Howdy and welcome back to Mech Overview! With the new release of the Mercenaries box and the accompanying wave of new mech force packs, a lot of the more obscure mechs are now getting miniatures, which is awesome. As a massive fan of trash, crap, and obscure B-list BattleMechs, I am ecstatic that all of these dweebuses are finally going to be getting cool new miniature. Today’s subject is far away from being a dweebus though, the Devastator!
Sharing a name with a Transformer and looking like a slightly bigger Warhammer, the Devastator is one of those B-list Assault Mechs that never got its time in the sun. Originating from a scenario pack and technically existing in 3025, in practice the Devastator actually arrived later for the majority of players, well after the Clan Invasion had been written. It also sorta technically existed in very small numbers during the Star League, meaning that in general this thing has always been kinda technically there but never as a star mech, staying out of the way and letting it’s more iconic brethren take the spotlight.
God does that suck because the Devastator is a fucking world class Assault Mech. The Devastator is a scary motherfucker that completely clowns on any and all other Inner Sphere assault mechs during the Invasion that aren’t S series Banshees. I have always had a soft spot for the Devastator after rolling one on an RAT in a MegaMek campaign. You might not have heard of him, you might not know where he is from, but the Devastator is far from inferior.
Chassis
The Devastator is a 100 ton assault mech with a general role as a goddam juggernaut. Most variants are built to fight at multiple ranges, generally liking mid range best. As a basic Inner Sphere non-Omni, variants can make substantial changes but most don’t. The Devastator is a very simple machine and most variants just want to walk into medium range and start winning the game for you.
Variants
These mechs have all been reviewed based on a standard F through S scale, which you can find described on our landing page here (along with all of our other ‘mech reviews, the name of the box you can buy to get any of the mechs we have covered, and our general methodology).
DVS-1D
The first variant of the Devastator out of universe, though technically the second in universe, the DVS-1D comes in at 1858 BV. It is a 3/5/0 mech with a good amount of armor and some pretty high firepower. It carries 2 AC/10s with enough ammo to load precision and be happy, 2 large lasers, and 4 medium lasers, one firing backwards which sucks but I have been informed that rear firing guns get a heavy BV discount, so it is whatever. Having used this mech quite a lot as my third favorite introtech dual AC/10 mech (The Hammerhands and Davion Rifleman are better), the achilles heel of this mech is heat. With only 15 single heat sinks, the DVS-1D is prone to cooking itself alive at the slightest touch, and it has pretty mediocre bracketing with 22 heat worth of mid-range gun that it wants to shoot. Most 3025/Introtech assault mechs are deeply underwhelming and this is unfortunately no exception.
As much as it pains me, even though I personally love this mech it just is not worth the BV. While it stacks up well against like, base model Atlas’s and King Crabs, the moment you leave introtech this mech just stops working. I used to play almost entirely 3025 as early as starting these mech overviews out, and this was my all star player when I did that. I highly recommend branching out to IlClan though, plenty of pieces from 3025 actually age great into the newer tech (I use a ton of 3025 Awesomes, Banshees, the Marik and Davion Marauders, Orions, Javelins, Spiders, Jenners, Panthers, and Dragons in my IlClan games and it goes great. Especially Panthers, holy shit does the 8R Panther age like wine). Most mechs that are good in 3025 remain good going forwards, but anything that manages heat this badly gets completely left behind.
RATING: D+
DVS-2
Ok so this is the good one. At 2481 BV the DVS 2 is a lord of war, an engine of destruction, a new and callous god that has come to hit a Dire Wolf in the mouth with a wrench and cackle as it makes that genetically engineered Neo-Spartan LARPER eat their own teeth. Fucking hell this is a good assault mech. Compared to the DVS 1D you get slightly more armor and swap to an XL engine and double heat sinks. Where this mech fucking rocks is the guns, good god the guns. Carrying 2 gauss rifles, 2 PPCs, and the same 4 medium lasers as the DVS 1D, including the one rear firing one. It also has enough heat sinks to completely sink its long range guns, letting it output a frightening amount of damage. A 50 point long range alpha strike isn’t quite “Please God Stop” damage, but it can do it every turn until it fully exhausts all 16 rounds of gauss ammo, and after that it is still basically a Thug even with just the PPCs, and the Thug is another genuinely good Assault Mech in its own right.
