Victor Moody Stahl wrote:Have you used small blasters in any way, shape, or form? Because the only limitation on their murderliciousness against infantry is the HMG-style dispersion... and even then, the sheer deeps that it puts out....
Well. I know that I certainly don't want to be on the receiving end of a small blaster.
Unfortunately Za'ki, you again prove that you have no idea what you're talking about. Small blasters have an ~44% efficiency against vehicles- and that's against vehicle shields too, so it's even less useful against vehicle armor. So no, small blasters are NOT the glorious anti-air weapon that you are passing them off as. Furthermore, a regular dropship more than fills the role of "Blackhawk with two miniguns". Just season with blasters.
An ADS, on the other hand, cannot carry a full squad (thus, is absolutely not equivalent to a Blackhawk), and fits a nose-mounted, pilot controlled weapon station. As I've said before, the ADS is in concept very similar to the Mi-24 Hind gunship.
Now, as far as ADS AV functionality, I have two thoughts: first off, rebuild vehicles from the ground up... again. The initial Uprising 1.7 proposal was that vehicles would be weak, flimsy hulls and that the fit would determine really what its role was. A requirement for this would have been low-eHP hulls with lots of module slots.
What we got was high-eHP hulls with an incredible restrictive fitting capability that ultimately led to a very small number of useful fits. Moreover, it's my opinion that this has led to vehicle fitting being overly generic, since even outside the small number of viable vehicle fits, most vehicle fits end up looking pretty identical.
By having an increased number of module slots, with an appropriate tweak to PG/CPU, and a reduction in base hull HP values, we can then have players choose what their vehicle roles are by how they fit it. As an example, if the Incubus had even a second high slot, the amount of versatility that that suddenly allows is a pretty impressive change; you can have damage for AV, scans for support, even an MCRU if you need mobile spawns.
So yeah, that's my opinion. If you need a TL;DR (I don't really blame you), then it's this: tear apart vehicles, rebuild them from the ground up, and actually stick to the original mission statement of "weak hulls, lots of mod slots, lots of customization".
Also, please do not ever add Logi LAVs again. They are impossible to balance for their intended purpose.