Let me explain!
Each ability key, when pressed, triggers a series of events that varies depending on the merc one is using. Not only because the abilities themselves are different but how the mechanism of their execution changes.
For instance, if one wants to call Kira’s Ion beam or Arty’s artillery strike, one needs to press the ability key and only release after the circle surrounding the crosshair has been filled. Now what happens next is that the primary weapon is forced back into the players hands. This is useful for Arty as he has a very short calling time for his artillery and once it’s called there’s nothing he can change about it, but for Kira, this is actually penalizing!
Let’s look at how Nader’s ability key works. When pressed it just switches the grenade launcher to the players hands and to shoot LAC-40s one needs to click with the left mouse button, effectively removing tons of wepon switch animations between each single grenade launched.
Now as Kira’s beam can be controlled after being called in, the current system forces the player to either start calling the beam with the 4 keyboard key or mouse wheel scrolling until it reaches it. Either way it complicates the process of using a quick ability key that is common to every merc.
Now my proposal is to simply make Kira’s orbital strike laser work as Nader’s GL works. Simply have the ability key press switch the laser to Kira’s hands and leave it to the player’s choice as to when to switch back to his or her primary weapon. It would also allow for a seamless continous use of the orbital laser, while maintaining the ability key consistency across the mercs.
I hope this is something that you all can agree with, even when one can argue that the 4 key is right there, and I hope that the technical challenges of putting this change into practice is not a big one as Nader already uses such a system.
Thank you for reading, keep up the good work!