BattleTech Guide to Mechwarrior Skills - What are the best skill builds for Mechwarrior pilots 

Your LRM boat would benefit from piercing a lot of the time, instead of heating vent. There's lots of situations in the game where there are multiple enemies with bulwark in the trees. Being able to ignore evasion as well as the damage reduction from bulwark makes one of your LRM weapons act the same when hitting one such unit as if you were using about two and 1/4 of them, since rounding down will not happen to your individual missiles, and the damage will be less spread out with a much lower chance to miss assuming they had been moving. You can still focus on one unit just the same when you need to and it isn't an issue. Sure, you're not gaining the benefit from piercing when you do that, but you also aren't using the benefit from heating vent most of the time that you're shooting. Heating vent at best will allow you to from two additional LRM 20 weapons as the heat reduction is 30 and the heat cost of each LRM 20 is a little more than half that. While piercing shot, on the other hand, allows you to make plays that simply don't work well without the ability, but yes, only in situations where it's appropriate. Highly recommend giving it another shot. If you pay attention to when it is useful, you will probably find it outperforming heating vent, specifically on a missile boat.

I will note the Very specific edge case that when using the very broken Gauss rifle marauder build to called shot the head breaching shot allows you to shoot through cover to get the head shot. But otherwise is extremely niche and hard to use. Over all I think that bulwark takes the cake for being the best option, because it’s effective in every situation even in the early game.

New to BT, but breaching shot using a single hard hitting long range weapon like an AC20 seems like something worth trying.

Loved hearing your perspective! I think what makes this game so interesting is how many different opinions I've heard when it comes to pilot builds. If anything I think that goes to show how viable everything is! I myself find my default to go with 2-3 "Brawlers" combining Sure Footing and Bulwark for maximum defense, then Violent Vent it make sure damage is going out every turn. Makes for a simple and bashy style of play, as I don't find myself using "fancy" skills like Multi-Shot or Master Tactician. I will usually have a single Breaching Shot pilot though as I do like to use the Panther with a single PPC for fun!

So I only played one campaign on normal, so all missions were like 2-4 skulls except the final 4.5. So maybe it's different on super hard, slow levelling, with 5 skull missions. I tried all skills just to check them out, and my impressions: * bulwark was always really good * multishot was a star - especially on defend base missions, they don't seem very doable without at least two multishotters; it also strips evasion blips, is good against turrets / vehicles, creates cover in urban settings etc. * sensor lock - it's nice to have one in case AI pathing glitches, as long as I remember not to accidentally put them on lrm mech; much less value having second one * sure footing - felt pointless, stab damage was never a big deal, at most I'd press vigilance button For second level: * master tactician - I couldn't get the right cyclops variant, so I mostly went after the enemy even with +1, but it was still pretty decent * coolant vent - I can see it being good in principle, somehow I never remembered to use it * breaching shot - really difficult to take much advantage of, the idea is probably to use it with multishot, and I could only take advantage of it a few times; maybe there's some build with just a few big weapons that could use it better, most mechs have a lot of small weapons * ace pilot - I found zero good opportunities to use it in the entire campaign, if it does something, that's probably some much fancier play than I've been doing; for mid (ML/SRM) - long (LRM/UAC/LL) range mechs I had, I'm not really seeing many opportunities That is after just one campaign.

The breaching shot absolutely work with multi shot. It works better with high damage weapon and some mech benefit more of breaching shot than others. The awesome with its 3 PPC's benefit a lot of breaching shot. My Atlas with its ultracannon 20++ firing 2 shots, doing 120 of damage each. Yep! works like a charm. Now of course it is not the best skill but I think it is a matter of taste and experience. For me I do not use master tactician because I don't find the +1 initiative to be that great especially because you also need sensor lock to have access to master tactician and honestly when I reach mid-game I don't really use sensor lock anymore. I prefer using multi shot, firing a secondary weapon at the target I want to reduce the blips and still fire my main weapons to attack another target instead of "wasting" a turn to just remove 2 blips.

Breaching shot combined with multi-shot I think is the best combo so it's funny that you have it at the bottom of your list. Say you have an archer with two LRM 20s. He could shoot them both at an enemy and cover and lose 40% of the damage. If he splits them and shoots them at two max he's doing 100% damage to both. So you could either do 96 damage to one mech, or 80 damage on Two separate mechs = 160 total for the same 40 missiles.

