wtf does skill have to do with anything?

difficulty of proper use is a valid point, skill at circumventing said difficulties is an individual player trait and has no place in any balancing conversation.

why? then there would be no counter to armor tanks

Personally I find the swarm launcher to be mostly useless against vehicles, at least up to the adv variant (haven't tried proto yet in Uprising).

LAV's (and especially LLAV's) - Swarms are almost 100% useless, the LAV's are far too fast and nimble for swarms to really give them much trouble aside from giving them a temporary distraction. Heck, the LLAV is even mostly immune to the forge due to their speed and insane ability to tank up their health with hardeners, resistance mods etc.

Dropships - Yeah, pretty much the same as the LAV's, they are fast enough to escape before any devastating blows can be had. And they can just fly high or go behind/on-top of a building which makes them unable to be targeted as they regen for another rinse-and-repeat attack. Also the time it takes to lock and send a volley towards them, usually is enough time for them to massacre you with their gunners (this is if they are really close to you).

Tanks - Probably the best things swarms are good at, but that isn't saying much. From my experience, as soon as the tank gets hit once or twice, they just back up behind a hill or wall and any incoming volleys, or future volleys of swarms, are null and void. They regen then pop back out, rinse-and-repeat. Even if the swamer has the high ground, it doesn't take much movement with a tank for the missiles to hit buildings, hills etc.

And tanks are pretty fast, they can easily relocate to a new section of the map which forces the swarm player to basically run to the entire other side of the map, and if they can make it over there without being slaughtered by infantry using anti-infantry weapons, the tank just runs away again back to their old spot... once again requiring the swarm player to relocate.


IMO, swarms could use a buff. Faster lock times and significantly faster missiles. ATM, the adv assault forge is almost infinitely superior to swarms when it comes to taking out vehicles. But alas it requires a heavy fat suit which is extremely slow and has no equipment slots. Swarms need to get closer to the ability of a forge, simply because it is the only viable AV weapon for the light weapon slot. And light/medium framed players shouldn't be forced to spec into the forge or heavy to get decent AV results. It's already bad enough we have to gimp ourselves against fellow infantry to use AV, but to use a completely new suit with less slots and be slow as hell?

I don't use swarms, be it AV nade or tank I never have a problem with armor tanks. But than again that takes risking suits to get close enough to throw a nade or risking my own tank to take out theirs. Swarms are the I win button of AV, no skill no risk and devastating to even the best fit tanks. Every other form of AV has some risk, swarms power has to come in line with the risk that's not involved.

It is absolutly a no skill weapon, easy mode but that doesent mean we should punnish the weapon too heavily, it still needs to fullfill its role and become balanced at the same time

Your not doing it right then. end of discussion...

Personally I find the swarm launcher to be mostly useless against vehicles, at least up to the adv variant (haven't tried proto yet in Uprising).

LAV's (and especially LLAV's) - Swarms are almost 100% useless, the LAV's are far too fast and nimble for swarms to really give them much trouble aside from giving them a temporary distraction. Heck, the LLAV is even mostly immune to the forge due to their speed and insane ability to tank up their health with hardeners, resistance mods etc.

Dropships - Yeah, pretty much the same as the LAV's, they are fast enough to escape before any devastating blows can be had. And they can just fly high or go behind/on-top of a building which makes them unable to be targeted as they regen for another rinse-and-repeat attack. Also the time it takes to lock and send a volley towards them, usually is enough time for them to massacre you with their gunners (this is if they are really close to you).

Tanks - Probably the best things swarms are good at, but that isn't saying much. From my experience, as soon as the tank gets hit once or twice, they just back up behind a hill or wall and any incoming volleys, or future volleys of swarms, are null and void. They regen then pop back out, rinse-and-repeat. Even if the swamer has the high ground, it doesn't take much movement with a tank for the missiles to hit buildings, hills etc.