If you just want a slab of armor to walk forwards and kill the living hell out of everything in sight, the DVS 2 is one of the single best mechs for that in the entire game. It takes some finesse to use a 3/5/0 mech though, as you will basically always be outmaneuvered and out positioned, but no heavy mech or assault mech in the entire game is going to want to close in on this thing and get shot the entire way in. Do not underestimate this mech under any circumstances, avoid it if you can and distract it with something fast and annoying if you can’t. There are Clan Assault mechs that cost more than this thing and don’t out DPS it. A Supernova costs 300 more BV and only does 10 more damage on an alpha, and it actually has around the same or lower DPS once you consider it’s tremendous heat load. The fucking Thunderhawk, my pick for the best long range juggernaut in the game, only has marginally more armor, has slightly less DPS, and costs 100 more BV for the luxury of trading the 2 PPCs for a gauss rifle, and while it is usually better to get as many headchoppers as possible the trade off here I think genuinely favors the Devastator.
This mech coming in the new Merc starter box is a goddam terrifying thing because it is going to show up in so many more games and people are rapidly going to realize that pound for pound and BV for BV the DVS 2 is possibly the single best conventional assault mech in the game. The only knock against it is the XL engine, and that is a very fair complaint, but in my experience by the time I lose a side torso my 100 tonners are already mauled to all hell. The utility of conventional assault mechs is something you can argue back and forth, I currently am not a huge fan of them and prefer juggernaut heavy mechs, but if you are going to take one I would genuinely rather have one of these than a Dire Wolf, even without thinking about BV for a second. Fucking massively strong mech.
RATING: S-
DVS-2-EC
Raising the price to 2859 BV, the fact that this thing is extinct in all eras but the Early Clan period is honestly maybe a good thing. The EC, or Early Clan model, is a fucking abomination. First of all, the Double Heat Sinks are upgraded to Clan standards, and it upgrades the weapons, not to clan grade, but to the transitional EC upgrades. The Improved Gauss Rifles are functionally identical, just lighter, and the ER medium lasers are the same as later Clan ones. The big cheese is the Enhanced ER PPC. This simply raises the damage to 12 without making any other changes. This allows them to headchop, and the DVS 2-EC is completely heat neutral while running and firing 4 Heachoppers, putting it in an exclusive club of itself and nothing else I can think of. Even the mighty Hellstar builds movement heat, and the DVS 2-EC comes in 300 BV cheaper, easily allowing for a gunnery upgrade which will let it win nearly every fight it picks.
If you have never played with a mech that slings out 4 headchoppers at once, that 3% chance to kill instantly from a headshot starts to happen with alarming frequency. Even if you aren’t landing headshots, the DVS 2-EC is still a significant upgrade to the DVS 2 with higher damage output and better range. This is a distinctly broken assault mech, and it being consigned to a period and place that literally no one plays (all 3 Early Clan players can send a comment about it) is a very good thing. Even in my own very light restriction games I would not want to use this or play against it.
RATING: S
DVS-3
A simple one, the DVS 3 is nearly identical to the DVS 2, trading the front firing medium lasers for slightly more armor, a rear firing small laser for some fucking reason, and 2 more tons of gauss rifle ammo. At 2452 BV it is nearly the same cost. It is also massively oversinked, which is hilarious but doesn’t really matter much. I dislike this as the lack of backup weapons can hurt on a mech with a minimum range, but as you were mostly buying a DVS 2 to brawl at range this shouldn’t hurt too bad. It’s a matter of preference but I strongly prefer the base model, 16 gauss shots is enough gauss shots.
RATING: A
Yeah it’s still an A, the DVS 2 is fucking cracked.
DVS-X-10 MUSE EARTH
God I love all of the MUSE mechs, they are such weirdos and the names are very cool. For a mighty and excessive 3250 BV you get a fucking horrid weirdo of a mech. Starting off, it moves 4/6(8)(10) because we are in BV threshold hell with MASC and a Supercharger. For armor it carries a fuckload of Reactive armor, reducing the damage from explosives and I believe also reducing the crit rate of Armor Piercing autocannon rounds. For internals, the mech is a nightmare with an XXL engine which builds 6 fucking heat at a run, and it has a ton of armored components for some reason? Armoring a component means that it has to be crit twice to take damage, and I personally am a gigantic fan of armored engines and armored gyroscopes, as crits to those systems rapidly lead to mech death. Instead, the geniuses at NAIS armored the hips, shoulders, and Supercharger, a befuddling mix of components when there were much more valuable things to do with that tonnage.
For weapons, good lord things suck in here. You have 2 Heavy PPCs with Capacitor, so 40 heat if you fire both at once, and a pair of medium VSPs. Only having the capacity to sink 32 heat and building 6 just from moving, the firing pattern is pretty clearly intended to be to alternate Heavy PPCs, one firing while the other is charging up. This is cool and all but there are mechs that can just shoot as many times as they want without having to do this, and adding on top of the weird structure and sheer badness and crit vulnerability of the XXL engine, it just makes a non-functional over expensive piece of trash.
Great name, and the art is cool, but they didn’t put this mech into full production for a very good reason.
