Spidey
Posts: 411
Joined: 12/8/2013 Status: offline
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I've been thinking about mostly the same thing, Shuul, but balancing weapons is hard since it all depends on what your goal with a gun is. And those special abilities against armor are a pain to balance, due to how armor works. Early armor is fairly easily bypassed anyway while late stage armor is a lot more likely to soak a lot of pressure. And regarding the weapons themselves there are so damned many factors to consider. Damage loss over distance, size, speed, those special modifiers, and of course refire rate. And "dps" isn't just that either, due to how armor works. Small needlepricks have a harder time penetrating armor than massive hammerblows. This all makes it rather complex to decide what actually is or isn't overpowered. I used to think that shockwave torps were a bit overpowered since they had good range, huge damage, and no rubbish penalties against armor. Then I wrote some data into a spreadsheet and took a look at beamers and torp weapons in terms of DPS per unit size. Can you guess it? Shockwave torp 1 is third worst in DPS/size at point blank range of all the tier 3 beams and torp weapons, doing 0.53 dmg vs 0.48 from epsilon 3 and 0.44 from velocity shard 1. Maxos 3 does 1.3, impact assault blaster 1 do 1.42, and shatterforce laser 1 does 1.18. That's at point blank where shockwaves are meant to shine. Go to range 300 and the humiliation continues. Shockwaves are at 0.26, epsies and velo-shards are at 0.28, and the shatterforces are at 0.67. And if we go further out, the velo-shards will just race further ahead. If we jump to Shockwave 2 and the other tier 4 weapons, the picture remains the same. The shockers can outdamage velo-shards slightly in the 0-200 range window, but at 300 onwards the velo-shards actually do more damage. And everything else will outdamage shockers in the 0-200 range window, with the exception being phaser lances at point blank range. But of course all this ignores armor penetration. Shockwave torps do a ton of damage on impact, which means that even though they're neither size- or time-efficient, they will make dents in armor if fired at close enough range. Shatterforce lasers, meanwhile, have excellent damage statistics but needs to hit a lot of times to actually dig through heavy layers of armor. But then you get three shatterforce lasers for each shockwave torp launcher and each laser will fire twice as fast. Confused yet? Have a hard time drawing any solid conclusions? Yeah, me too.
< Message edited by Spidey -- 4/28/2014 8:06:59 AM >
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