El Bandito, on 14 April 2014 - 02:26 AM, said:
I am tired of schooling LRM haters for months so I'll make it brief.
1. Current ECM will make LRM and SSRM (both canon BT weapons) completely useless, if all mechs can carry it. Are you dumb enough to suggest PGI to trash a whole weapon system for the sake of those who do not know the basic of MWO?
2. Without indirect fire, there is no reason EVER to bring LRMs. ACs and PPCs will do the LOS fire job much better. A competitive game should keep competitive level standards, and LRMs are almost never used in competitive level play.
1. Exacly correct. ECM completely removes the ability to lock a target, making LRM's an exceptionally poor weapon. If we could pick exactly what piece of ground they were going to fly to, including over hills (ie... set the range and declesion of the launchers) and turned them into crappy artillery that had to take into account mech movement to hit a target... THEN I'd be okay with them, but they'd be totally different weapons and much more aiming based.
2. They'd still lose out to direct fired weapons when you have line of sight. They spread their damage, they have a direct counter in AMS, they have a direct counter with missile warning, and they have a direct counter with ECM. What more do you honestly want? LRM's are really only useful with team work. If you NEED LoS they're pointless.
So as usual:
Team work is OP, nerf Team work!
Edit:
Actually the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of LRM's being mini-artillery. Not World of Tanks style, but with the ability to guide the missiles by sight into a target, and have a button set (like I,J,K,L) that lets you tweak the exact landing point of the missiles. So you can guide them back over a hill and left or right to follow a mech that's broken LoS. Keep the spread pretty bad in this mode. Then the cry's of "skillless" system would end. TAG/NARC then become a method of keeping a dot on the enemy rather than a pure lock, and they allow the missile spread to tighten up.
So you aim, the missiles get a cross/circle on the ground representing where they're land and their spread. based on where you're aiming. you can use I,J,K,L to shift that cross hair's relative position to your aim point. So it's indirect aim, through a direct aiming process. A REALLY good LRM user would learn tricks to aim far, and pull back to fire over steeper hills. But I'd also limit LRM's tracking, so that can't ever turn more than about 30° (no shooting past a target and pulling them in yo-yo style).
Edited by Prezimonto, 14 April 2014 - 04:49 AM.