I suspect he'll say what already been pointed out: 10 points actually matters, 5 points doesn't. The reason being that the common armor levels (around 20 points on average) means that with 10-point hits you have a good chance of actually punching a hole before you've spread damage all over the target (i.e. sandblasting) while 5-pointers have very little chance of beating the odds.
Against fighters it's much the same (10 points TAC most things, 5 points don't). Against vehicles of course you want as many hits as possible, but then you want missiles or LB-X anyway!
Which of course means the ReLL might actually be worthwhile if you expect to meet a lot of reflec/hardened, but the small/medium are really wasted page space. If they had caused 6 and 9 points respectively (with the large pushed up to 10) they would have been a fair investment.
That is about right across the board, although I do feel like the combination of the LPPC and HPPC can make the old standard feel a little bit superfluous in a lot of cases. The LPPCs are better if you want to sandblast things without worrying about penetration and the 15-point chop from the HPPC is far more threatening than the 10 from the PPC. It does still have its uses, but they are getting smaller and smaller with each new weapon introduced.
Diablo
First, apologies for not replying normally. I'm not allowed. I'll probably be in trouble just for replying. :( but hopefully my reply will make sense anyway.
The numbers you provided are nice but I'm not sure how practical they are. How many units can carry 40 tons of large lasers with enough heat sinks to use them? ??? It looks like Yeti went by matching weights but still 40 tons of laser requiring 25 to 32 tons of heat sinks to cool? I'm not sure that's possible on a Mech. Not only that but it just compares things based on weight alone. If you base the numbers on other things it changes a lot.
While you cannot reasonably mount that many of each gun on anything smaller than a DropShip, it is still a useful point of comparison because it gives you an idea of how they stack up on a per-ton basis. You will probably not exactly match the weights, but you can use that weight difference for other stuff which is usually fairly well balanced around the 3025-era gear so it is essentially the same. You might wind up with a slightly different performance envelope if you use that mass for LRMs, but it is not objectively better or worse, just different. Also, those numbers show that the large does actually give you an advantage against the armors it is supposed to beat so the minutia of the numbers there really just boils down to nitpicking because we have already established that the weapon works.
You are right that the comparison would have been better if the weight of the required DHS had been factored in to leave only crits as a floating variable, but the point still stands that the small and medium are not worth the weight because they are very close to each other on heat and crits so the numbers there are at least very close to accurate.
I'm also not sure about the damage. The damage for standards is most likely spread out so it isn't 3 points of damage compared to 4 but three 1 point hits compared to one 4 point hit. That's great for crit seeking and whatnot but wouldn't 2 LRM-5s or 4 SRM-2s be even better? Also while you're crit seeking aren't you giving up big hits that would wear down armor faster?
4 points of damage does not make a hole, that is smaller than a LRM Cluster. At that point you are firmly in the critseeking and sandblasting category so more hits is more useful than the marginal damage concentration. You are going to have to grind through all their armor no matter what so the critseeking is better than nothing. For reference, I generally consider 5-point hits to be the absolute least useful form of damage in the game because it is not concentrated enough to make a serious dent in armor so there is no hole punching power and it is too concentrated to really critseek effectively so all it does is sandblast armor.
I'm not sure but did you agree that RE Lasers against those armored fighters is a good thing? I do agree that LB-X2a are great against aircraft but a good and/or lucky pilot with a well armored fighter will keep coming back. A pilot that just lost a good chunk of their armor might not. And if they did it'd be a fewer number of times they could. Right? So pairing the two on a couple units would be a good thing right? One plinks away with the LB-X2 and if the fighter keeps coming it gets swatted by the one with the RE laser.
That was air-to-air only, and even then that only applied to the large. ASFs behave very differently in air to air combat than they do when engaging ground targets. In the air you cannot usually force them to lawn dart because they have too much altitude so that PSR looses its teeth and the 2-X becomes useless, but when they are attacking ground targets failing that PSR is essentially instant death so nothing else matters.
This means the 2-X is the king of ground to air work with other long range flack weapons filtering in behind it, and air-to-air work is dominated by what 'Mech jocks think of as hole punching weapons (AC/20, HGR, Gauss Rifle, HPPC, ect).
I don't know. I guess I don't see RE lasers as the replacement for others but as an addition to them.
The problem is that outside the large, they do not even do that. The standard Medium and Small Lasers do just as good a job as the RE-Lasers in the cases where the new technology is supposed to shine while performing far better in all other cases so there is no reason to ever use them.