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[Skyfaller]

The NARC needs to be useful. It is currently a complete waste of crit slots and tonnage for scouts and even for a catapult A1 (the only mech that you could argue would benefit from carrying it to help it lock its missiles).

Lets focus on the Catapult A1 as a prime example of why the NARC needs some improvement.

The CatA1 with a Narc receives no benefit from plugging a NARC on the target... its short range makes it unwise to use, the short timer and low damage threshold before it falls off means you cant narc a target and bombard it and worse yet, the Narc is disabled when ECM bubble is near it.

If that was not enough, the Narc does not stack with TAG so for a scout, its absolutely stupid to load a NARC when a TAG does a better job from 800m away. Less tonnage and crit slots wasted too.

There is a way to make the NARC useful however:

1- Increase range to 800m like the TAG.
2- Increase Narc ammo by 50% more per ton.
3- Narc is a homing beacon. As such it should only be affected by ECM if the player has no LOS on the target because LOS means the Narc can send target location via infrared..which ECM does not interrupt.

This change makes the Narc be a missile-fired version of the TAG but with the benefit that it requires only LOS (no pinpoint aiming of the TAG to pain the mech) and when out of LOS it hold locks (unless ECM field is near).

4- If target is TAG'd then the Narc's bonus CHANGES. It will (if this can be coded), make the missiles home in on the armor section the TAG is illuminating as its 'center impact point'. This can be good and bad.. good because currently most missiles hit the mech center and torso but with TAG&NARC you can shine the TAG to the RT for example, and make it the centerpoint of impact..thus the CT,RT and right arm get most of the missile impacts. Bad because a moving target is hard to hold the TAG shining onto a specific spot.

This change makes scouts very effective for LRM mech support and enables mechs like the stalker5M to be able to control where their LRMs hit (since it can load NARC+TAG plus 4 LRMs).

ALTERNATIVE to #3+#4 : Make the NARC auto-lock onto itself any LRM that is in flight that has no lock. This would allow scouts to ask for a heavy missile barrage to be dumb-fired to X grid and as the missiles are in the air the scout Narc's the target...attracting the almost-there missiles to home in on it.

5- Remove the timer on the NARC. It already falls off at a measly 40 damage.