the Play HAWKEN pages suggest putting points into things instead of using internals
I'm pretty sure an earlier version of the PC game allowed you to upgrade your mech such that it generated less heat or walked faster or whatever, depending on the descisions you made. Right now you just modify mech's stats via internals, and equip items to throw out.
-but if you're wondering about the problems luking beneath the surface of the game I can give you a rundown of the meta issues I've run into as a new player. I've only played for around a month tops, but most of the old players seemed quick to just shill the game in it's entirety to me when I had similar concerns to yours, instead of pointing out the obvious issues like scanners to me (until I actually used one of course), most likely because they kinda need every player they can get (the game has around 200 people playing at any given point in time on each system).
1) Assault (G1) is essentialy better than the CR-T on PC.
Not a big issue since neither are terribly over or underpowered, but the only noteworthy advantage the CR-T has is more radar range. It recovers from overheating faster, but that's pointless because the ability prevents that. It also recovers fuel more quickly, but that's pointless because you'll fill your gauge either way after shooting for an extended period of time, which is exactly what the coolant ability is there for. The assault is basically better in every other way; the extra health and walk speed gives you far more opportunities to actually use it's coolant ability than the CR-T's.
2) Orblording on PC.
Orblording is where you use a big medkit and extractor then throw out healing orbs to rapidly regenerate health in a fight. The medkit descriptions say that they let you gain 25% more hp from health orbs, but they let you gain all that extra health in the same time it would take to consume an orb without a medkit. If you're eating 125% of a meal in just the normal 100% of the time, that means you've reached 125% speed. In other words, they give you more hp/s the same way extractors do, letting you stack the effect up far more than you could stack any other item like deflectors, which on PC can only fill up two internal slots tops. You can gain up to an additional 21 hp/s while standing on an orb using the largest extractor and kit (on top of the orb's base 38 hp/s healing rate) and lets you gain 25% more hp (you get another 42 hp on top of the 170 an orb already gives). In an extended firefight, that's a fair bit of health, and chasing a low health enemy only to turn the corner and see that they suddenly have more health than you is beyond annoying since players are expected to need to repair. It damages the flow of the game.
3) Armor fusor on console.
The devs realized that orblording was too powerful of a regeneration method, and they nerfed it fairly hard, especially extractors, but they felt like they needed to buff the fusor at the same time since it looked overshadowed or something. On PC the largest fusor recovers 20% of your max hp in 20 seconds, which is 1% per second. This means mechs with more max hp recover more health with it. Since stacking heavy mechs was overpowered, they decided to make this a flat rate instead of a scaled one on console. That's good until you see what the healing rate is. On PC, with the largest healthbar you can get, you heal 8 hp/s with it for 20 seconds. On console, you heal 20 hp/s in 10. Yeah, 20 hp/s, and an additional 200 health. It adds almost as much regen as the 21 hp/s orblord setup, and gives 200 hp total instead of 42 more health form orbs, and only costs three slots instead of five. Plus you can get the extra 25 hp/s without having to sit still on an orb. And again, this is a flat rate; with a beserker that only has 350 hp, you can slap this part on and gain 200 health every time you kill someone, and around half as much on an assist. That's up to like a 550 hp sum, more than any midweight mech's base health (though they can use this too of course). They're easily twice as powerful as they should be. It isn't just that this is broken, but that the devs let it be broken in spite of already seeing the problems orblording does. It kinda just comes off as negligent to some people.
4) Scanners in general.
They aren't too bad in TDM pubs if noone is using teamwork anyway, but in stronger lobbies or in modes like siege where you have to camp on objectives they're ridiculous. With a radar scrambler you can at least recognize that you're in a scrambler's range and go find it, but with scanners you have no idea that the enemy can see you until you get close enough to the scanner to hear it. And much like being able to heal health too fast, it just sort of damages the gameplay as a whole on a conceptual level since you're normally expected to have teammates to spot targets.
Edited by Acguy, 02 January 2017 - 07:21 PM.