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[Erebus Alpha]

I was playing MW4 Mercs earlier (with the MekTek pack), blasting stuff with a mostly stock supernova, and I immediately noticed that the lower arm actuators are FAR more useful in that game.

In MW4, you can press a key to point your left arm 90 degrees left, and your right arm 90 degrees right. You can only fire weapons on that arm while you hold the arm swing key, because naturally, all the others are pointed the wrong way.

MWO needs this too. The ability to fire weapons & hit your target while your legs are pointed away is rather useful. Mechs with lower arm actuators would have 360-degree weapon coverage (or very close to it). Although they would not be able to use all of their weapons at once in this configuration, only the weapons in the applicable arm.

Aiming with this new mechanic would be interesting...

In MWO, mechs like the Timberwolf, Marauder, and Spider have a clear line of sight from the cockpit. The pilot can literally just turn their head & look sideways while aiming an arm 90 degrees off-axis from their torso. So when you press an arm swing button in one of these mechs, you just look out the side window.

However, some mechs with lower arm actuators have less-than-ideal side-facing visibility (Battlemaster, Cyclops, Zeus), some have zero side visibility at all (Commando, Atlas, Hellbringer), and a few of the weird ones have great visibility on one side and none on the other (Summoner, Hunchback). For these mechs, we just need a HUD window to pop up when using arm swing, so that they can aim through a side-facing camera.

Most of the arm-mounted weapons in MWO are at or near waist-level, which makes them almost useless for peeking, and the enhanced range of motion that can be obtained by disabling arm lock is only useful in a handful of niche situations. Most arms do not have enough lateral deflection to matter. Arm swing would present a tangible advantage to mounting weapons in arms instead of the torso sections.

This would not require any change to the existing arm lock mechanic.

Most of the highly dominant builds gain nothing from this. Laservomit + arm swing results in low-alpha-laservomit, which is the most balanced kind of laservomit. Clan dakka-assaults rely on torso-mounted hardpoints (Kodiak) or arms without lower actuators (Dire Wolf).