I was very happy to see this thread, only to come in and find out that it's a thread about how to turn a Raven into a poptart.
Congrats on your accomplishment, but... this is like starting a thread called "See what I did with my AC20 Raven". It underlines the problem, it doesn't dispute it.
Target Rich, on 12 April 2013 - 01:15 AM, said:
This whole discussion reflects the basic game imbalance in this beta..
The ROLE of the raven is to scout.... it is the eyes of the lance....it uses its high sensor suite to hide, spy, and relay that info to the main lance.
A light's big damage weapon is TAG or Narc...through this designation system...the LRM boat can indirectly fire from extreme range and the raven can then guide this strike to a devistating remote kill.... That's the Raven's big punch...not the mickey mouse crap that we see right now.
The beta right now does not do this...and is fundamantally BROKEN.
Lights are lag shielded to virtually invunerability....LRM's are nerfed into utter impotence...and the narc...that devistating identifer has so very few shots....and lasts such a tiny time (ie ONE salvo)....that the scout role has become irrelevant.
Lots of issues...IF we get this game back to anything approaching basic battletech....all this stuff will be resolved..
But get this right by september....???
LOL
Well, they can't fix it and they won't fix it, I think. The design of the maps and the game make it very difficult for a Raven spotter to carry its weight. Even when LRMs were great, the LRM boats were quite happy to work without light mechs scouting. They just brought their own TAGs.
Due to the map design and the whole game design, there are very few situations where an LRM boat can really take advantage of indirect fire. It happens, of course. I've seen it happen many times, when the enemy team only realizes there's a spotter somewhere when it's too late. But it doesn't happen consistently, and it tends only to happen momentarily, so it's not really worth it to make it the primary role of a teammate.
It would be very different indeed of the LRMs had higher trajectories and higher missile speed, so it was actually hard to avoid indirect fire (i.e. the shooter wouldn't be able to see you, but the trajectory of his missiles would still allow him to hit his target with a spotter). But right now you have plenty of time to find cover, and the trajectories are flat enough that you pretty much have cover everywhere. Using LRMs on River city is very hard against skilled opponents.
I think some major changes are needed to make the specialised scout role viable. Untill then, Ravens are going to be either hunter-killers (Streaks), harassers (SRMs) or cappers (biggest possible engine. The engine cap is probably going to change soon, judging from Garth's hinting in another Raven thread)
Edited by Alistair Winter, 12 April 2013 - 04:43 AM.
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