Protect Your Mecha: A Rival Wings Primer

Let's talk about the Mecha of Rival Wings.

1. Objectives, Your Mecha and You: What Are We Here to Do?

The goal of Rival Wings, like most MOBA-likes, is to walk to your enemy's base and destroy their glowing crystal weak point like an NES Contra boss. You must also protect your glowing crystal weak point.

Your side has three kinds of units. Regular Players (or foot soldiers), Mammettes (or creeps) and Mecha. Mecha are the thing that sets this apart from other PvP modes and MOBA-likes. If you do not summon Mecha, you do not win. Oh -- right. Winning.

To do this, in Rival Wings, since structures have oodles of HP, you need Oppressors and Brute Justice Mechas to help you burn down the structures. To get this, you have to pick up fuel containers under the central control point, let passive income accrue (controling the center control point increases this rate), or defeat enemy Mammettes (creeps to you MOBA-ers out there). At 50, someone in your team better Recall (go B) and get a Mecha. But, before we decide what to do with a Mecha, let's decide who should pilot what.

2. Front Mission the Battletech: Who Is Going to Ride What?

You have three roles as a good foot soldier. DPS who brings the ouchies, Tanks who like to take the ouchies, and Healers who think the ouchies are just silly and try to negate them all. Given this trinity, first look at your alliance as a whole. If you are over represented in a role, you can probably sacrifice your alliance's fifth Dark Knight to pilot a Mecha. What this usually means is that your DPS, who are for the most part interchangeable, should be piloting the Mecha. After all, for the most part, the Mecha's job here is to do ouchies to buildings or foot soldiers, DPS should be the most willing to drop back and get into a Mecha. As you'll see in Section 3, Healers and Tanks are bad pilot choices. But, if you've got 10 tanks across your player group (really, this happened once), go pilot a Mecha. It's fun!

There are three kinds of Mecha. Brute Justice is your trump card. Cruise Chasers are anti-everything units. They chew through foot soldiers and Mecha with relative ease, but are frail. Oppressors are slow. Painfully slow, but they defeat structures. So, which should you pilot?

Pilot a Brute Justice if:

• You can. No, really. You can only have a Brute Justice active when you have lost a tower. So, that means you're in trouble. So play your trump card. If someone else hasn't already picked it, use it. It is that good. You can never go wrong.

Pilot a Cruise Chaser if:

• You do not have at least two other Cruise Chasers active.
• You are defending your core.
• You have an Oppressor already active in the lane that is pushing.
• Either of your lanes are pushed.
• Always drop back to base and pilot a Cruise Chaser if you cap Ceruleam. Don't waste resources. You can't construct additional pylons to increase your Ceruleam cap, so don't let it go to waste.

Pilot an Oppressor if:

• Your lanes are secure.
• Your base is not likely to come under siege in the next few minutes.
• You're so slow, I want to stress these two points again. When you get in the Oppressor, you're telling your team: "We're pushing, hopefully for the next couple of minutes.
• You have at least two active Cruise Chasers/Brute Justices who can immediately come to your support. You are useless without an escort, if you don't have Mecha to support you and foot soldiers to protect you, the Oppressor is a waste of Ceruleam.
• There are at least 3 minutes left in the game. If you plan to make it to the enemy core and engage it, you need time. If there isn't enough time, pick a Cruise Chaser instead and help the push or defend and hope for a draw or win on points.

Now then, now that we've got people in Mecha and know what we have to do to win... How Do We Win?

3. The Shield and the Sword: How Do We Win?

Look, now that I've spent all that time helping you decide about who should do what. Let me let you in on a secret about Mecha. They're not here to protect you. You're here to protect and escort these Mecha to the enemy's structures. Once someone is piloting a Mecha, they should pilot them like big, dumb creeps. Cruise Chasers should clear the lane then group up with the big, slow, stupid Oppressor and plod down the lane with it, protecting it from all comers.

Your foot soldiers should do the same. In fact, whenever possible, you should engage enemy Mecha or Foot Soldiers to take hits for your Mecha. What I'm going to say is counter intuitive, but believe me. Foot soldiers are more durable than a Cruise Chaser, easily. Cruise Chasers have 30,000 HP. Tanks and Healers, in a single health bar, have about half of that. Good cooldown management gives you easily more than 30,000 Effective HP. If you have a pocket healer, a DPS or Tank may not even need to blow a cooldown to reach 30,000 Effective HP.

