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[Deathlike]

Not factoring the ECM component (which is a major issue in itself), Streaks have the greatest disparity in damage dealt vs skill to use ratio... that's effectively easier than even pulse lasers or regular lasers... which doesn't even make sense (lasers for the most part are where most people have to start with on the skill chain).

With regards to tracking, IIRC, streaks are made to hit the part of the body that is targeted when fired. I think it will be (or has been) tweaked to target specific parts of the mech (excluding head) like arms and legs (right now, it's all torso AFAIK). I don't necessarily have a problem with this, outside of the fact that it can be too effective w/o changing the dynamics of the damage.

SRMs have undergone favorable tweaking, where at a certain range (under 100m) the cluster of missiles are more concentrated (more with Artemis). On the other hand, Streaks have not been tweaked in the other direction... which I think I'll try to explain what I think should be done:

1) 1/2 of the Streaks on average should actually hit the target where the reticle is on. If streaks on the current average succeed like 75% of the time, you are doing lots more damage that the equivalent medium laser, which is less effective on faster mechs (and that's not factoring splash damage) due to spread of the laser damage. Lowering the average for streaks like it were a scatter weapon like LBX (but not as crappy) would make it a lot more balanced. This can scale when larger streaks are introduced.

2) There should be a running RNG on whether the the streaks hit the intended part. For example, if you are targeting the CT, there should be some sort of distribution of probabilities that it doesn't hit it. For instance, a missile should have a 50% chance to target/hit the CT, 25% for the side torsos (or to be more balanced, 40% CT, 30% each for each side torso).

If you are targeting a side torso (let's just say RT on a hunchback), you would have a 40% chance to hit that, 15% chance to hit the CT, and a 22.5% chance to hit either the leg or arm.

If you are targeting an arm or leg (let's say the right arm of a cent), you would have a 66.7% chance to hit the arm, and 33.3% chance to hit the right torso.

In distributing the damage like a scatter weapon similar to the SRM, it needs to operate similar to SRM principles with the locking benefit, but not significantly to be like some sort of short range tbolt-like weapon that it currently is being used as. (For those of you that don't know what a tbolt/Thunderbolt is, it is a weapon designed to ignore AMS and deal significant damage to the part of the body it hits.) This would at least minimize the kind of issues that streaks by themselves are a part of.