Orville Righteous, on 14 July 2018 - 05:25 AM, said:
I played around on the PTS last night and I expected to not use Clan ER MLs anymore because of the poor heat/dam ratio. However, I found them still so useful, I had to use them. Their range and weight just made them fit in well in so many of my builds. I really like the 3 LPL + ER ML combo that's now available as well.
Yeah they still have a place for sure. There is a balancing act here and maybe 5.25 is going too low, but some of the complaints over this don't quite make sense. IS medium lasers kind of suck and aside from a few boat builds they often feel like filler, backup, etc. rounding off a build or potentially just being dropped for ammo/etc.
I'm fine with clan feeling that pain too, especially when their lights can use an ER small that is almost as good as IS medium for half the tonnage if closer range is OK. If the goal is to keep a longer range then time to pay the piper for those ERML that have been better for so long.
That said, what the exact right balance is is highly debatable. The wider the damage/range gap is the harder it is to balance one faction's mechs vs the others, but if it's too little then you lose variety and also need to curtail some of the tradeoff stats. 5.25 seems like it might be getting so close to IS dmg values that it's impacting the "variety" part a bit too much.