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In my opinion it should simply just be a energy variant of annihilator. If i could rebalance it, I would remove the ammo regen, heavily lower fire rate, remove/nerf the guidance and raise the energy damage to 200. Keep in mind the medium version of the messenger has limited ammo, although I literally haven't touched it because it looks balanced.
On Discord there is someone who refused to believe messengers are not bad because they're "annihilators" and can't hit anything. (I will not state their name to avoid stirring drama, but if you're dying of curiosity just ctrl+f my message history) So anyway I responded with a video of my scarab winning a frigate 1v5, no skills, no smods, no energy weapons, never even came close to overloading because it has 1500 range and is a scarab. Probably didn't even need to pilot the scarab honestly, the AI knows how to stay at max range and harass things if you don't give it non-PD energy weapons. Heck, there was one incident where I threw two AI scarabs (actual builds this time) at the sim paragon and they turned it into a joke. I'm no expert but, normally I can't kill the sim paragon with 16 DP and level 3 officers.
Messengers will struggle to hit destroyers as you'd expect, but since they have slight guidance and ECCM increases it by
half, you can get them to hit frigates often enough. 1500 range + ~500 DPS is already absurd, now throw that into a small mount? So what if half of them miss? It's also HILARIOUSLY busted to throw 4 messengers + ECCM on a lumen and watch it dart around the map, killing all ships regardless of hull size. You'd think it'd die quickly, but it actually doesn't because it out-ranges most ships including cruisers and has phase skimmer. Lumen is the ideal ship for messenger spam, it has 4 synergy slots for 4 DP and great agility, you just need to protect it from fighter spam somehow.