Well yea... I see why there are LRM-lovers, who are upset about this topic.
I think the LRMs in the current state were going to be perfect but there's one huge BUT...
It's a game - for the "real life" comparisson, the missiles should be devastating, hard for someone to ignore and etc. currently I find them to break the ballance.
Cmon - even a LRM lover should agree with me, that this is the one almost-none-skill-to-use weapon in the whole game - you get lock, you fire, you should know the trajectory of your missiles, based on where are they possitioned and that's about it.
You can actually spend a whole game nuking the hell outta stuff without even seing once the "stuff" mentioned.
And don't even get started with the ECM and how hard it is to keep a target tagged, cause every single weapon has his drawbacks and counters.
I also think that the missiles in their pre-this-patch state were a way more balanced than they're now, atleast in game, not real life terms.
There MUST be a wider spread for the missiles - now I find them to hit almost all the time my center torso, which makes it very deadly weapon.
Add to that the mentioned - you just need a lock and be 200-1000m away, and there we go on our point-and-click adventure. Could be a very small change but at the moment, cause of that change, they are turning everything into ashes.
And it's the same very small change, that makes the LRMS so appetizing weapon of choice and from there the hell follows.
People getting burned by them realize that they've recieved some tweaking and on the second time they get obliterated by them, they just put LRMs in some mech for the next match and launch with it, and so on.
So at the end we got 8 man games with about half of the team carring the long range missiles, which are deadly enough for a two man per team, not to mention 4+.
You CAN NOT just sit behind some forsaken hill and destroy enemy center torso, or hit it almost all the time.
I can't do that. Neither with energy weapons(all the time atleast) nor "skill" weapons(ballistics, SRMs, PPCs) tho I actually have a good range and more than a descent aim.
Why should you, cowering behind the cover, be able to do that?
They were perfect before this patch. Something you should pay attention to unless you wanna die.
Now they are wrecking havoc in ballance terms and I reallly don't approve that.
Not for a weapon that have such a long range, does not require any aiming and chase the targets.
Edited by Voidcrafter, 07 March 2013 - 04:19 AM.