You've Been Playing Captain Mendoza All Wrong In Crucible
Crucible, Amazon's hero shooter, stars a small but varied roster of intergalactic mercenaries, robot botanists, and alien truckers. These characters come in all shapes, sizes, and ordinances, and, keeping with genre tradition, one of the available hunters is a human with a rifle.
Captain Mendoza fills the time-honored shoes of "man with a big gun," but don't assume he plays just like any other heavily armed war veteran. There are many like him, but Mendoza brings unique features and tactics to the battlefield. If you enter Crucible assuming he works just like Soldier: 76 in Overwatch, you're going to lose a lot of matches.
Here's how you've been playing Crucible's Captain Mendoza wrong, and the tactics you need to adopt to start racking up wins.
Not calling Mendoza's Supply Drop all the time
Many players agree that Captain Mendoza is overpowered. Normally, you would assume someone like Bugg or Tosca would fill that role because of their tiny hitboxes, but Mendoza earns this distinction because of his signature ability: Supply Drop.
Supply Drop is like Mendoza's Swiss army knife. It serves as a shield that protects him and his allies from harm, but when it comes crashing down, the Supply Drop also knocks back nearby enemies. Add in a turret upgrade, and you transform the drop into a stationary AI ally that fills the role of both sword and shield. But, the Supply Drop's primary purpose is to top off med kits — which is why Mendoza is considered OP.
Each time Mendoza calls down his Supply Drop, it comes with a free med kit. Normally, medkits are rare, valuable resources. However, at the time of this writing, the cooldown on Supply Drop is reportedly a mere minute, allowing Mendoza and his allies to pop medkits like Tic Tacs.
It doesn't matter if you summon a Supply Drop to shield allies from incoming bullets or to resupply a character's med kit. If you can call it, do it; the drop will come in handy either way.
Not reloading while on the run
Mendoza's Sprint ability has many advantages over other character movement skills. Unlike Summer's Firepulse Thrusters, which can't be spammed without overheating her flamethrowers, Mendoza has infinite stamina and can run like a racehorse. With the proper upgrade, Mendoza can even Sprint into enemies for some shoulder-charging damage, but there's one neat little trick you might not know about Mendoza's Sprint: It doesn't prevent him from reloading.
Mendoza has mastered his marksmanship to the point where he can reload his gun on the go. Just keep sprinting to your goal and reload at the same time — it will help you get where you need to be faster with a full magazine. Being the first to arrive is meaningless if you don't have any party favors.
Not aiming for the head
Aiming for the head is a common tactic since most shooter games utilize headshot mechanics — bullets to the brainpan tend to pack an extra punch, and Crucible is yet another game to join the headshot crusade. While not all characters can pull off headshots for extra damage, Mendoza is one of the lucky few to have that capacity.
You probably wonder just how someone like Mendoza could land a headshot since he wields an assault rifle. Those kinds of weapons seem designed for emptying as many bullets as possible into large, chunky targets, while headshots are more suited for single-fire weapons like pistols and sniper rifles. You might assume that Ajonah is more at home aiming for the brain since her harpoons erase a ton of HP whenever they crit, but Mendoza's gun indeed deals serious damage when it lands a headshot. Hunters like Summer or Bugg, meanwhile, are left in the cold.
Landing headshots with an assault rifle might seem like a tall order, but the developers wouldn't give Mendoza the ability to score critical hits unless they intended players to take advantage of that mechanic.