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is there a difference here? outside of price and availability of course.

Honestly I have seen better damage done with the Null-rays and strength modifiers. I quickly ranked up my one strafer and then after playing around with different combination of weapons asked the question why I was not getting as much damage out of a rank 6 weapon than I was out of a null-ray or my fist. Named-Violation explained to me how the weapons and modification worked and with a quick test of one of my level 1s I played with a weapon/str combo till I found a shift on my formulas. As soon as the alt-form I like comes back into rotation I will be willingly dropping my 6 firepower weapon for a 4 firepower weapon to adjust for a higher damage.

Now personally I feel at 0 the metalikato strikes are cooler and do more damage, especially once you start dropping strength to back them up. But outside of that, no real damage difference.

awesome, thanks again man. the reason I ask, is all of the low level bullies that lurk around. 100 k is way too high to be competing at lvl 0, i think. Trying to perfect a low level dueler.

Do you think that your firepower/strafe combo is unbalanced? Too much firepower?

Well you must hate me then. I just leveled my 100kers from zero to one. I don't level my bots till I can rank up 1 full level at a time. It keeps me from being prey, but I know what you mean.

Strafe is actually absolutely useless levels 0 and 1. My strafers are still pretty much useless at level 1 and 2, however the rank 1 is doing better than the rank 2 because of the way I res-peced him. The same goes to repairers. I mean on average the only time strafers / repairs make decent xp/energon is when they are in large fights. Problem is that the survivability is low at those levels, but the pay offs are big.

My advice is if you are planning on making low level arena bots is to stick to 2 or 3 points into speed or strength and then one or two into ram or avoid. If you plan on being in missions these will still help.

The two or three points you put into strength will give you armor to mitigate some of the damage you may take as well as allow you to deal out some devastating damage. The benefit of this too is that you really don't need a weapon as your fists will do more damage than the weapon. My top bot is a rammer.

Avoidance works great at rank 0/1. The two or 3 points into speed allow you to be more accurate as well as giving you a great bonus every time your avoid fires off. While my rammer takes less damage from being hit, my avoiders dont get hit. Means less energon for repairs, and faster turn around times. I've done some arena matches where I decimate the cons without ever getting hit.

I honestly wouldn't work on strafe at rank 0. My rank 1 strafer is my experimental, but he is about as useful as in missions / arenas about 40% of the time. My rank 2 strafer started to bound up big time after my last rebuild, but I expect that after I reformat him this time he will finally be one of my top scorers.

Nah, no hate for the only other bot out there! Anyways, i wouldn't have null rays if it weren't for you!!

Thanks for the info. Ive tried to utilize courage over speed, but the three speed/ one avoid build seems to be the headrunner here at this level.

Any idea on how recharge works on weapons? is it relevant?

Courage works well at rank 1, but not rank 0. I ran 50 runs at 4 courage and I found the other combinations to work better for me. Granted I did end up attacking about 30% more, but I also tend to miss about 45% more than my speed builds and about 30% more than my strength builds.

The way I have tested recharge on weapons is strange. It may be wrong, but this is my tests with it only.
The recharge time (out of 50 missions and 10 arenas) tends to work like this. When it says no recharge time the normal attack time was not effected. When it says short recharge time, the attack time on a 0 courage bot (out of 50 missions) the attack frequency was reduced about 8-12%. The damage variances did not change. YMMV though.

Level 0 and Level 1 I tried to do the weapons thing. It was not too effective for me. Even my rank two I am planning on dropping from 6 firepower to do a strength multiplier and get some more armor. I figure around Level 4 I will start to try to get the weapons that I am coming up against by some of the higher bots. My best advice is find the cons that consistently beat you at your level and higher levels and see what they are doing. That's what I am doing

It's worth pointing out that expecting massive changes in performance from the tiny number of stats you can have as a level 0 character is like pissing on napalm to put it out... It doesn't really make much difference. By level 1 though, you can start to effect your character's chances more.

I disagree slightly. Level 0 is a great way to test the effects of how stats work. It gives you a basis on how 4 points can make a difference and how the multipliers or deviations. Your analogy is correct though. Once you hit rank 2 you can get a huge and gigantic difference in tactics and stats.

i agree. it comes down to what you're taking away from the opposition as well. three speed character vs a four speed character is almost like zero vs one speed. maybe im wrong on that one, but thats what it seems like.

Yeah, that's pretty much right.