Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Pulse Lasers are short to medium range anyway, unlike Blasters and Autocannons which are more designed for close and personal brawling. Using long range ammo on a short-medium range gun should make it medium-long range, which it is, although I do somewhat agree that the damage application with Scorch is pretty high for its range.

Then again it does make lasers more applicable to the FotM as the poor damage types and high cap use do limit it somewhat against armour and neuts.

just seems mad to me that a short range weapon like pulses can reach out further than arty or rails unless they use the pathetic dps ammo that hits mabye half what scorch does at best

well it looks like Rails are getting a 40% damage buff .. which actually seems a little too high to me but its progress at least.

On scorch .. yes on paper it seems a little high but when you take into consideration cap usage and look at the hulls of amarr ships its actually not so OP as it may appear .. that and ships that use them usually need a cap bonus to run the guns and a prop ... also all the other crystals are very poor ... maybe if they fixed the other issues then maybe a slight nerf to scorch might make sense.

NO
Also you care comparing the short range ammo on Tachyons which is largely pointless as no one would bother using them as they nerf range too much .. in reality they need too boost those ammo types instead of nerfing what already works well enough.

Desolation/Bolt
Lux/Blaze
Shock/Storm
I wonder why CCP removed those =\ Btw, missiles have their choice of damage type in T2 ammo, but minmatars dont when choice of damage type is a highlight of projectiles.

Pulse lasers are the bottom of the barrel in terms of gun stats among pulses, autocannons and blasters with one important exception: Optimal.

If lasers did not have the projection advantage that comes with optimal range they would be by far the worst guns available and I think you could even say that objectively, they are outperformed by other guns in all other respects. Say heavy pulses have an optimal around 1 km with Multifrequency and around 10-12 km with scorch...the best use of lasers is now to refine them to build autocannons is it not? (I'm deliberately being a little drastic here to emphasize how important range is to the viability of lasers)

So with the range change lasers now have:
-mediocre damage at best
-projection on par with blasters at best
-falloff is the worst (HPL = 5 km, Neutron Blaster = 6.3 km at all level 5 skills with no mods fitted and no hull bonuses apply)
-tracking is worst of the 3 short range gun types
-cap use is by far the worst
-damage type is fixed (though this can be said of blasters too)

If this were to happen, given this silly view of a potential reality can you think of any reason to ever fit a laser to anything?

Yes the projection of scorch is fantastic but it's pretty much what makes HPLs into a thing one might use. Incidentally most kiting Minmatar ships use falloff bonuses and 425s do they not? Gallente kiters use neutrons and null or am I wrong on this, my Gallente are usually face melters when I do use them. Scorch dps is low compared to the damage dealt up close with other weapons it's advantage is the ability to do more damage than you do at longer range. So if you're fighting against a laser ship while using autocannons for example, it's up to you to get in close enough to out damage the scorch, not up to CCP to nerf scorch range or damage. So using short range guns with long range ammo to kite sounds pretty par for the course to me.

Scorch typically does the most damage at range but since all weapon types often use short range guns and long range ammo I don't see much point in getting into why people don't use long range guns to kite instead since no one kites with rails or beams anyway no matter how far they can reach because the dps and tracking losses don't make the extra range worthwhile. At least Arties can be in optimal and point range at the same time. So while there is no question that scorch is very powerful it is the projection that makes lasers a thing worth training for, nerfing the range of lasers is a massive hit to their viability as range is the only advantage they have, there is literally no other benefit to using lasers over blasters or autocannons.

Scorch is fine relative to other short range weapons, as it makes lasers better at some aspects and worse at others compared to other two short range turrets. Comparatively, Beam lasers are awesome long range dps weapons, but tend to be extremely hard on the fitting, making them less popular on most hulls. This isn't anything strange - railgun Brutix is just as rare as beam Apocalypse. Meanwhile, Zealot, Oracle, Nightmare and Paladin are practically made for tachyon beams and you'll be hard pressed to see those (except the Oracle) with Pulses. It's just that in most situations, Scorch has enough range for most applications, while at the same time Pulses being less limiting on the fitting due to lower fitting requirements.



Medium railguns only. Small and large railguns are fine, but the problem with medium ones was that they had no chance in competing with rail-fit Naga, while at the same time lacking the tracking to offset the lower damage. Whereas small rails can be used as an effective kiting tool and large rails are awesome sniping tools, the medium rails had no purpose. With the damage increase, a medium rail boat will still do less damage than the Naga, but it will be able to offset the damage with better tracking, tank, speed or some other advantage.