I played my fair share of mercenaries and I had a blast. So I had to play clans. But now I am quite disappointed : the story is nice, but that's about the only nice thing about the game. The balanced seems fucked up so badly, laser death star seems like the only single option to play the game.
Ballistic weapons have dog shit dps/ton, and there's usually so much space with lasers for DHS that heat is never a problem, except for PPC. Fun fact btw : pulse lasers are better than both PPC and gauss (same damage, same rof as gauss, slightly better for PPC). But it's almost impossible to get dual gauss before assault mechs anyway.
The damage scaling is the other thing that interrogates me : enemy