I went into this Caustic game not too happy, as the last few games had been PUG-bad, and the crawl up the skill tree is just long. I need about 1000 XP to finish off the basics on the Flame Dragon. Was thinking I need another 3~6 matches to do that.
Started and half the team went up the mountain and the bloody fast movers started to cap (!). I pop up over the caldera to see a pair of Atlas on the far end, so I do the natural thing — I sent Gauss rounds into them. They backed down; LLs vs. Gauss is a losing proposition at that range, even with 140 tons of advantage. I was left with nothing to do, so I started working my way to the left, but was caught by surprised when I noticed an ECM Atlas going by outside my cockpit within 100m.
I skidded to a halt and started working my way behind him, and he was tunnel-visioning into a teammate, probably the Stalker. I was left free to wreck his rear, so I throttled down and sat behind him. Thankfully, my team had engage the rest and I was unmolested. Blew off a torso, then followed in as he stumbled forward and quickly killed him — this kill I worked for.
Still fresh, I joined in a hillside brawl between an enemy Raven, a enemy Centurion, and some of my team. Centurion had an AC10 I think, and the pilot was good, and he was eventually making some serious holes in my Dragon, but my fire eventually tore a leg off and someone got the kill. I cooled a bit and then popped back over the crater to chase down the last few stragglers, and managed to land a killshot on the back of a fleeing Centurion, blowing off his torso, probably his XL engine too. Then the last enemy, a Raven-2X, came up and I took a snapped laser shot at him; this barrage apparently was enough to core him. I went “huh” at that point, certainly not expecting to get that many kills, and certainly not expecting to top the table with a Dragon and molesting so many of the enemy!
On top of that, I earned enough XP for me to finish off the last skill with this one game, and I can now move on to another Dragon. 🙂