Ok, you think that makes sense, right. Cruise Chasers are meant to be fragile glass cannons. You can buy that our characters are more durable than a Cruise Chaser. Well, let me tell you something else. A well played Healer is probably more durable than an Oppressor. Yes. That's right, I'm telling you flat out that a Healer, or any class with a Pocket Healer, can easily enter engagements and live with 70,000 Effective HP. Just look at a White Mage's kit.

White Mage

• Base HP with HP Boosting Trait: 14,000.
• Divine Benison gives you 25% of that as a shield: 3,500
• Benediction, Full Cure: ~10,000 safely. As you can see, just those two cooldowns get you to almost Cruise Chaser level durability.
• Getting the last 40,000 or so Effective HP is a combination of Protect, PvP Actions and Cure 1, Cure 2 and Regen spam. If you take Recuperate as your PvP action, that's an additional 3,500 HP. I can tell you though, as a White Mage, I've easily survived 2-3 minutes under Focus Fire, which with Lilies and timing, means you might get to double Benediction yourself.

Scholars and Astrologians are a bit harder to reach Oppressor level survivability, I'll admit. Tanks though can also easily reach Cruise Level survivability. Anyone can reach Oppressor level survivability with healing and effective use of cooldowns and disengaging.

Every Hit Point of damage and enemy cooldown you soak, you can get back by disengaging or healing. Mecha can't be healed, and they really can't disengage either since they're big, stupid things who only want to smash glowing crystal weak points.

So, what does this mean when you are fighting? Your priority targets as anything but an Oppressor are:

• Enemy Cruise Chasers. These will break your formation fast, and as we've seen, are squishier than a Lala. Squish them. Fast.
• Enemy Brute Justices. These are way too dangerous to let stand, and every point of damage you get in is pretty much permanent. Clear the dangerous escorts (Cruise Chasers) first, then clear the biggest threat.
• Enemy Oppressors. These things are slow, and once you've gotten rid of the escorts, it's just a big enemy capital ship sitting there with flak guns, pew pewing at you. The Foot Soldiers escorting it are going to try and get your attention. IGNORE THEM. They're more durable than it, remember? DESTROY THE OPPRESSOR.
• Enemy Foot Soldiers in standard PvP order: Pressure the Healer, then stun and spike for the kill. Then focus on DPS. Ignore the enemy Tanks if possible, or coordinate a stun and spike if separated from Healers.
• If you have no Mecha to defend, Enemy Structures. Otherwise, defeat Enemy Foot Soldiers first. Without Mecha to defend, Enemy Structures fall on the same tier as Enemy Foot Soldiers. Make a judgment call if you have enough Tank/Healing power to keep you up through the assault. If they do, IGNORE the enemy and hit the structure. I hate watching three people chase an Enemy White Mage in circles around a tower that they could be destroying. Don't make me sad.
• Enemy Mammets.

As an Oppressor, if you take an action that doesn't move you closer to a structure or damage a structure, you're not using that Mecha properly.

Now, that you know all this, we have to actually start a game.

4. The Opening Gambit: Why Do We Care Who Calls What Lane?

Here's where things get a bit weirder. I don't actually know the proper flow of mid and late game, because it all depends on how well you are at resource collection and Mecha defending. But, here's what I can tell you about the early game.

You're not going to a lane. You're going to the central control point. And you're going in through the top so you don't have to fight up the stairs while Bards and Black Mages AoE you down. Go around the tower, go in the top, engage and fight for that central point; if you get hurt bad, either fall back or get under and pick up fuel if you think you can pick it up safely.

If you win this initial engagement, get a fuel advantage, field two Cruise Chasers and an Oppressor, and push a lane. I prefer to push top since, again, you never want to be fighting for the central control point from the bottom of the stairs. Control the top and control the high ground to make it easier to take the center point back.

I might write more later, but this is Matt's Very Basic Rival Wings Primer.

-- Want to play FF14 with me? I'm Emikis Vanzier on Gilgamesh.