Hey folks, and this is a (hopefully quick) article on how to invest your MC in MWO. Let’s start out with one overarching piece of advice:
Wait for Sales
Pretty much everything goes on sale at some point. The main things that don’t go on sale much, if at all, are MC, Mechbays, Premium Time, one-shot camos, C-Bill mech prices, and generic cockpit items. For those, you might as well buy them as you feel you need them. Pretty much everything else, though, I would wait until it goes on sale unless you really really really wants it bad.
With that out of the way, let’s start the actual article with
Mechbays
Hands down, 100% the best use of your MC (up to a point). When you start off, you barely have enough mechbays to master a single variant, let alone get a true stable of mechs assembled. Even if you do the most MC-efficient thing and sell all the variants you don’t love after you finish mastering a mech, you can easily find yourself with 30 mechs in your lab before you feel like you have a solid coverage. I personally have over 100 and I know people with over 200. PGI has gotten better about “giving away” mechbays during the weekend challenges, but they aren’t so good that you won’t need to buy some yourself too, eventually. Buy them as you need them, and if they’re on sale stock up, but this is the one thing you should never be unsure of whether it’s worth spending your MC on.
Makin’ Bank!
This section is going to focus on Premium Time and Hero Mechs. Which one is more worth it is a difficult question, so I’lll break it down for ya
Premium Time
- 50% bonus to C-Bill earnings
- Applies to all mechs
- Gives extra XP in addition to C-Bills, making leveling much easier
- Also allows you to host or co-host a lobby
- Does not last forever, and can get very expensive over long periods of time (about $100 for a year’s worth)
- Gives less extra C-Bills than a Hero Mech
Hero Mech
- 30% bonus to C-Bill earnings
- Permanent (once purchased, you keep that bonus on it forever)
- Unique mech camo and hardpoints can make it particularly valuable
- You only get bonus C-Bills while running this mech
- Does not boost XP
Overall, that means that premium time will give you a bigger bonus, but will cost way more over the long run. Personally, I almost always have premium time going, and I’ve got the better part of a dozen hero mechs, so my advice is to get both, but I wanted to lay out the options so you can choose for yourself. Now, let’s discuss each in more detail.
Premium Time
This offers a 50% bonus to C-Bill (and XP) earnings over the period that you have purchased it for. Obviously, the price per hour of premium goes down the larger the package you select is, so if you know you’ll be playing and will want a premium account in a year, or 6 months, or whatever, and you have the money to do it, you should absolutely go for the longest time pack as you can. I usually do it on a monthly basis because I like to keep a tight monthly gaming allowance for myself, but that’s just me. After getting to a certain point, when you don’t have anything left to buy or level, there’s no worry in letting it lapse, but it tends to save on a lot of heartache if you keep it running until that point.
Hero Mechs
There are 3 priorities for Hero mechs in my mind. The first is how effective they are at making you C-Bills, then how fun they are, then how cheap they are. There’s a few mechs that fit each category and one mech that I’ll reveal dramatically at the end as being the best combination and just your best choice for a Hero mech! It’s a Misery. Fuck, I ruined it. Anyways, the builds are also optimized for not running any consumables – more on this in the Modules section below (so generally they’re a bit cooler than usual builds).
Make money!
For the funs!
Cheap ‘n good!
Best buys (other electronics stores are available)!
Honorable Mentions
Bottom of the Barrel
Master Bundles
These are absolutely an amazing deal due to having the chassis’ Hero mech, the champion mech, a C-Bill variant, 3 mech bays, a cockpit item, and 30 days of premium time! It’s seriously a great deal and I’m sad that it wasn’t there for me for these hero mechs. Let’s just look at the essential components of the Stalker pack; the Misery, a mechbay, and 30 days of premium time is 9,175 when bought individually, while the mastery pack is 8,785 MC. The math comes out similarly for the other mech packs too. Even when the hero is on sale, it is still a pretty good deal due to how it comes with the champion variant and a regular variant and a cockpit item, so its total value is still better than just buying the hero mech.
That being said, if you’re trying to minimize the amount of MC you spend for the best overall C-Bill gain, you’re best off waiting until the hero goes on sale, and then just buying it by itself.
Package & Bonus Variants
Right now, this includes mechs from the Founder’s pack, the Phoenix Pack, the Clan Invasion Packs, and soon the Resistance Pack and bonus mechs like the AS7-S, CN9-AH, and the King Crap (I’d imagine). These get all of the Hero mech bonuses, but are otherwise identical to their C-Bill variants. So, the best ones of these to use (in order) are:
- Timber Wolf TBR-Prime (I)
- Dire Wolf DWF-Prime (I)
- Hellbringer HBR-Prime (I)
- Stormcrow SCR-Prime (I)
- King Crab KGC-000(L)
Modules
For C-Bill grinding, you obviously want to bring optimal Mech Modules and Weapon Modules (if you’ve got any questions as to what those would be, check out the Module & Pilot Skills Guide, and NO CONSUMABLES! Seriously, I did the math, and I’ve probably spent somewhere in the area of 250,000,000 C-Bills on consumables since the stat reset, and about the same before the stat reset, meaning that I’ve probably spent about half a billion C-Bills on consumables total. That’s absurd. Just don’t use them. Don’t even bring them. Your income will go way up. Trust me.
Champion Mechs
If there’s a variant that you know you like, and you’re dying for GXP, these aren’t a terrible investment, but…I’ve never found them to be all that useful to be perfectly honest. I’ve used giveaway champion mechs to try to grind GXP before, but…I’m pretty sure that a first win of the day bonus will make you more GXP than the champion bonus does. So I’m gonna say not worth.
C-Bill Packs, C-Bill Mechs, and MC Consumables
Don’t you fucking dare. These are such bad value that you’re actually better off investing in those bottom of the barrel hero mechs. Just don’t do it. Don’t. You. Dare. Unless maybe if it’s like, an MC sale on a C-Bill variant that hasn’t been released for C-Bills yet…but even that I wouldn’t do personally.
Cosmetics
Buy whatever you think looks cool dude! Paints are probably the best investment since you can use them on all of your mechs, cockpit items are nice to look at I guess if one of them blows your mind and you want it really bad, and patterns are the only place where I can offer useful universal advice. Unless you really truly 100% expect to apply that camo to a single chassis 10 times, don’t get the full unlock. The 1-off 75 MC deal is worth it most of the time, with the only exception I can think of being if you have a mech chassis or variant that you absolutely love and want to switch between at least two different camos on it all the time. That pretty much covers cosmetics though.
I think that’s it
Yup, pretty sure that’s it. If not, yell at my on the MetaMech forum.
And as always, glhf
-G