I'm a little annoyed with the plasma railgun as well. My main issue is the fact that you need to be zoomed in to charge. When you zoom, you lose alot of the environmental awareness. I end up getting engaged by others before I can take down my target Titan because of the lack of awareness.
With the current mechanic, I think the plasma railgun could use a little buff in damage to balance out the risk. The shield wall helps, but only for against those who are in front of you, and again, my issue is losing awareness for what's around you....
I agree. It needs a little higher damage when not charged, and charging shouldn't result in the zoom. It also needs a much larger clip (should be the same as 40mm).
The overarching problem with the railgun is that they tried to make it a support weapon without giving it the good support-like characteristics (all while giving it all of the bad ones). If you want it to be a sniper-like gun, then:
1) It should be an instant-hit at any range
2) It's damage shouldn't drop off AT ALL
It sucks enough having to zoom in and losing all mobility and awareness, but then you have to account for travel time of the bolt? That's absurd.
Equally absurd is that you can't possibily go toe-to-toe with another titan, so you're supposed to hang back. Well, the damage of the railgun drops off SUBSTANTIALLY at 15m (IIRC). So by the time you're "sniping" with it (as it was apparently designed to do), it carries less damage than nearly every other titan weapon (unless it's at a full charge).
At any rate, the damn thing is broken no matter how you look at it. There is no engagement strategy whatsoever that would lead someone to willingly choose the railgun. There is not one single unique purpose that it serves. Hell, if I'm going to snipe with a titan (who does that anyway???), I'm going to use the 40m cannon. Same (higher actually) damage, same hit delay, less time between shots, and 5x the clip size.