I've been seeing this term thrown around a lot here on the forums, so I wanted to open a discussion about where the term came from and what it means to you.

So I may be wrong and not have my video game history perfectly correct, but the first place I remember hearing the term 'noob tube' was in the first Call of Duty Modern Warfare games. It referred to the grenade-launcher attachment that could be added to any of the assault rifles in the game, and when it shot and hit, it was almost always a 1-hit kill. It could be used without sacrificing the effectiveness of your assault rifle whatsoever, and switching to it and getting a quick kill took no prep time to speak of and was pretty much a straight shot. This was obviously absurdly over powered.

Now let's compare this to how people are currently using it in Dust. People have been using it most in reference to the Forge Gun and the Mass Driver. Keep the original example in mind.

The Forge Gun requires you to play in the slowest class of suits available. It is your primary weapon and not an attachment like in Call of Duty. It has a charge up time before it can fire. It requires extremely precise accuracy. It has a very limited clip/extra ammo capacity. It has a long reload time. It is however almost always a one-hit kill.

Verdict: NOT a noob tube.

The Mass Driver is never a one hit kill (unless you're a scout with 200 HP and get direct hit). It is your primary weapon and not an attachment like in Call of Duty. It has a very slow rate of fire. It has a very limited clip/extra ammo capacity. It has a long reload time. It is largely ineffective against elevated targets. It is very difficult to hit targets outside of 30 meters away without a height advantage. It had a slow projectile travel speed. It does however have a large blast radius.

Verdict: Not a noob tube.

TL;DR: My point is this: can we please stop insulting each other based on our weapon choices and just admit that every weapon requires a different skill set that must be practiced. If someone is really good with a weapon you're not used to, they probably had to practice for a long time to achieve that level of skill.

But everyone uses shields, so MDs are the ones suffering from "unbalanced game-mechanics"

You know, even when running an AR fit I've had little to no issues dealing with MD's. Maybe that's because I know their weaknesses and how to deal with them. You CAN NOT fight them the way you fight another AR player but they're not invincable.

Once again, if you haven't used them, skill into Mass Drivers level 3 and get an EXO-5. It's not that much SP. Start messing around with it and see how it actually works.

And stop making QQ threads FFS.