I think Russ(?) said something at MechCon about considering making direct line of sight locked LRMs have a different trajectory than LRMs that were indirect fired. (I'm not sure there was even a full sentence said about it, so if I misheard this someone please correct me.)

It got me thinking about how to "reward" people for using LRMs right, aka direct-fire. I was wondering if direct fired LRMs could have a velocity buff. (Or equivalently, indirect locked LRMs could have a velocity nerf.)

The idea being that if you're holding your own locks, you don't have to expose yourself out of cover for as long. This also makes the Target Decay nodes more useful, since faster missiles will get to the target before the lock drops. And it makes the velocity nodes in the skill tree less important, so you can take either ammo or armor/struct nodes instead. Both of which are nice to have for LRM boats.

In short, I feel like buffing velocity for direct fired LRMs is a better way to reward "good" LRM play than making their trajectory flatter. Which I feel won't really change things much, and so players won't modify their behavior. Also, a flatter trajectory has a downside - it makes it less likely the LRMs will hit an enemy behind low/partial cover.

What do you think?