Himiko Kuronaga wrote:
Blasters will not ever be short range anti-vehicle superiority weapons without destroying the rest of the weapons. Perhaps in concept, but never in practice. Here is why.
Railguns operate effectively from range because they can kill a target in the wink of an eye before that target can react and get to cover. The problem is that they work even better up close, which is where you want blasters to be strong. If they were to receive an RoF nerf, it would indeed make blasters viable, but it would destroy the only thing railguns were good at. Tankers would never be caught in the open again. Especially not after the range nerf you already applied to rails.
Assuming you did nerf rails, the blaster might somehow be able to muster enough prowess to kill a rail at close range -- something it cannot do consistently right now against a competent driver. However, by doing this you effectively just destroyed the missile tanks only niche.
You see, missile tanks are bad at range and are purely a trolling weapon against infantry. They can kill things, but really it's mostly as an insult. It's a bad weapon. The only way the missile tank is going to kill another tank is if it stacks multiple damage mods, gets right behind them, and unloads an entire salvo into their rear end. And then that tank is worthless until cooldowns expire, unlike every other kind of tank. So it has to have complete superiority in that niche.
And even though thats the doctrine, missile tanks are still worthless.
So, if you make blasters good against tanks, rails become bad against infantry+tanks and missiles remain worthless against everything.
Rails are currently good, missiles are worthless except for trolling and blasters were decent as infantry suppression but worthless against tanks. It's a joke but its the most use all weapon platforms have ever gotten all at once.
If you make missiles good blasters will have no role and rails will either be able to contest missiles at point blank if they dont receive a nerf, or be worthless at range if you do nerf them and even more worthless up close. Making blasters to be the anti-tank weapon and missiles the anti-infantry weapon isn't going to work either, because infantry have already expressed that being killed by a tanker is unacceptable to them (which is why you nerfed blasters in the first place, remember?). This will never change for as long as you attempt to balance the game. Scrubs will always be scrubs.
Hand/Eye coordination cannot be taught. For everything else there is the Learning Coalition.