I am Fox Gaden. You may know me as the author of Fox Guide: Swarm Launcher, Unleashing the Swarm. Dedicated tankers may remember me as the Swarm Launcher specialist that posted in many of their threads in prior to 1.7 to say that yes indeed, the Swarm Launcher was OP. Well, it is not OP now!

I think the current stat of Vehicle vs AV balance can best be illustrated by noting the number of players who donGÇÖt have a single point into Vehicles skills and no experience in tanking, who are achieving great success with Militia tanks. This strongly suggests that things are out of balance, with AV being too weak.

I spent the weekend testing the Proto Swarm Launcher to confirm these suspicion. Now, before I go into my findings I want to make one thing clear. I was not wasting ammo on shiny tanks. When a tank activated its cool-downs I would wait them out, and attack when their cool-downs were on cool-down. So you can just assume for the rest of this post that unless I say otherwise, I am not talking bout tanks with their active modules on.

While I did get some tank kills, and a lot of kill assists, this was largely due to the large number of infantry running AV and the large number of friendly tanks. I went into a match with two other Swarm Launchers in my squad and we spent the entire match chasing tanks and did not get a single tank kill. However, when 5 enemy tanks congregated around a single objective in another match all the infantry they killed spawned back in with AV fits. 5 or 6 infantry AV were able to take down 5 tanks fairly quickly by focus firing, but many of the AV infantry died multiple times during the engagement, and this took a third of our team away from doing infantry work.

I was not counting on the Swarm Launcher alone. I was also getting in close whenever I could to flux the shields off and/or strap remote explosives to the tank, so that when my Swarms hit, there would be a bit more punch. While these methods seemed workable, they did not do enough to overcome the weakness of the Swarm Launcher.

I think HAVGÇÖs are in a good spot right now. I think the balance should be achieved by buffing the Swarm Launcher. I donGÇÖt want the Swarm Launcher to be OP again as it was before 1.7, but it needs to be powerful enough to cull the herd of tanks and pick off the inept and the unskilled.

Swarm missile damage should be buffed from 220 to 250 per missile (down from 330 in 1.6).
Swarm Luncher lock range should be buffed from 175m to 200m (down from 400m in 1.6).

I think that this would still leave the Swarm Launcher underpowered, but it is better to take a small step and then reevaluate, than to take too big a step and end up back were we were in 1.6.

I donGÇÖt have the skill with the Forge Gun or the experience with AV grenades to be able to evaluate them.