This is a fairly simple suggestion. We have a toggle for Autofire and it's nice. But I'd like a separate toggle for "Point Defense Fire" This could be added as a button beside the normal Autofire button and could be toggled with CTRL+# or ALT+#.
-When both the Point Defense Fire and Autofire are both enabled, Point-Defense weapons would act as they currently do, firing on missiles and fightercraft when available and other targets when there are no missiles.
-When only the Point Defense Fire is enabled, the Point-Defense weapons will ONLY fire at incoming missiles and fightercraft, prioritizing missiles.
-When only Autofire is enabled, the Point-Defense weapons will ignore missiles completely and prioritize firing on your target, as if it wasn't a PD weapon at all.
This would add a lot of flexibility to PD weapons, being able to shift them into outright offensive weapons when needed and making sure they stay as PD weapons when needed. Some issues that would be solved by this would be:
-Integrated Point Defense AI affected weapons (Tactical Lasers, IR Pulse Lasers, ect) wouldn't waste time firing on missiles that are easily going to miss you or are going to be shielded.
-Point Defense weapons such as Burst Lasers won't spam away all of their shots at missiles when Fighters are right there. This really shows when trying to shoot down missile-spamming fighters like Pirhanas and Broadswords, that spam missiles constantly.
-Point Defense weapons would be able to pour on some extra DPS on missile-spammy and Flare-Spammy ships in general. Two big examples of this are Enforcers pulling all your PD fire away with swarms of Rockets and Hounds distracting your PD fire with Flares.
-You could also set your weapons to dedicated Point Defense so the reverse doesn't happen. It's not fun when all of your Vulcan Cannons are aiming forward, spamming away all of their ammo into enemy's shields while a trio of Salamanders loops around behind you...
Note that if you set PD Fire on for non-PD weapons, it would have no effect. It would only change the firing behavior of PD-Capable weapons (Including those made into PD weapons by Integrated Point Defense AI). Overall, this would make Tactical Lasers and Burst Lasers a far more versatile choice instead of their currently-limited niches. They could be Point-Defense when needed and standalone weapons as needed, provided that the player is quick enough to toggle his PD-Fire and Autofire settings.
What do you guys think?