Mech Arena - What should I run as my 3rd bot?

My 3rd and 4th bots are Guardian and Ares. Both fill different roles. It's good to have a tank, but they don't last very long at lower levels against multiple opponents. I'd do one of those personally. based on my usage, I play my guardian far more than my Ares. It's better for tournament play and will help pay for itself and other bots/weapons/upgrades.

Jug is still a solid bot to main as a 3rd, and ranking it up is definitely worth it.
Shadow will only do you right if you have Javelin 4s already and need a bot to stick them on, otherwise it's a "minimal combat" playstyle that leans more on grabbing whatever beacons aren't tended and shooting the enemy in the butt. They can ignore you and take double damage, or they can take double damage from whatever they were fighting by paying attention to you, either way they die. High risk high reward,that's pretty much the idea of playing shadow.

Guardian is much better further down the line because it doesn't really shine until you can stick Missile racks on it. It can do well with snipers, but then you're not getting much out of it's ability. You can do pulse cannons, but then it's exposed for longer than it wants to be. You can use RPG6 on it as a slightly worse version of missile rack 6 until you can muster up for missile rack 8. If you're considering Guardian, you might be better served using the 1k A-coins to buy the 100k credits and get an Ares instead, because it has better health and performs better overall in head to head confrontations, as well as ducking sniper fire with the shield.

i would love to give the shadow a shot but have heard its tricky to have success with, the bot most likely fits my play style more since i prefer fast bots to slow tanks. on War Robots I ran a pursuer, blitz, phantom, loki, and Nightingale over all of the other bots in my hangar. Maybe if it comes up on sale again I'll swoop one out to trial run

Run Thermal Lance 6 with Pulse cannon 6 if you're running them on a 12 en bot. You'll have to upgrade the Lance a bit, but it feels much better than dual Lance or Dual Pulse. Lances have lower damage, but are always accurate and are reliable, while pulse bullets deal less damage between 60 and 90M, on top of missing most of their shots between those ranges. Lance bolsters the shots that do hit up to Pulse cannon's max range so they do their regular damage, while still making Pulse bullets even deadlier at closer ranges.

Guardian with Pulse 8 is a cleanup bot that does best when you're traveling in a group. It still feels fairly squishy if you can't kill everything that has eyes on you before your ability wears off.

RPG 6 upgraded to the level/rank the rest of your hangar is at will do just fine on Guardian. They limit the amount of time your unshielded bot with a long arse ability cooldown has to be out of cover to deal damage. Using the most energy you can to throw weapons on a bot, isn't as important as using the weapons with attributes that allow you to make the most of your bot. Kinda like how Javelins are good on Killshot no matter what it's max energy is.

Re:Shadow. Deffo see if you can get it on sale. It is SUPER squishy. Like, it starts at rank 3 but only has 10k health squishy.
It's more like playing Stalker back when stalker was relevant than Pursuer, because you can't really be aggressive with it unless your intention is to throw Shadow away you insure the death of what killed you.
Trading bots against Shadow is a terrible trade for the enemy. Your job as a Shadow pilot would be to make that trade as unfavorable for the enemy as possible.
Shadow can't brawl. It has just enough firepower to kill something that has it's back turned to a Shadow. Whatever you're shooting should have to choose between killing your little bug, or killing the Tank/Killshot/attacker that they're already fighting while you shoot em in the arse. They turn around for you, the ally lives, and possibly kills them. They don't, you kill them regardless of whether or not they would win the other firefight, and you steal their bacon ??