Agreed, and worse. From my post on 1 March:
The Vasari Assailant (LRM) Frigate has, at level 4 military tech, the ability to toggle to charged missiles. This makes the assailant unable to move, turn at a vastly slower rate, in return for extra range and an attack that hits multiple targets. You would expect this to be a good thing.
It isn't. The secondary attack does so close to no damage that it might as well be. As far as I can tell, the secondary, multiple target attack (the beam) does about 5 damage to a nearby target, and (it seems) even less to 2 or 3 other enemy targets, per missile volley. Keep in mind that there's quite a long time between volleys...
What that means is that a fleet of, say, 50 missile frigates focus firing on a single, doomed enemy, will be inflicting a piddling 250 points of damage to a nearby enemy. After allowing for shield mitigation this is barely a scratch in a Cobalt's shields. It's pathetic. It's even worse if you're not focus firing, since by the time the second volley comes along the shields have easily regenerated such tiny pinpricks. I haven't looked closely at the numbers so this might not be quite right about the damage, but I can say that close watching for any significant effect from these missiles with large all-Assailant fleets has so far shown me pretty much nothing.
Worse, since the effect disables your engines until you switch off the charged missiles, the Assailants can't move and can barely turn, making them very easy to get behind and destroy. And worse again, the auto-cast for the things to go back to normal missiles, allowing movement, seems bizarre - sometimes a random proportion (up to 100%) of your assailants will refuse to switch off charged missiles during a retreat, and despite repeated and frantic movement orders will sit there until they die or you go and switch them back to normal missiles manually - which has to be done one by one since manually activating an ability on a group only effects the single unit at the top of the stack.
...and extra range is largely worthless, since the Assailants don't autocast charged missiles until they're in range, anyway, and forward movement is fast enough to make the extra range largely pointless (it only really has an effect in that, when left to their own devices, the long range ships will stop moving and fight while the close range stuff gets closer, and thus into auto-target selection. As long as the missiles are a fair bit longer range than the close-in guns, that's really all you need for the brawlers to "tank" for the missile ships - end even then, only as long as the enemy player doesn't manually target your LRMs).
As it stands, charged missiles are a significant disadvantage for Vasari. You're better off without it.
Vasari has enough difficulty early game - I think this is something that needs fixing.
