Can we please change the snub changes back?

[Durandal]

There's all something you seem to be missing despite your pleas for missiles to be readded to the game, and that is the fact that they replaced a regular gun.

The addition of the aux slot is actually a huge problem in this regard, as you would now have no real drawback from additional, consistent, DPS. And missiles are, for better or worse, consistent DPS in their current form.

I'm not adverse to readding them with an ammo count of ten or maybe even twenty but that isn't going to be enough for you people, so it feels like, "man, why even bother?"

It also doesn't help that the balance team is frankly in shambles at the moment, and even though that's not exactly something I should be talking about publicly it really pisses me off when I can't get an intelligent discussion going in there without people tearing each other's heads off.

There are some more strawman arguments here too. For example, those "idiots at Digital Anvil" did not intend for Freelancer to be a competitive multiplayer game. (see; houses having different tiers of tech, nomad energy blasters that had no power drain, etc). You can't possibly begin to even try and use an inherently unbalanced game as a basis for an argument on balanced missiles.

The other is vets hitting consistently enough with a razor to mount one instead of mounting missiles? Hell, god, no. Absolutely not. Remember Starkillers? Those things that tracked worse than missiles? Yeah, every man and his dog was using one.

Now give him something that tracks better and deals ~3.5k damage every shot. Now give him twenty of those. That's 70000k damage total. Divide that by 17400, the damage of a single razor, and you get four shots. I know for a fact from the numerous battles I've participated in, that it simply doesn't happen. Not in a chase. In duels, sure, the razor is excellent. That's where it shines and most people who die to it do from a full salvo of 2.00s, ye olde shotgun loadout.

But in a chase, you're always going to get more DPS out of a missile unless your target is bad enough to literally drift in a straight line, in which case no amount of balance is going to save you and you can just be killed by good old fashioned guns anyway.

On average, I'd say myself and most other people who are decent with a razor could land maybe two hits in a chase consistently against someone who is actually dodging. If you do that math for that, it comes out to 10 tracking missiles at 3.5k damage each.

Now look me in the eye and tell me you'd be satisfied with that, which is the closest 'leveling of the playing field' I can theoretically bring you with tracking weapons that don't lock.

Edit: Alright, I forgot to factor in CMs here. Let's also assume an average of one third of your missiles being thrown off by them. It's really, really tricky to judge how accurate that is and @Haste has done more testing in that regard but I think it's the closest number I can pull out of my ass.

So we're losing one third of our 3.5k damage missiles that we want to have deal razor tier damage over the course of a fight. So we have ten missiles. One third of 10 is 3.3, which of course rounds down to 3. So whoop dee doo, you've got a whopping thirteen missiles. I'm pretty sure my argument still stands.