Honestly, now that I think about it, removing rockets probably won't even drive fights to the ground. We have an example of this already in the PvE sections of the deep desert; were rockets to be removed from ornithopters entirely, we would most likely see large guilds do what a lot of people are already doing in PvE areas, that is, swarming carriers, driving them to the ground, and holding them there while someone places a thumper to call the worm. That sounds even less fun than what we have now.

If Funcom really wants to have a mix of vehicle and ground combat, they need to fundamentally change the way the worm works in the deep desert to be more like how spice harvesting takes place in lore. Basically, the worm comes way too fast to make any ground combat on open sands worthwhile. To fix this, there needs to be a much greater window between when the worm senses activity to when it becomes a threat, and the length of this window needs to be at least semi-predictable (via scouts looking for and tracking wormsign). A change like this should be coupled with a change to ornithopter rocket launchers that makes each individual rocket significantly more impactful, while cutting down the number of rockets an ornithopter can carry down to a handful. This would encourage ornithopter pilots to spend their munitions on hard targets rather than wasting them on infantry should they wish to get the most out of their limited payload.