RATING: F, overly expensive and under performing.
DVS-10
A little weirder and with a similar weapons load to a fucking Blackjack variant, the DVS 10 comes in at 2204 BV and is in every way a slightly more sane MUSE EARTH. You still move 4/6(8)(10) but you lose the XXL engine, Reactive armor, and armored components. 4/6(8)(10) is a miserable movement profile from a BV standpoint, but you do at least get to be a hilariously fast 100 tonner, which has value. For guns you have 2 large re-engineered lasers, and 2 medium re-engineered lasers. RE lasers are situationally awesome and a 10 hex run on something this big is hilarious, but there are better ways to get RE lasers into a force and the damage on this mech is just a little low for something that has to rely on inconsistent systems to get its mobility. The reason I am not completely tearing this thing apart like I usually do 4/6(8)(10) mechs is just that 2204 BV is really not that bad of a price for a 100 tonner with these traits, low damage is the actual only problem with this mech and if you are playing a game where RE lasers are good this thing’s effective damage will double.
For those who don;t know, RE lasers ignore all damage reduction from armor. They deal the full damage to the enemy no matter if they have hardened armor, reflective armor, ferro lam, whatever. They also have a -1 accuracy bonus, which is insanely nice. For the price this is anemic damage, but it really isn’t that expensive and if you have an opponent who loves Hammerheads and the various ferro lam clan rebuilds, this will get some great use.
RATING: C, B+ in a game with good targets with hardened/reflective armor.
Jack: Look, who gives a shit about the guns. They exist to shoot every other turn or so and get some damage here and there. This mech exists to charge things – if you turn on masc and supercharger at the same time, you can pretty reliably line up an 8-hex charge, as that gives you 2 hexes to turn. Sure, you’re not likely to hit someone’s back like a Celerity would, but that’s still 80 damage. I’d call it at least a solid B.
DVS-11
Oh god this thing costs so fucking much. For 3170 BV, the DVS 11 is a more or less direct upgrade to the DVS 2. Moving 3/5 (6)(8) with MASC and Supercharger, the DVS 11 honestly is way less bad than most MASC + Supercharger assaults. For guns you have the same 2 gauss rifles, but trade everything else out for a pair of snub nosed PPCs, 2 Clan ER medium lasers, and 2 Clan ER small lasers for some fucking reason, one facing backwards. Snub PPCs are probably the third best brawling weapon in the game after the Clan LPL and Clan MPL, 9 hexes of short range is nuts. I honestly think that this isn’t that bad of a mech. Once you start going over 3000 BV you are competing against very high end Clan Assault mechs, but the DVS 11 I think could actually win a lot of those fights. It has good range bands, good mobility when it needs it and the ability to bunker down and slug it out when it doesn’t, and like, it is competently put together and armed. I would still rather have a DVS 2 to save the BV but if I had extra and already was fielding every Javelin and Panther mini that I own and use to pad BV, I might pay for the upgrade. It is a better mech on it’s own merits, but BV is unkind. If you are a certain kind of player you will love the hell out of this thing, and it wins a gold star for being a MASC + Supercharger assault that I don’t completely fucking hate.
RATING: B
Conclusion
Genuinely one of the game’s best assault mechs. I love how I get to talk about good mechs sometimes. The DVS 2 is a gold fucking standard against which other post-invasion assaults have to be measured, and the DVS 2EC is a fucking warcrime and I would not want to play against it. We have all been living in a mercifully Devastator free world for the last few years, and we are all completely fucked because everyone on planet earth is about to get one of these with their kickstarter orders and they are going to be crawling all over every table after people pop those open.
So what do we do about this? As I alluded to earlier, the Devastator variant that is most commonly going to see play, the DVS 2, has a minimum range. Simply standing 2 hexes away from it, not next to it because assault mech kicks hurt, and blasting with SRMs, Heavy Lasers, and the like, is going to hurt it bad. In addition, it does have an XL engine so crit fishing with LBX autocannons or SRMs is another idea. The DVS 2 also really struggles to kill light mechs and fast mediums, as it has short legs and is too serious of temperament to chase them down. Something like an Ice Ferret, Locust, Rec Guide Cicada, or a Black Lanner can really annoy the hell out of one of these and kill it if it ignores them. The Devastator has mediocre back armor as well, with a gauss shot going internal anywhere on the rear torso and threatening to crit out that massive engine. So it is best to surround the Devastator with light mechs and try to punch holes in its back and go crit fishing. This applies to every variant, though it might be hard to pin down the DVS 11 or MUSE EARTH in the same way that you can pin down the DVS 2 and 2EC.
Fucking hell this Kickstarter is awesome. So many new and fantastic mechs. This isn’t even the one I was the most excited for! Devastator Superior, holy shit.
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