Any ship with a trifecta will be strong. Two gats and a mortar on a mobula is a lot more dangerous, or three hades on a mobula. Nothings really changed with the Artemis. Sure its annoying, and it disables, but it takes forever to whittle the hull down. There are a lot of weaknesses to the build. The only reason people are now noticing, or now complaining, is because not everyone and their mother are taking gat/mortar. This all happened as soon as the game was balanced to create viable threats at close, mid and long range. Any nerfs to the artemis will put us right back to cookie cutter meta gat/mortar.
The issue is really with the players. They've gotten so used to charging straight at ships with impunity for a close range brawl. You've got to get out of that mind set and adapt. There is plenty of competitive material from the last few weeks showing triple arti junkers being used, and many times of them being wrecked. Every time they were wrecked, it was due to smart teams doing smart things. And likewise, the artemis is working really well with the Gents because we stay immobile, we go high, and we use open lanes to shoot. We could change guns, and change tactics anytime and still succeed. It's about knowing what to do with your build, the issue isn't the gun itself.
With any ship, any build, look at it's weaknesses. An artemis can't shoot up, and it needs time to target areas. If it's just hitting the balloon or hull it's really doing nothing. You need to use terrain, or different elevations. Go high, take a mobula. Stay out of 1330 meters, take a lumberjack. Go fast with a squid, take a carronade. There are proven easy ways of defeating this build, and it's up to each player to make his wins happen. Lamenting over the fact that you can't just shrug off artemises as you charge in a straight line at them isn't going to help.
How am I supposed to go up and above the triple art junker when you are camping at the flight celing? Literaly the only way we could get any kills on you was by ramming you to death. and we used EVERY bit of cover the Fjords provides to try and get close to you.
The only reason we managed to "wreck" (as you expresed yourself) your build in TSR16 becouse you weren't camping at flight ceeling. You need expert LJ gunners to hit targets hiding behind cover at LJ's max range, and our both Gunners have been absent last 2 weekends. Artemis on the other side is so easy that even I hit 4/5 shots on moving targets.
I'm also sick of getting advice to snipe, to deal with the crap like this. I hate playing sniping matches. I hate repairing, I hate piloting, and I hate gunning in sniper matches. As if sniping wasn't entrenced in the meta enough.
Mobula needs to use it's everical maneuverability to keep out of enemy arcs, becouse it's slow and can't turn very well. If enemy is at the bottom of the map and is sporting carrorades or at the top of the map and sporting LJ or Artemis you can't break arcs verticaly, and then you are forced to either merc with 2 mercs or are huge tasty target. Squid has great horizontal maneuverability, but is somewaht lacking in vertical maneuverability + carrorade puts you into artemis arcs of fire. Squid has as hard time killing anyone alone as has triple art junker. Squid can be a distraction, but in high level play unless you force the OTHER junker to deal with something else, the other junker can gat artemis the squid easily enough (or carrorade artemis - squids have poor armor, you can blast thru their armor realy realy fast - heatsink is invaluable whaen it comes to dealing with squids). Dealing with entrencehd sextuple art build is possible, but enything we have had come up with so far is a soft cunter as opposed to a hard counter. It's a hard uphill struggle.