The Problems with Laser-Designating
Laser-Designating is simply underwhelming, especially when comparing it to BF4. I'm happy they gave the STAFF-Shell and Smart-Rockets the capability to lock-on to lasers, but in praxis almost never ...
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Going to take the opportunity perform a friendly hijack to tie into a close relative of the laser designating: Tracer Darting.
This is a passion project for me and one that I am fanatical about. A few patches back DICE introduced the ability for infantry to fire tracers darts into the map environment. This would ostensibly allow vehicles the ability to fire on those targets with AGM's thus finally making due on the promise made back in BF3 that "you ARE the airstrike." You could have infantry designate a target and then another player flying in to fire ordnance on that target.
This would be balanced by the need to for two players to be involved and hard countered by Blasco's jammer. It would fairly address concerns by pilots that they had nothing to fire at once all ground vehicles had been destroyed.
Beautiful! Exquisite!
One problem: The AGM blast damage was never increased to allow it to perform as intended. It still does only 50 damage to infantry with a very small blast radius. Naturally, this needs to be increased to make it viable. Something on the order of the MBT's HE shell would be balanced.
The reason why the proposed damage/radius increase is justified is that it takes someone on the ground to fire the dart and then some vehicle with AGM has be in range, lock and fire before the dart expires in 12 seconds AND the targets have to still be in the blast radius when the missile impacts. Of course, the flashing dart is visible to the enemies so they can always vacate the area to avoid damage and the kill radius I am proposing is 2m which is very modest. To put that into perspective that's about the radius of the HE shell on the MBT.
This solves the problem of people wanting dumbfire jdams, which would be almost impossible to balance, by providing the same damage profile but with the aforementioned restrictions to keep it from becoming unmanageable. And it solves the problem by boosting the utility of an unpowered gadget: the Tracer Dart.
@rainkloud I'm glad you "hijacked" it 😉
I think Blasco shouldn't hard-counter it though, bc of the effort required to laser and coordinate vs just placing a gadget for someone to camp.
Since the new rocket pods are fairly effective at farming kills, you're proposed changes could help to make the lock-on rockets more useful again in comparison, while being more than difficult enough to use.
One important thing to add would also be that the marker of the dart-gun should have another color/info, when shot at the ground rather than stuck to a vehicle, in order to inform players what they are shooting at.
It is way to often that a dart-gun-shot misses the intended target and marks a location that is of no interest and can fool someone to shoot at it with disappointment.
