Shaio, on 30 November 2014 - 07:12 AM, said:
The AC 2 suffers from two major flaws that limit its potential as a weapon system, Heat and ammo/ton. The AC 2 takes up way to much weight to make it a viable secondary weapon given its low damage output and when fired rapidly in groups of 2 or more the weapon system will rapidly overheat the Mech preventing the use of other weapon systems and that just dose not feel right.
After some review on the forms and some extended testing in the Dragon-5N I have found that 2 AC2's are viable when pared with the ER Large lasers. I imagine this may apply the AC2/AC5 combo as well. Running any more then two AC2 produces little return for the weight invested.
This said I still believe that a "small" reduction in the staggered fire heat generation and slight increase in ammo/ton would bring this weapon system inline with the other weapon systems in the game.
AC2s have not even been remotely relevant since RoF dropped from 0.52 sec to ~0.8. HPS was always absurd, but at least back then, with 3 of them you could DPS enough to be worth the stupid heat and massive amounts of ammo you had to carry...
There was a time when a 3xAC2 Shawk with XL255/265 and 10-11 tons of ammo was a formidable and nasty opponent...
People cried too much and then came the orbital strike nerf nuke...
They have been completely worthless ever since.
The only mechs that can carry enough to matter, can carry the same number of something better, like AC5s, or UAC5s...and thus will the AC2 remain irrelevant. It allowed some medium mechs to punch above their weight class just a bit, and no longer...