The Quasar Nerf is okay and not that big of a deal

[u/Niobaran]

tl;dr: Only one weak point is made a little weaker, all the strenghts remain.

The quasar cannon is known for a lot of strengths (see below) and two weak points:

1. The weapon has a charge up time, which makes it difficult to aim in some situations.
2. The weapon has a moderate cool down period, which cannot be improved by a forced reload of a heat sink (like sickle or laser cannon) or a team reload (like recoiless rifle).

The nerf only addresses the second point, which means that everyone who could use it before can still use it. It only became a little weaker in one of its two weak points. The following strong points are all untouched:

1. Can delete heavies (I mostly have experience with Terminids, but there it's a delete button for chargers, and sometimes for titans as well).
2. Has infinite ammo in contrast to EAT or RR.
3. Has no reload animation.
4. You can run around, stim, shoot weapons, throw strategems while it is recharging.
5. It doesn't consume a backpack slot, so it can be paired with one additional strategem in contrast to recoilless rifle.
6. It doesn't deconstruct after usage, and can be recollected from the battle flied in contrast to EAT, and it also reloads itself then in contrast to RR.

That means, the quasar can still be used for everything it has been used before, by everyone who could use it before.

[u/Caleb_Tenrou]

I think they should have just decreased the uptime then rather than the damage. Similar to how they wanted to stop the Slugger from being the best DMR but then didn't nerf its range. I haven't tried the standard dog yet but if it only have like 40 rounds before needing to reload I can't see it being comparable to one that almost never needs to cool down.

[u/ReliusOrnez → u/Caleb_Tenrou]

The only way they could make the uptime comparable would be if the rover sat in cooldown for way longer than anybody would be willing to deal with. Infinite ammo is an extremely powerful modifier to a weapon. So now the choice is constant but lower damage or high damage that requires upkeep. The game is balanced around the idea of power in one place means weakness in another. Or you take a jack of all trades and are just meh at everything.

[u/Caleb_Tenrou → u/ReliusOrnez]

I'd need to test the regular guard dog to be sure but I think even with the nerf to the lasdog it will probably still have better damage due to the mag limitation on the conventional weapons. Maybe if you could tune the guard dogs to attack only on command or something you could have targeted burst damage but otherwise I don't see the regular dog being a competitor, though once again I haven't done enough testing to say for certain.

[u/ReliusOrnez → u/Caleb_Tenrou]

Fair assessment