Change in rebuild time would go a long way to fixing.
You all talk of counters to blenders which are pretty well known but you are counting on best case scenarios where a blender just sits there and lets you counter them. Competitive play rarely goes how you want it and if you know how to counter, they know how to counter in return. I've seen it too often. Ship being blended tries to move to get gun arcs, blender compensates and prevents blended vessel from countering. Frankly because its too easy to counter a counter. Specially with fast goldfish. Mostly because ships are too damn slow to do anything against a fish that has a vessel locked down. This then relies completely on an ally being free to save the blended vessel. Another reason why 3v3 has better gameplay. 2v2 is predictable and boring.
Frankly, we had better gameplay when the Carro could shoot down because back then ships were faster and arcs were better overall. Don't dare do it now. Hell I've been in many engagements where the blender didn't have to move far away to be able to angle down enough to hit the balloon every time. It isn't a perfect flat arc that prevents downward aiming. You can, with good positioning, hit downward targets very effectively.
Moving to counter often means the fish goes to side guns which are either flames or gats. They'll just keep circling and switching back and forth between carro and sides. So you say, shoot out the carro! I say...whenever is the carro going to be in arc or sitting still long enough to shoot it out? Competitive pilots will not sit there in front of a gun and let you shoot it out. Nor will they let you attempt to counter. If you fly a Pyra, you're too slow to turn or move to do this. Junker, you're constantly falling because the balloon is a huge liability. Galleon, same. In fact the blender can just sit up high forever on a galleon and never come anywhere near the guns. Squid can manage a counter however often times the blender gunner shoots out engines while blending. Its a smart move, it just means the squid might as well suicide as they'll never recover.
Using pub game reasoning for keeping things as are? Thats just great. You pick the LCD of player to base counters off of and even then they'll not have the experience to be able to pull it off. Argument is invalid. The balloon system needs to change. If you want noobs to stay, blender buffing is not it. There are two types of matches which make noobs rage quit the most on. Munker fights and blender/flamer fights. Noobs hate the feeling of helplessness and outside of being bounced around with mines, blenders do that the most.
