Lock-On "Fire and Forget" weapons shouldn't be a thing.
The beta does this RIGHT for the most part. I am simply concerned that they're going to add the Javelin and 14 other variations of weapons where you can just casually lock on to a tank or something far away from you, shoot, and then just run away and have nearly guaranteed damage done for no skill of your own. Vehicles are already made of wet newspaper (you aren't doing 25 damage per rocket, you're getting 25 points regardless of how much damage it does) and get shredded if they push into an area with more than 1 engineer (which is fine). The only saving grace vehicles currently have is the assignment to do 3000 repairs so everyone and their mom is sitting on vehicles repairing them, which absolutely will not be happening in the full game.
On the flip side, the heli and the jet are allowed to lock vehicles from range with no hope of cover and total impunity. It's an extreme nuisance at best and a guaranteed death if you're even near a single enemy with a rocket or both heli and jet are after you, all with no skill and no risk to said user of lock-ons. There is no interaction or recourse (other than the smoke on the main battle tank, but even that doesn't seem to work half the time), you're simply at the mercy of the pilot's attention span. It also seems that their lock-ons can lock both air and ground vehicles, instead of having to sacrifice choosing one or the other.
The solution is fairly simple:
- Remove the air to ground vehicle lock-ons
- The jet already has bombs, that's good and fine. Adding a tow missile for the jet could make for some hilarity too.
- Give the heli a tow missile (NOT a TV missile) like the one on the IFV
- If lock-on weapons were planned for infantry, replace those with handheld tow missiles for full damage, and then keep one lock-on weapon that requires unbroken lock from start to finish (cannot regain lock if broken) that does far less damage. And absolutely no proximity-detonations.
- Remove mines. There shouldn't exist anything that you can just set down that plays the game for you with no skill input of your own.
TL;DR: There shouldn't exist anything that plays the game for you with no skill input of your own or something that you cannot fight back or reasonably escape from.