Metalsand, on 14 November 2013 - 11:51 AM, said:
Okay, after spending a match where I did LRM dodging instead of combat, I revise my statement.
While LRM dodging is not something you can do as effectively while fighting someone, I believe that they should be rebalanced, not nerfed. Tracking should be improved at the cost of a more shallow angle of attack. This will allow missiles to hit what they are aiming at if the enemy is out in the open, and fail when an enemy is behind cover.
Furthermore, I believe missiles should have the ability to make an impact probability estimation. Since you typically cannot see the enemy from where you are LRM boating, you will not know if you can actually hit them from where you are. If the previous rebalance is followed, I believe that LRM systems (or perhaps just Artemis-enabled LRM systems) should give you a very rough percentage of the chance of hitting the enemy. In other games where you have artillery, you typically have some sort of top-down view so that you can tell whether or not you can hit the enemy, but as this is not the case in MWO, something is needed to make up for that fact.
They have already played around with the Arcs in a pretty big way. There was a time when the Arc of unaided missiles was too high, allowing missiles to negate most terrain even high mounts were not enough. But then they balanced them reduced the Arc and added a LOS component, granting those with direct or indirect (spotter) LOS to benefit from a better Arc thus increasing the chances of getting into some cover areas.
LRM's are not meant to be Artillery, they are meant to be long range support weapons that can soften the enemy up with indirect fire (less accurate) or direct LOS fire (more accurate / better tracking) salvos. 400 Damage for the amount of hardpoints / weight / Modules / Components used is just not efficient, not as a primary weapon anyway.
As to the percentage based suggestion, it doesn't really apply to targeted homing type missiles. What your describing is more like a mortar, which may at some point be in the game as a weapon (I look forward to this)
As it stands now they are most effective as area of denial, this is more of a nuisance though than an actual threat. IMO they should be more reliable not less =/
I do however believe that Arty and Airstrike should be a top down map selection as you describe. The fact that it was point and paint in the first place had me...... confused.. I hope to see map selected arty strikes in the near future *crosses fingers*