Gut, on 30 May 2015 - 09:33 AM, said:
Here's your argument:
It's easy to avoid being hit by lrms.
Here's my response:
Because of the mechanic it uses, it should be easy to avoid.
It should be, indeed. It *SHOULD* be hard to rain death on people you can't even see.
That makes them hard to use effectively. Hard to use effectively = high skill weapon.
But even when you can see them, it's STILL harder to use LRM's effectively than lasers. It's not enough to point and shoot, you still need to counter defensive tools like ECM, deal with appallingly slow projectile speed, account for ballistic arc of varying trajectory depending on range (which can be a problem for intervening terrain above you along the flight path, or lower terrain up close), for the fact that your opponent will know the moment the missiles are inbound and can react instantly, etc.
If I can see you, I can hit you with a laser. Even if I can get a lock on you, that doesn't mean my LRM's will hit you.
So, LRM's are (at any level of play beyond raw newbies) a reasonably high-skill weapon. Still not often a good weapon, or at weapon worth it's tonnage, but the value of a weapon has no bearing on it's skill requirement.