay close attention to when their behavior deviates from what you would do, and try to figure out why they did that. Look for good results, then backtrack to when they knew to do something you would not have done. Radar, chat, objective progress, health bars, audio... anything could be a hint.
Dawn_of_Ash, on September 20 2014 - 03:05 PM, said:
That makes sense, but unfortunately, my current PC (or laptop) is having a hard time running Hawken by itself that I'm a bit worried about what would happen if I put anything more onto this laptop.
Open the console and type stat fps. You want stable fps at or above 30 frames a second. If you're not getting it, turn your graphic's settings down. If you're still not getting good framerate, search the forums for modifying your ini files to have even lower visual settings. nepacake might be nice enough to help you here
One thing I haven't seen mentioned on these forums is you can limit your framerate using the MaxSmoothedFrameRate=60 line in HawkenEngine.ini under the [Engine.Engine] heading. My computer is capable of rendering beyond my monitor's refresh rate (60 fps), but even if I limit it to 60, my framerate drops at the most important time: combat. I limit my framerate to 45 fps so my card's average temperature in-game is reduced. This way, during peak loads (combat) the temperature doesn't go up long enough to trigger throttling.
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