Justin Tymes wrote:This is a lie, you may can down a militia with 3 shots, my proto swarms with 2 damage mods is not downing them with a clip, because hardeners will always activate long before then. Flyers can also EASILY avoid swarms, veteran Flyers laughed at swarms before 1.7. If you are being hit by a 3rd swarm volley, you are a bad flyer.
A single swarmer isn't downing dropships, 2 more than likely not going to either. The flyers knows your location the moment you shoot your swarms, and with 150 range, DS can easily zone you while racking kills/transporting, while you and your buddy is sitting in that 1 spot being useless to the team and gaining no WP.
The bolded portion shows your complete misunderstanding of pre-1.7 AV-Dropship balance: a single Swarm Launcher in 1.6 meant that every Python was shot down and every Incubus was either driven off for the majority of the battle...or shot down.
Now ADS's are a very potent threat, but there exist dangers to them: they are certainly not easy to pilot, their controls required climatisation and practice and utilising their firepower requires further honing of skill; whilst Hardeners have given them a great lease of life, they are far from indestructible, a Forge Gun will do serious damage to an ADS and will at least force the pilot to attempt to remove the threat (not an easy task, as they need to acquire the target under buffeting fire and survive incoming fire while having enough time left to combat the threat) or disengage (which, whilst not yet rewarded, is just as valuable to your team as killing it), Swarm Launchers are incredibly powerful AV
support weapons (they will do little to nothing to a Hardened vehicle but they still do substantial damage to an unhardened one: coordinated fire of a Forger and 1-2 Swarm Launchers is an extremely potent weapon against all forms of vehicle, but Dropships especially); Blaster and Missile turrets are both great threats to an ADS (a Blaster catching a low dropship will rip it apart in seconds unless the pilot has fast reflexes and decent skill enough to know how to manoeuvre post-engagement; a Missile turret can alpha a dropship quite reasonably [I've done it enough myself] it's just not as effective as a Railgun).
The real crux of the debate is the Large Railgun turret. Almost every ADS pilot you will meet will say that the LRT is stupidly powerful: the reason for this is the range, hitting power and speed: it hits you from close to (if not out of) maximum rendering distance; it hits you with enough power to two-shot you out of the sky; and it fires the second shot so rapidly after the first lands that you have less than a second and a half to react - let me tell you something: a second and a half is nothing when you have to decide: what modules do I have to activate? In what order? What's the best way to regain control of my ship now that it's lurching wildly from the hit? Where do I move to? Up? Down? Where was the shot from, so I can evade it's line of fire?
And at the end of the day, the LRT is probably fine. It is the safety of the redline that boils the blood of so many pilots. A railgun can, with impunity, swat Dropships from the sky all day long and have no predators to worry about except for other railguns. Without the threat of retaliation, it makes it trivial to destroy Dropships and that's where the imbalance lies.
Without the threat of retaliation, without the potential for repercussions, a redline railgun has no reason to venture forward (since it has no predators and can reach out to the engagement area anyway), has no reason to fit survivability modules (since the only threat is another railgun) and has no reason to care.
TL;DR:The redline facilitates the power of the railgun, which takes it from 'extremely deadly but counterable' to 'extremely deadly with no counter but itself.'