Rogatien Merc
Red Star. EoN.
1570
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Posted - 2013.10.31 18:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
To answer your question more generally, the answer is an adamant "NO". The way the system is designed you have to understand the balance between "Min/maxing" and "Diminishing returns".
The most effective fits are those fits that can reflect / be affected by as much SP as possible at one time. You are literally putting more power on the battlefield that way. So if you're in a STD scout suit running a shotgun, a shield extender, an armor rep, and a kin cat, then the entire time you are in that suit, all of the SP you have invested into kincats, card regs, armor plates, damage mods, ARs, sniper rifles, etc.... is completely and utterly wasted, at that moment. If your SP is divided among a ton of different things then it drops the average "applied SP" that you have on any given suit. It's just the nature of the beast.
That's the basis of why min/maxing is effective (in any game really).
Now on the diminishing returns side let's look at hacking. To get from III to IV in the hacking skill costs something like 435,000 skill points. This is an incredible amount of SP when you're starting out for what you get. What do you get? You get to shave off a fraction of a second of the hack speed when you are hacking things. Now think, in a match, how often are you literally standing with your finger on the O button hacking? THAT is the only time that this SP 'power' is "applied". So if you have 30mil SP this might be worth it because you realize "well, pretty much ANYthing I get is really expensive at this point, they are all incremental benefits, and that fraction of a second can make the difference between winning and losing a match. Completely true. But at a lower level where you DON'T already have a ton of things trained, that 435,000 SP can grant you a greater amount of 'utility' elsewhere. You can train level I into several core skills that unlock different modules for many different fits (armor plates, flaylock pistols, whatever) or fitting skills very cheaply. Or you can use that SP to bump up things that affect your suit in other ways. But it's important to think about what is having an impact any given moment of battle or any critical moment of battle and what can have the greatest impact across your gameplay experience.
The key to diminishing returns is understanding the concept that being able to have multiple fits and the 'utility' to play the right "role" on the battlefield is often just as or more important than the ability to be really good the wrong role for the situation (i.e. a point is getting over run with infantry and the best AV guy in the game is stuck in a swarm suit... well... it doesn't matter if he's the best AV guy in the game at that point. He needed to be in an infantry fit).
[Sidebar: Lone wolfs have to have more utility because they have to be able to adapt; people in squads with others have the freedom to min/max more because 'we have a guy for that' and they can adapt as a team instead of individuals... this is one reason pubstompers are so effective in squads.]
Someone listed a fit with shield extenders. It's an instance where it is very worthwhile to unlock proto very early for several reasons. For instance, they have a progression of 22hp STD / 33hp ADV / 66hp PRO. Getting it to advanced is worthless - you might as well use militia, but getting it to proto is pretty much a requirement for a lot of suits because the marginal utility of more HP comes into play every time you get down to low health and is critical because it is the determining "you live or you die" factor. Directly relevant to your original question, the benefit from the skill is 2% HP bonus per level, which is miniscule. This means that if you level it to II and then go level something else to II, then something else to II... well, the SP in the skill is having very little impact on any suit's "applied SP quotient" (made up term). Same at level III and IV. Wasted SP until you get it to V. So either commit to getting it all the way to V, or put the SP into something that has more of an impact at that time.
^--- overly complicated, but I hope it helps understand the logic behind the answer to your original question.
"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay it's price."
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