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First issue is that they usually find use on either a joke builds that work as a missle version of direstar, coring one hostile away and then staying nearly useless for the team for the rest of the match, or in other cases RL users have to carefully shoot one RL at a time at weak spots of mechs, trying make most use of them. But in last case it would be much better to have an actual multi-shot weapon, like MRM10 with one ton of ammo, that would allow you to shave armor off from more than one enemy, and with much more total damage. MRM10 weights 4 tons with one ton of ammo, which contains 340 (or 400 with ammo skills) missiles, aka "points of potential damage". 4xRL15s (also 4 tons) will only have 120 "points of potential damage" in total. If you know you are going to die sooner than later in a match, then it doesn't matter for you, but if you plan to squeeze as much use from yourself for your team as possible, bringing other missile typse would bea much better choice.
Second issue with RLs is that mechs got way more armor than in TT battletech. If TT or HBS BT Rocket Launcer 20 could blow light mech apart if fired at the right time, but in MWO sigle RL20 wont even strip armor of most light mechs, even if you could hit one with it. Which definitely detracts from their value even more.
And third issue is that even though they weight not that much, it's still usually better to have more armor, more heatsinks or more actual reloadable missiles instead of one RL20 (1.5 tons) that would deal additional 40 damage once. Again, repeatedly poking somebody with 3xMRM10 can bring you much further than shooting somebody with 6xRL20s, if you are able to survive for long enough.
Some other minor issues with RLs are that they have a huge sread and a minimal range, which makes them unreliable, as your precious high alpha strike can easily splash around entire enemy mech.
Plus, i want to remind that most of posts that described them as "good if you have free tonnage left to get some" and videos with RL builds on YouTube are all (or almost all, i didn't watch all of them) from very old times, created often 3, 4, 5 or even 6 years ago. With current weapon balance, with prosperity of insane high-alpha sniping builds, or just generally super high-alpha builds with massed-out clan lasers or HAGs, most of the time RLs simply don't have a chance to be fired at enemy at all, and even if you can find a way to do that - what for you would bother with 4 or 5 one-hit-wonders if you can get a bunch of Binary Lasers, or get a clan mech with pair of HAGs and achieve basically same alpha strike damage as RL boat can have, only with ability to reload and with pinpoint accuracy?
TLDR: RLs are too unreliable to use, and even though they can oneshot someone in right circumstances, their total damage output is much lower than on all other missle laucnhers, they can work as a crutch for newer players to get at least one killing blow, but not as anything above that.
So, i have several suggestions of possible reworks for RLs to make them more usable outside of joke builds and a crutch weapon role:
№1:
-Give Rocket launchers a total of 3 or 4 salvos instead of only one, with a very long reload time, somwhere between 1 2 or maybe even 3 minutes. This will lead to RLs still dealing their damage and getting disabled for a long period of time, however, instead of basically halving your total weapon mass, making your survival that much less important for the team, you will have a good reason to survive long enough to shoot RLs second or even third time, because each shot volley of RLs will be able to put a new big hole into already weakened enemies at the later stages of fight. Basicaly, this way RLs will reward survivability by multiplying their potential damage once they are reloaded, marking a new "checkpoint" for you.
№2:
-Same as №1, except this could be done not by altering the weapon as a whole but rather by a new skill tree called "External Ammo Feed" that will consist of 4 nodes, and each of them will grant one reload for Rocket launchers. All 4 nodes will grant eaxactly the same effect and suggestion №1. Cooldown time should be same as in №1, around 1-2 minutes.
№3:
-This suggestion is more crazy, but what if RLs got a special togglable feature (like Artemis IV) called "Rocket Ammo Feed", that would increase RL weight by one ton, increase RL size by 2 critical slots, but in exchange would allow RLs to use external ammo for reloads at the cost of 50% jam chance and halved damage output. Cooldown time in this case should be same as MRM cooldown time, somewhere around 4 seconds, and one ammo bin should contain about 200 rockets. This would act as some sort of very crude MRM replacer, and it would give RLs a second use as some sort of weight saver over normal MRMs, if it's necessary to save weight and consistency of the weapon is not the first priority. But this is rather far away from original Rocket Launchers, so it's just food for thoughts.
Additionally, i would argue that it will be a good change if RL spread would be cut by 50-60% and minimal range would be removed entirely, but at the cost of making RLs fire like Clan LRMs, maybe with higher RoF, but in stream, and not in one big cloud. This way they still wont have pinpoint accuracy, but at least RL users will have more control of where to aim to keep hitting the right component on enemy. Plus, it will allow the target of RL user to actually play around it, torso-twist away from at least some rockets and not just eat them, which will make Rocket Launchers that much more skill-based weapon, instead of a bad crutch for oneshotting somebody once per match.
And lastly, i understand that it isn't lore friendly, but we already got Heavy Large Laser that doesn't explode, Clan ERPPCs that deal 10 damage with weak splash instead of 15 damage, HAGs that have pinpoint accuracy and no spread at all, engines that don't crit, different Autocannons that fire multiple weaker projectiles instead of a singular but bigger one, and many other deviations from the TT mechanics and lore. Would such rework for Rocket Launchers really be too much on such background?
Edited by JumpingHunter, 06 December 2023 - 09:15 AM.
