viral vine
I’ve seen this topic discussed a fair bit but with no real solutions.
They’re so slow that the additional armor doesn’t justify them and the heavy weapons they give additional weight to equip provide no real advantage and are often worse than the light weapons. The armor especially is even more worthless when we’re dealing with the module based damage system.
My solution to making heavy chassis viable is to give them a large amount of additional shields or an armor bonus that applies to all installed modules.
Both of these solutions provide an overall EHP increase to the robot and would actually make using them viable given the severe energy, fuel and speed restrictions they have. They are defender class chassis, they should make your robot into a tank. With the module based damage system this doesn’t work and it works even less with shields naturally providing more EHP than armor to begin with. Legs are also almost never targeted unless someone is in the air or on high ground and neither of those are situations those chassis are often in given their mobility restrictions.
This issue is also further compounded by the fact that healing sources don’t scale based on armor values and provides flat values that disproportionately favour lighter robots and even further disincentivizes building into heavy armor.
These chassis should support formidable builds that demand the enemy team focus fire to destroy them while providing opportunities for flankers to seize the moment of distraction. Essentially acting as a lower damage Titan more focused on defense and support. Lancelot is the closest thing to this but it simply does not provide enough survivability even with its increased armor or with supporting healing robots and pilots.
dusky kelp