Carrying on with my focus on reviews for up and coming
pilots, let’s look at the Dread.
Now unless you have been active in KOTM events and hit gold
or are part of a clan and have had either a gold under your belt or have struck
lucky at raid time, this is going to be the first mech that you have a chance
of striking it lucky and gathering as a prize drop from Cogwerk Port.
Now I’ve mentioned the prize part first because at a book
value of 90 Niodes, 700 Bioptics and 1125 Ferrite, quite frankly at low level
it’s expensive and you have far bigger priorities for your hard earned
resources. But as a freebie, it’s a keeper.
Out of the crate it has +1 speed and a +5% missile damage
bonus, so as you have probably guessed, this is a missile mech. Now I’m not a
fan of them, they are notoriously slow and I much prefer the speed associated with
a projectile mech, but one thing to bear in mind is that with this being a
niode mech it has far more weapon slots than any of the crystal based stuff you
will be using. And more weapon slots means a higher rate of fire and this wee
beastie can fair pump them out.
Add in the fact that by the time you have it up to your
current level and deployed, you should have another 8% missile damage and a 15%
trample ability PLUS the fact that you should be getting splash or fork from
your missiles, then you are going to be throwing around a lot of pain at a nice
fast rate. Yum!
Now the crying shame is that I see so many of these mechs
scrapped for the niode value purely to feed the insatiable war machine that is
higher level mechs. I did with the first one that I got, and regret it now… to
be honest it was so long arriving due to the luck of the draw that I never
thought I’d get one. I was into my 80+ levels when I got another, and yes,
there is still a use for it.
The original plan was that it would slot into my 50 ton specialist
formation and it still will. It might even be viable as a rear ranker in my 70’s.
But during the Mechalympix we were introduced to a new weight bracket, the 45
ton category.
“Oh no!” came the cries. “What do I do? My Oggun army is useless
and I’ve only got Holmeses!”
Hah.. pop that little Dread on the scales will you?
Submitted by by David McCallum #701548