DO:
- use manual aim (hold SHIFT). It gives you 15% extra critical chance after you aim for 4 seconds and makes you walk slower but regen energy twice as fast compared to running
- fill in all 4 active skills. You level up much slower if you do not have all 4 and get less starting skill points.
- unlock and use double size power modules. They give 40 power for 2 slots instead of 30 that two small modules would give which is 33% increase. Every single build for every single class will benefit from using those.
- take melee strike skill. It's an amazing skill that saves you a lot of ammo and can get you extra burst damage on very short CD. It also costs almost nothing power and slot wise.
- take at least one life support module. It increases your survivability by a ton and give you extra long term sustain. It's much better than increasing kinetic res with plates in almost every case. Again the double size module is better than the small one
- share primary ammo with teammates if you have a lot (press X to dump 3 primary magazines on the ground)

DON'T
- use overwatch all the time. It reserves 30 energy which might be used for other things and wastes ammo killing stuff that can be killed with skill or melee for free instead. Do use it when there is a lot of chaos going on and you don't have anywhere close to full energy and you need to focus on using items/skills and not aiming.
- take kinetic res modules. Life support will be better in most cases.
- use GAR as primary. It's a just not a good weapon with mediocre stats. (SGAR is very good weapon though)
- have too much spare suit power. Yes the extra increases your energy regen a bit but it's mostly a waste. It can't be helped if you have a bit spare but try to use as much of it for modules as you can. It's fine to even get like 5-10 under power sometimes.
- hit your teammates with explosives. Friendly fire is very brutal in this game and most explosives can one shot even the tankiest marines. The amount of teamkilling with explosives in this game is very high. Do your best to lower this statistic.
- get close to big monsters. They're often taken out with explosives so you're either gonna die from friendly fire or prevent the team from unloading their full firepower to avoid killing you. Do your best to get away from big monsters and big clusters ASAP.

Here is a rough weapon stats table. Do note that aiming weapons manually gives them extra 15% critical chance after 5 seconds. Do try to utilize that whenever you can and don't be lazy and rely on overwatch all the time.


Table can also be found at link below if you want to mess with it
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T0nsFNjxO7El685bau2t_wGmdepYTqQeMCasDPbSeQM/edit?usp=sharing

You'll start with 3 ability points and can get to level 13 for a total of 16 points to spend among your 4 active abilities. Abilities can be classified into few groups.
-high energy use(short cooldown ones even if the cost is cheap)
-low energy use (generally high cooldown ones)
-passives
Be sure to diversify there and don't take all high cost abilities since you won't have enough energy to use them all.
Another way to classiffy them is
-good with just single point investment and doesn't scale very well
-needs to be maxed out to really shine and not very useful at 1 point
-good all the way from 1 point to 5
-trash ability that's just bad almost all the time

Again diversify here and be sure to have at least 1 ability that is useful with just 1 point investment since you can't max all of them. Preferably 2.

Also remember that you can reallocate the points between abilities at the cost of some energy. Be sure to utilize it to get the most out of your abilities. Use CTRL+number to lower ability level and SHIFT+number to increase the level. For example if you have secondary ammo generation ability you can put a lot of points into it at the start to build your ammo stock quicker when the waves are easy and then swap those points out later when it becomes difficult. Also you don't have to slowly level the skills that need 5 points. Just level other skills and when you reach high enough level just take out 5 points and max out the all-in skill immediately.

Life support vs plates

Life supportgives you 90 Hp and +1 HP/s regen with no diminishing returns
Plates give you 8-14% kinetic res with diminishing returns

Even with 500 base HP + 90 HP from life support is 18% HP increase which is higher than the effective HP gain from extra kinetic res. And that's even without counting the extra regen which will push the effective HP increase to 20-25%

Kinetic res is only good because it increases the effectiveness of other healing on you. So it only works when you have a very good medic that can give you consistent healing and organized team that can make the most of it. And you really need a ton of extra healing for kintic res to outperform life support. That's not the case for most players so just stick with life support modules. You'll get much better mileage from them.

Here is a table with base stats of each class.

Good:
- Very Good base stats with extra energy regen, hp regen, lot of inventory slots
- Chain Explosive - almost mandatory skill for taking out biggest enemies with the 30k damage blast, no other class has such good skill to deal with them.
- Rocket ammo generation skill - 2 rockets is 16k damage (or even more with armor breaker) and lets you use energy in downtime to stockpile rockets which makes this skill very efficient
Bad:
- Need to be careful of friendly fire