R.I.S.C. gear is supposed to be more powerful than conventional gear, it's part of the allure. Yeah, you have a chance of blowing it and losing your gear, as well as, often enough, doing some harmful things to your own 'Mech...but if it works, you get effects a normal gear card beats off to late at night.

For instance, R.I.S.C. Fire Shot as it's written on the card. Now, if it busts, you lose the gear and gain two heat. This is bad. But...if you're lucky enough to have access to two of them, like I do, and a couple of mediums to use them, you could - conceivably and pre-errata for when Wizzies figures this combo out - plant your pair of ballistic mediums behind blocking terrain and indirect at Seka's Pride all day, miss every shot you make...and unless your Fire Shots both go bust, you will heat it up into shutdown in short order since the attack doesn't need to succeed, only occur. What conventional offensive gear would ever let you reap its effect even if the attack failed?

Also note. Both non-R.I.S.C. range-extending gears - ER Ammo and Clan Wolf's Extended Targeting Range - inflict pretty steep penalties on the attack/damage you can do while using them. And ER Ammo doesn't even get you to the range limit (18") for it -2 to AV. But Hyper Laser...not only does a Hyper Laser offer an unlimited range extension, which not even the CW ETR can do, but it alsoadds in half again your damage. That laser, if it did what it does without a R.I.S.C. roll involved, would likely cost you about the same point value as a medium 'Mech, if WizKids was insane enough to print it at all.

High risk, high reward. If you're a bit of a gambler, and who plays this game and doesn't have a bit of the gambler in them, then the R.I.S.C. cards can be a heck of a thrill. At least, so far as I'm concerned.

Fireshot has been errataed for a while now. (It sounds from your post that you are unaware that they had already done it.)

One of the things with RISC gear is not what it can do but what am I giving up to use it? For me to use RISC gear, I have to give up my gear slot which usually means either IT, decoy, or evade. Is that RISC gear worth it? Sure you can have high damage but unless I happen to have IT on the dial, I probably won't hit consistantly enough to even do damage. Unless the odds are above 50%, I look for alternatives. I'd rather do smaller damage consistantly rather than rely on hitting one time and hoping its early in the game.

Yeah, I musta missed Fire Shot. Odd, been looking for it. Ah well.

Heh...call me crazy (and I know many of you will), but I like to switch things up every now and then. Running nothing but IT, Decoy, or Evade in every single 'Mech I play, every single time I play them, gets damned boring after a while. R.I.S.C. cards give me fun trick effects I can use to change things up and, often more importantly than people give credit for, make the other guy go "WTF?"

One of my most successful armies was actually a heat-based army which prominently featured a suiciding DF Jaguar equipped with Inferno Flamers and Dillon Lorrcan backed up by Matchstick with IT to compensate for early-Kurita-dial AV, and Thunderthighs with APM. I had a couple Saxons transporting infantry around for the odd capture. Army worked amazingly well, nobody quite knew how to deal with that kind of heat-generation capabilities. I caught all three of my foes off-guard with it and took them unawares, cooked most of them before time.

Sometimes using something unconventional and using it well is worth all the rerolls in the game, especially if you're using something like Davion reroll pride to sub in for the IT. Besides, if you're that worried about needing to hit nutty defense levels, just use Merc pride like everyone else :p

Hear, hear!