EVE New Citizens Q&A

First, I think it's worth considering what optimal and falloff mean. As long as someone is within optimal and not moving, you will be doing "full damage". Once someone is at optimal + 1/2 falloff you're down to about 80%, and at optimal + falloff you're at about 40%. Those are maximums, for when nobody is moving.

Furthermore, as people move out you don't have to move your gun quite so far - so as you might expect tracking becomes less of an issue further out. There's been a concept floating around of (optimal + 1/2 falloff) * tracking to try to get a handle for how well the ship "effectively tracks" at range, but really most people just use EFT and look at the graphs.

Another thing that affects damage application is resists. If you shoot someone with 1000 damage and they have 50% resists, you'll only do 500 damage. With 75% resists, 25% damage. The implication here is that EM damage (read: EMP and all lasers) is a fairly weak damage type in PVE and against armor tanks.

In the end: projectiles have some rudimentary damage projection and deal better damage up close. Lasers have high "EFT" DPS and project damage really well.

I'm partial to lasers, personally.

-Liang

I use mostly projectile weapons, so I am of course biased towards them, but I've tinker with lasers and went back to projectiles. My reasons are:
No capacitor need. If you are being nueted you can still shoot back.
Damage choice: You can, with the right ammo, do whatever kind of damage you want to. Reloading does take ten seconds though.
Damage over ranges: You can change your ammo to adjust your ranges (exchanging range for damage), but in most cases I personally only use the short range ammo (EMP, Fusion, Phased Plasma, etc) and fight a lot more in falloff.

Damage is
Optimal or closer 100% damage (if you can hit)
Optimal plus Falloff 50% damage
Optimal plus Falloff plus Falloff (2x falloff) 0% damage.

So, if you had a laser and a gun and both did 100 points of base damage (and this is EXTREMELY simplified)
The laser had an optimal of 4000m and a fall off of 500m and the gun had an optimal of 800m and a falloff of 4000m

Distance - Laser Damage - Gun Damage (roughly)
500m - 100 - 100
1000m - 100 - 97
2000m - 100 - 85
4000m - 100 - 60
4500m - 50 - 52
4800m - 20 - 50
5000m - 0 - 47
6800m - 0 - 25
8800m - 0 - 0

There are a lot of other little details as well. Damage is determined by the ammo type's listed damage x the weapons damage modifier. The ranges in the chart above can be adjust because of the ammo type (short range projectile ammo reduce the range by 50%, so using EMP ammo means I won't do any damage until I get within 4400m . The laser using multifrequency would also suffer the 50% range issue, so no damage beyond 2400m.)

You're comparing, what, pulse lasers to Autocannons?

Your impressions are pretty much correct, but you underestimate how much a longer optimal can help. Additionally, remember that there is ammunition that is only compatible with T2 guns, and Amarr has some of the "best" both outright and because it can be switched out with no cooldown in combat, and Minmatar has some of the worst in that T2 AC ammo is not a huge improvement over faction ammo for the most part.

There's really not any type of weapon that's outright superior or inferior to another type of weapon in the game right now, the last cycle of re-tuning fixed most of the imbalances. What weapon you use will alter how you fly, though, there's a lot more of the figurative "lining up a shot" with Amarr and more of the "spray more bullets 'till something hits" with Minmatar.

(The fact that minmatar T2 isn't a huge upgrade over T1 for the most part is actually considered an _advantage_ of minmatar, since you've got a bigger chunk of your potential power accessible at lower cost and sp levels.

EDIT: Also note that the previously posted "damage" is actually damage*hit chance, i.e. damage averaged over time. Unless something fairly dramatic has changed, the damage of each given shot is pulled randomly off a chart once it's been established that you've landed a hit, and hit chance is the primary thing altered by falloff/optimal, as with tracking.