Xavori, on 02 March 2016 - 12:19 AM, said:
Let me begin by saying if you don't like playing LRM mechs, great. Don't play them. Play what you enjoy. But if you think they're useless or bad...well...you're wrong. And this is why...
Your argument lacks supporting facts.
LRMs aren't useless. They may not even be "bad" depending on what you mean by that. But they're sub-par weapons and actual math proves it.
Let's talk about weapon efficiency (WE). Weapon efficiency is the percentage of a weapon's damage that you put on target every time you fire that weapon.
For LRMs, WE and accuracy are essentially the same*. You can simply look up your accuracy in your stats and that's your WE because LRMs always do full damage when they hit. So for most people, LRMs have a WE between 30% and 50%. Good LRM players might have WE as high as 50%, typically only on their smaller launchers. (My Clan LRM-5s w/Artemis are 53.5%, for example, while my Clan LRM-20s are just 31.2%.)
* We gloss over critical hits and the damage that they do because the effect is similar for all weapons. We also don't have any stats for critical hits, so we can't compute their effect anyway.
For most other weapons you have to compute WE because they don't always do full damage when they hit. I typically use the medium laser as my example because it's near the top of the list and easy to find, but this works for any weapon. Here's how you do it:
I've fired the ML 18,208 times and hit 15,825 times. Thus my accuracy is 86.91%.
However, as we all know, lasers only do their full damage if you manage to hold them on target for their entire burn duration, and that rarely happens. So we need to figure out how much damage I manage to do when I do manage to hit.
The IS ML has a damage rating of 5. So for 15,825 hits I should have done 79,125 damage. My stats say that I've only done 47,671, though, so my %damage is only 60.25%. Bummer! I'm basically only getting 3 damage out of my medium lasers when I hit.
But that's only counting shots when I hit, and we want to count ALL shots fired. To get that, multiply accuracy by %damage. In my case, that's .8691 * .6025 which equals .5236 or 52.36%.
So there you go. My medium laser WE is 52.36% which I can compare directly to LRM accuracy.
As previously noted, my Clan LRM-5 w/Artemis is 53.5% accurate. That means that I'm about as effective with an IS medium laser as I am with a Clan LRM-5 w/Artemis. Yay! LRMs are good!
Yeah... not really. Only the LRM-5 climbs that high... all other launchers are much worse, down to the Clan LRM-20 which I've already noted is only 31.2% accurate.
But it's even worse than that. The IS ML weighs 1 ton and requires no ammo. It also hits what you point it at. Even my best LRM, the Clan LRM-5 w/Artemis weighs twice that, requires ammo, and randomly spreads its damage all over the target. So while they're still comparable, the medium laser is really still a better weapon.
If you look at the backbone of most LRM boats, the LRM-15, the numbers are pretty terrible. My IS LRM-15 is 39.2% accurate (and slowly climbing of late). That's a weapon that weighs 7 tons, requires ammo, and spreads the 6 (out of 15) damage that it manages to hit with all over the target.
For the same 7 tons, I could get an IS Large Pulse Laser and my WE would be 54.8%. That's nearly 1/3 better than the LRM-15, and the damage is more accurate and doesn't require ammo.
So sorry, Xavori, but you're wrong. The math actually supports the fact that LRMs are less effective than other weapons.
They can still be useful, and they're certainly a lot of fun (I use them all the time), but they're simply not as good as direct fire weapons as primary armament. But that's okay, because the tradeoff is that they can fire indirectly which allows a good LRM boat to support multiple skirmishes at the same time. They're a support weapon, and they're reasonably good in that role.