foamyesque, on 10 January 2025 - 12:04 PM, said:
The point is that the situation is exaggeratedly bad: trading with one alpha is fine, every mech has to risk that, but eating two from some of the slowest-cycling weapons in the game is something that essentially prohibits trying to use LRMs without a spotter.
The culprit is the absurdly low velocity. If LRMs were fast enough to be used without a lock, or were able to actually land a hit that you had to expose to take before you take actual hundreds of damage in return fire from another mech, it would allow more dynamic gameplay and raise the reward for better play with them -- encouraging the benefits of mobility, poptarting, etc that something like the Treb or Catapult can bring to bear, instead of 'how many tubes can I put on this Clan assault' passivity.
They aren't the slowest cycling weapons because heavy lasers and HAGs exist but whatever, the more absurd statement is you wanting LRMs to be effectively better than MRMs WITH the added bonus of being able to lock-on which is just....ridiculous, however let's not pretend that it fixes the "tube inflation" issue because that's a product again of bad mechanics and interactions with ECM/Radar Derp/AMS (especially AMS due to it creating an arms race).
Given you have to have lock for tracking to continue working, I'd support instant lock times and lock loss for direct fire BUT lock times are global across all missiles and the last thing we need is instant lock streaks, so when I mention that there's foundational issues for missiles this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
foamyesque, on 10 January 2025 - 12:04 PM, said:
I never played in that era so I can't speak to what Artemis did pre-Cauldron. But right now I don't think lockons or even spread are the primary issue with them: they're simply too slow now to reach a target. That dual-alpha-return-fire calculation doesn't even incorporate lockon time at all, it's simply the fact that it takes LRMs that long to get to the alleged outer limits of their range. It's kind of a sad joke when the actual effective range of the alleged Long Range Missile is about that of a Clan Streak.
I'd argue the velocity is much less an issue than the lock-on time which acts as a hard barrier for entry to even use them and because it is based on range (with a hard max lock-on time at 800m) and makes it inconsistent especially at range. It'd make a bit more sense for a longer lock-on time if they were FaF. That said, there is no silver bullet fix here because again, there's layers to the band-aids of systems PGI put on top of radar to counteract their awful lock-on mechanics.
foamyesque, on 10 January 2025 - 12:04 PM, said:
The ECM and radar deprivation changes have helped lockons as a class, which is nice, but they've also helped literally every other weapon system in the game, too. People would run ECM even if lockon weapons didn't exist at all.
I don't know what kind of bad argument this is, but no other weapon system is hard countered like lock-ons are when it comes to radar derp and ECM. So even if it helped every other weapon system, it didn't help them near as much as it did lock-ons.
Now you are right that radar derp and target decay shouldn't exist in the skill tree or really as quirks (TBH, the skill tree itself shouldn't exist but whatever), but once again, it's just a single factor to a multi-faceted problem.
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