Currently the Swarm Launcher is the only weapon along with the Nova Knives that don't follow the trend of getting a 5% damage increase between tiers (the Laser Rifle maybe as well, but that weapon special in other ways too).

Any other weapon than these two or three have a 5% damage increase between tiers. This means that if the base damage on the Standard tiered weapon is 10, then the base damage on the Advanced tiered weapon is 10.5 and 11 on the Prototype. All other weapons function like this, including the Forge Gun and the Plasma Cannon, the other two AV weapons.

Why shouldn't the Swarm Launcher follow this trend? Since the Swarm Launcher currently gets an extra missile doing 330 damage at each tier, the Swarm Launcher actually gets a 25% damage increase between the tiers. Such a huge damage increase between the tiers means that there's a huge damage difference in raw numbers, not only on the base damage, but in fact even more when you factor in the Proficiency skill and Damage mods.

A Standard Swarm Launcher with Proficiency 5 and 3 Damage Mods is doing around 1915 damage.
An Advanced Swarm Launcher with Proficiency 5 and 3 Damage Mods is doing around 2400 damage.
A Prototype Swarm Launcher with Proficiency 5 and 3 Damage Mods is doing around 2870 damage.

This means that there's almost a 1000 damage difference between the Std and Pro Swarm Launcher per shot, or almost a 3000 damage difference per clip. That is a huge damage difference and in my opinion it is very wrong.

What this usually means is that the Std Swarm Launcher is usually not a real threat to any vehicle while the Pro Swarm Launcher is actually more of a threat than it should be in my opinion.

I think the Swarm Launcher would be better balanced if it had a 5% damage increase between tiers, like almost all other weapons. The current damage on the Std Swarm Launcher would probably be too low of a startingpoint, so a base damage of around 400 per missile would probably be good.

This would mean that the
Standard would be doing 1600 damage, 400 damage on four missiles.
Advanced would be doing 1680 damage, 420 damage on four missiles.
Prototype would be doing 1760 damage, 440 damage on four missiles.

These damage values would give the Std 280 more damage than now, the Adv 30 more damage than now and the Pro 220 less damage than now.

If you factor in Proficiency 5 and 3 Damage Mods like before, the damage values would be
Around 2320 on Std
Around 2435 on Adv
Around 2550 on Pro

I honestly think that the Swarm Launcher with this slight damage buff to the Std tier and slight damage nerf to the Pro tier would be better balanced.


TL;DR
The Swarm Launcher currently has a 25% damage increase between the tiers, which in my opinion makes it fairly unbalanced both at Std and Pro tier. A 5% damage increase like almost all other weapons have would be better.

Its also the only vehicle only weapon except AV grenades. Speaking of grenades, the prototype grenades do 50% more damage than the standard as well. It swarms get nerfed like this, then grenades should as well, even thought everyone's precious core locus grenades would only do 440 damage.

Thing is, nobody would use the proto swarms because they wouldn't be worth it anymore if they were like this, everyone would settle for the standard and vehicles would blow up even faster, because there would be no real SP requirement to AV. While at first glance this is a nerf to Swarms, its an even bigger nerf to vehicles. Currently, the fact that standard swarms kind of suck is saving vehicles a lot.

I don't know about that tbh.

Don't people use Proto ARs? Proto Forge Guns? Proto everything else? Why wouldn't people use Proto Swarms then?

Currently people aren't using the Standard Swarms because it's worthless (more or less anyway). This means that people are forced to use Proto Swarms which means they're doing around 2k just in base damage (almost 2.9k with Proficiency 5 and 3 Damage Mods).

If you say that people would just use Standard Swarms with this change, then that means they'll be doing 400 less damage per shot than now (since people are using Proto Swarms currently, because the Standard Swarms is worthless according to you), or around 550 less damage with Prof 5 and 3 Damage Mods than now.

What I am trying to say, is that while this would decrease the use of proto swarm launchers, it would drastically increase the use of the others, to the point of overuse. The militia swarms would be almost equivalent to the advanced swarms we have now, vehicles would have no chance with everyone having access to something like this. Vehicle users already have to worry about OP proto swarms, they don't need to worry about OP standard and advanced swarms as well.

[lots of text...]
TL;DR
The Swarm Launcher currently has a 25% damage increase between the tiers, which in my opinion makes it fairly unbalanced both at Std and Pro tier. A 5% damage increase like almost all other weapons have would be better.