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[Lazy Eye]

I "did" my Catapults under the pre 1.2.223 regime and I found them okay (except for the ECM which is still a super weapon for it's tonnage, but I digress...)

I've *always* been of the opinion that the one thing that LRMs needed more than anything else was a speed increase, which we got in this patch and *is* good - I didn't even have a problem with the "broken" indirect-fire flight path...

Now that you can actually hit stuff with LRMs, what's going to break things now is the number or tubes people carry (DoT; damage over time).

I predict that, even after fixing the splash damage problems, LRMs are still going to be too powerful, not because of the damage, but because of the number of tubes people can carry.

One of the reasons to take loads of ammo with LRMs is accuracy: you take loads of ammo to make sure you do *some* damage. Now that the speed increase has made LRMs more accurate, you can have more confidence of hitting, so you don't need to take as much ammo to do *some* damage, ergo, you can take a higher tube-to-ammo ratio. Simple maths.

The easiest way to fix this is to reduce ammo-per-tonne, which will encourage people to take less tubes / more ammo and or take more/better secondary weapons. I would suggest a constant "damage per tonne" value, so that whenever damage goes up, missiles go down and vice-versa.

[Frank the Tank]

I think a better solution would be to adjust the way missiles volley fire. Currently you can abuse the number of missile tubes your mech has in two ways. First, (more commonly a problem with SRMs) you can fire multiple small launchers in group fire as one salvo when the should be volley fired. The best example of this is the 3SRM6 CN9-A which has 10 tubes, but can group fire all 18 SRMs at the same time instead of a 10 + 8 missile volley. Second, you can fire large launchers out of a few tubes in a long chain. The missiles do volley fire properly, but they can create a constant stream of missiles.

If volley firing was tweaked to work when group firing and have a longer interval then missiles would be balanced more judiciously. The pauses between volleys should be much greater so people aren't getting constantly walloped. If you reduce ammo per ton you will still have the deadly and incredibly efficient assault missile boats, but you hurt lighter dedicated missile boats like the catapult or trebuchet. Basically, a change to the volley fire mechanic would allow mechs with a lot of missile tubes (catapults and trebuchets) to function as they should, while putting a burden on mechs without a lot of missile tubes.

Incidentally, I think that on the whole speed and accuracy (not precision) should be increased further (after splash is taken care of), with damage drastically reduced. LRMs should be very easy to hit with, but do very little and highly spread damage.