Brizna, on 09 March 2015 - 07:34 AM, said:
One doesn't point them in the direction of a Locusts CT and expect it to blow up, that happens when you double gauss or double PPC it, of course gausses are the heaviest guns in the game and PPCs are hot as the sun. MGs are a secondary weapon, they are a very nice at that that can even become the wining card in the right situation; given they weight so little and cause 0 heat, that's good enough for me to take them when I got empty ballistics but my mech is already too hot to consider more real weapons.
Saying that they're a secondary weapon would imply that they can actually, like, hurt things. Right now they're a tickle cannon. The only reason people take them is because there is literally not a single other possible choice for low-tonnage ballistics. People would start to actually use Small Lasers if we suddenly deleted Medium Lasers, for example, because they would be forced to.
If we got actually decent future light ballistics like the Magshot or AP Gauss (both of which weigh 0.5 tons), MGs would go nearly extinct overnight.
If you wanna talk tonnage, I'll point you to the newly improved Small Pulse Lasers being extremely efficient for their weight in close quarters, while having better effective range because of no CoF (better max range for Clan version), infinite ammo, way more damage, and not requiring continuous face time, while being pretty dang heat efficient as well.
There are other opportunity costs that just weight. There's also short range, continuous DoT nature (constant facetime, no upfront alpha strike damage whatsoever), ammo, and perhaps requiring a decent number of hardpoints to get them to be good (even if buffed).
Edited by FupDup, 09 March 2015 - 07:48 AM.