MWO is bad with a Joystick, mouse and keyboard required.

If he doesn't have the best hand eye coordination (I know some folks that play that do), assault mechs like the dire wolf are the way to go. Giant clunky mobile fortresses that can tank tons of damage and dish it out to those ahead of them.

When you initially start playing you can use the starter mechs until you have enough money to outfit a mech. New players get a massive bonus to generated money for the first X number of games, it comes out to like 12-14 million. After that it takes somewhere to around 80-100 games to outfit a mech.

If a poor choice is made on the initial purchased mech, then it will be a pain to make money for more mechs.

Understanding the mechanics between IS/Clan weapons and mechs is key.

IS mechs get quirk bonuses, lower fire rate higher damage autocannons, high damage LRM's and lasers with short burn times. Taking advantage of quirks for IS mechs is key.

Clan mechs get omnipods with some locked upgrades, lower tonnage and lower slot costing weapons, but they also get no quirks.

Ghost heat is important, it basically says if you fire x number of the same weapon (sometimes same type of weapon) you generate more heat than normal. This is particularly high for weapons such as ER PPC's.

Building a mech in game is an awful ordeal, the UI is "literally" the devil. Use http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/ to make builds, look up weapon stats, quirks, omnipods, ghost heat or pretty much any other stat.

Lastly, setting weapons to chain fire most of the time is stupid, since it's always stagged to half a second, weapons with short cycle times will fire much slower than normal (AC/2s for example). To use any sort of advanced setup you would use a macro program like Fire Control.

Mechspecs.com is pretty good, but I don't agree with all of the highly rated builds listed there.

I don't mind showing new people how to play, I can send you my in game name to answer any questions that he might have.