Damage Beams?

[Joe_Fish123]

I am curious why anyone would use damage beams as a primary weapon. They are inferior to cannons in every way except for travel time. The main problem with damage beams is dps. Currently, you get 1 dps per damage beam block. You get 5 dps per cannon block. Is there any reason why you would want to use damage beams? Am I overlooking something?

 

[Top 4ce]

It's the same DPS as cannons iirc. It's the range the make it's use difficult. As a close up weapon it works because it's hit-scan and makes hitting moving things easy. Also makes a great secondary and useful for push/pull/stop weapons.

 

[Joe_Fish123]

I just tested it, it is not the same dps. It produces 1/5th of the dps per block as cannons do.

 

[Top 4ce]

How are you testing it? Pure main damage beam group? Are you taking into account the full damage of the pulse? (I'm not saying your wrong, just want clarification. All weapons should be doing 5 dps/block)

 

[Joe_Fish123]

Well I put 4 cannon blocks and 4 damage beam blocks and connected them to their respective computers. Then I opened the weapons menu and looked at the dps. It gave the 4 cannon blocks a dps of 20, and the 4 beam blocks a dps of 4. Then I tested them against a shield, and it seemed like the cannons were doing damage to the shields about 5 times faster.

 

[Criss]

Well I put 4 cannon blocks and 4 damage beam blocks and connected them to their respective computers. Then I opened the weapons menu and looked at the dps. It gave the 4 cannon blocks a dps of 20, and the 4 beam blocks a dps of 4. Then I tested them against a shield, and it seemed like the cannons were doing damage to the shields about 5 times faster.

It's been confirmed that damage values from the weapons and structures tab might not be displaying correctly. There have been instances where players have found inconsistencies with damage values. It is supposed to be the same dps.

 

[Joe_Fish123]

Oh ok thanks for letting me know. I recently tested it again and you are right all the weapons overall have the same dps.

 

[MrFURB]

Well I put 4 cannon blocks and 4 damage beam blocks and connected them to their respective computers. Then I opened the weapons menu and looked at the dps. It gave the 4 cannon blocks a dps of 20, and the 4 beam blocks a dps of 4. Then I tested them against a shield, and it seemed like the cannons were doing damage to the shields about 5 times faster.

The damage from beams is per damage tick, with 5 damage ticks per pulse of the weapon. This makes beams a bit more front-loaded in damage without sacrificing block-clearing capability; both weapons hit 5 times in 5 seconds, so without effects they both could destroy 5 blocks in 5 seconds.

There are a few advantages that make beam weapons worthwhile that other weapons simply can't match. The larger the sector size, the more effective the beam's hitscan nature becomes as it gains range (especially if the server speed limit isn't proportional to the sector size increase). Beams are also slightly more effective than cannons for burst style weapon systems with the advantage of being able to output five times as much damage as a cannon before it's rearm time... Well, it would be when the block config value for beam/pulse is fixed so that it doesn't cost 5 times as much energy as it should.

 

[Snk]

Beams are also useful for deploying effects like stop and EMP

 

[Ithirahad]

...And Piercing, and Push, and Pull... Even Explosive with beams has its uses sometimes. (Cannon+Beam+any effect is fun with large enough modules.)

 

[Seato39]

...And Piercing, and Push, and Pull... Even Explosive with beams has its uses sometimes. (Cannon+Beam+any effect is fun with large enough modules.)

Does Piercing actually work on Beams now? I've read that it didn't before, has it now been fixed?

 

[Cornedo]

I use beams because unless you're firing at point-blank range or your target is really big I find hitting anything with a cannon to be fairly difficult.

 

[Ithirahad]

Does Piercing actually work on Beams now? I've read that it didn't before, has it now been fixed?

It did last time I tried it, but then again that was ages ago. Piercing beams are intended to be for my Iali ships, and I've been so busy building Aethi ships that I've never even tried non-Aethi-style weapons since the weapons-update prebuilds.