And tanks are pretty fast, they can easily relocate to a new section of the map which forces the swarm player to basically run to the entire other side of the map, and if they can make it over there without being slaughtered by infantry using anti-infantry weapons, the tank just runs away again back to their old spot... once again requiring the swarm player to relocate.


IMO, swarms could use a buff. Faster lock times and significantly faster missiles. ATM, the adv assault forge is almost infinitely superior to swarms when it comes to taking out vehicles. But alas it requires a heavy fat suit which is extremely slow and has no equipment slots. Swarms need to get closer to the ability of a forge, simply because it is the only viable AV weapon for the light weapon slot. And light/medium framed players shouldn't be forced to spec into the forge or heavy to get decent AV results. It's already bad enough we have to gimp ourselves against fellow infantry to use AV, but to use a completely new suit with less slots and be slow as hell?

Just shoot straight out of the barrels instead of that spread thing.
An unnecessary pain in the ***.

I'd like to see them not go through hills and corners so I can make use of my LAV speed

I don't know about the rest of you, but I want them to apply kick to the user when you fire them. I want dumb-fire back.

I want to be able to aim straight down and launch myself into the air, landing behind and enemy and then knifing them in the back of the face.



But, if I can be serious for a moment -

Ideally, I'd want swarms (assuming time was found to be put in to this) to be shifted to something like an 'assisted lock' TOW launcher.

Fly-by-wire missiles are nothing new in shooter games. However, they're usually pretty difficult to use. While I'd love to see a proper TOW system... I just don't see it happening. So... What I'd like to see, is essentially what we've got now but removing the 'fire and forget' aspect of the weapon, requiring someone to maintain the lock by keeping the 'locked on' target box inside their reticule until the missiles make contact. Losing track/LOS of the target would make the missiles miss, but could be corrected and put pack on course if the lock is re-established quickly enough.

Now, with a change like this you could fire repeated volleys off the same lock, but you'd need to maintain tracking throughout the entire thing. This requires a lot more dedication from swarmers. Alongside this, I'd like to see a missile velocity buff, but keep the damage the way they are. As-is missiles are pretty slow and can be evaded entirely by certain vehicles going at top speed. Faster missiles would prevent this in most cases, and would reduce the amount of time a swamer would have to maintain direct sight & lock.

I'd like to see them not go through hills and corners so I can make use of my LAV speed

There is nothing wrong with swarm launchers. People who skill into and use them on a consistant basis give up a lot. With only a side arm to defend your self against other infantry, the movement penaly when firing, GOOD tankers know this is their counter and use this counter efectively. Tankers come off as wanting an I win button only looking at stats on paper, not taking team play and player skill into consideration and compeltely ingnoring actual game play.

For all the talk about swarms being a no skill weapon and op against tanks one thing is never compared. KIll death ratio. As a class what are tankers KDR vs dedicated swarm users?

Being a AV swarmer i have seen this happen once , my entire volley went through a rock that was sticking out and i thought it stopped my swarms but then 3 secs later a "+50 kill" appeared on my screen i do not know what caused it but i can understand how frustrating it can be.

I dont know if any one else has noticed but when i fire my volley i keep an eye on it just to be sure that it hit or didnt but right before the misses hit or miss they slow down for a second then accelerates towards the direction of what was locked on also i have noticed that my swarms have a lock on time of about 2 sec. then after firing i have to wait about 2secs before i can run, switch, reload or even attempt to lock on again.

I enjoy using the swarms but i feel like calling it a easy weapon is wrong, why? its one thing to just lock on and fire away but to have some one wait until the indented target is in a open field where cover isn't easily accessible isn't.most people just want to pull the trigger. or knowing when not to engage a target. i have seen people using swarms and just locking on to the railgun sniper tank on the mountain in the red zone and not hitting but still just launching volley after volley or the tank that just came around the building and hit with swarms then rolling back behind cover. but maybe thats just me.

I would like to see milita swarms droped to 2 or 3 rockets per shot. This would reduce the ablity to just have an entre squad take out a tank by just spaming it with militia swarms.