Great content as always

as seen in the piloting skill, hit defense is when shot at as its separate from melee defense. the hit defense Gyro is awesome and probably should be used by most mechs. btw i personally go for guts for the overheat bonus and not the HP. i never really found myself needing extra HP. the overheat bonus is really nice to have though. usually i go for 6 and then not worry about anything else there much...later can get a 9 for a double bonus. also the coolant vent is not coming to a similar amount. u net gain 26 heat reduction even including the heat addition of 24 over the next 3 rounds.

i love breaching shot. its great for most ballistic weapons (especially UACs and AC20) as well as large LRM weapons. can also be nice on boosted SRM6 or heavy energy weapons like PPCs and large lasers. i tend to have heavy cannons on my mechs so i use those pilots for those, as well as LRM boats, while u can put the coolant vent pilots mostly on mechs with mlasers and SRMs. think of an annihilator with 4 gauss cannons for example...or mechs with UACs or AC20 (maybe 2). this can make them unstoppable and utterly devastating no matter what. i basically try to have several lancer pilots (breaching with bulwark) and several gladiator pilots (multi with coolant). they can work well together in a lance of the heaviest mechs to make them very tough and very deadly. either for heavy weapons or for lots of smaller but hot weapons. also, multishot works very well with breaching shot, as u can engage most of your weapons on a mech with no defense (or little defense without bulwark) and shoot a single weapon at a well defended mech (or 2). this way u do heavy damage to everything without losing much firepower. u can devastate multiple targets and nothing can stop u. doing this with 2-3 mechs will devastate multiple mechs. sure its NOT useful at all during most precision shots (unless u use a mech focused on a single weapon, maybe a coil for example), but as most of my shots are not that usually, its often useful. maybe with your strategy of maximizing resolve to precision strike all the time almost...its less useful.

ace pilot can work well for a fast flanking mech. but i dont see much point with it if u dont use those in your lance. i guess earlier it can do VERY well as u tend to use more flanking light and meds. later u can use some heavies like the laser grasshopper i love using even a bit later, but its usefulness is probably significantly reduced. also it would work perfectly well with master tactician...which cant be together :/

Tactics 9 with a Marauder gives 35% headshot chance…shit is nuts.

Ace pilot is nice early to mid game, when you're using light to medium mechs. It allows aggressive hit and run/jump tactics but I prefer the master tactician towards end game. why? You'll be using and fighting assault and heavy mechs which are not agile enough for aggressive hit and run. I'd prefer high initiative + call shot to quickly eliminate mechs. With master tactician + reserve + call shot + high level pilot you can quickly destroy center torso or even do head shots without getting scratched. High initiative also gives you a chance to get out of sticky situations. I agree with your breaching shot assessment. It's a bit lacking since you can only use 1 weapon however this is good with pure LRM boats. Personally I like bulwark + master tactician. Bulwark is the best level 1 ability by a mile.

Cant agree more on Ace pilot being best skill in game. My fav lance is 4 light-meds, Ace-pilots, 6JJs for max evasion to take focus fire better. I can take out assaults/heavies with 4 firestarters, but gotta be careful of melee, spread damage across lance and focusfire them quickly 1 by 1. Multishot vs Bulwark: Multishot is better earlier on when fighting light mechs. Bulwark better in late game attrition wars.

I just started again with a second campaign run. My first one was a few years ago and quite "unoptimized" Since atm there is 0 to do in the office I just thought: Hey, why not use the time to improve my new run? Ace Pilot: I definitly see your logic behind it. But IIRC from my last run: At the beginning of the campagin you do not have enough XP for "acing" one pilot. Lvl 7 in one category takes some time. (especially since it becomes more and more expensive I tended to go for the passive boni on lvl 5 or 6 first) But later, why should I field light mechs? Maybe I just played "stupid", but IMO the heavier mechs were always just better than the ligher ones. A medium mech beats a light one. A heavy mech beats a medium one and a light one. And assault beats all the others. Since I do not have a weight limit I just went with the bigger mechs later on and always replaced the lighter ones asap. And with medium (or even heavy) mechs the "getting behind the enemy" was not really working out. In other words: When I was able to go behind the enemy, I had not unlocked ace pilot. And when I had ace pilot I did not use mechs that could get behind the enemy any longer.

the breaching shot with 2 AC20++ on a mech with multi shot... RIP

"Technician" -_-

Gladiators and Vanguards for everything in the game. All other options are trash and you should feel bad for using them.