I see that most people recommend beam lasers in most cases, and I'm trying to understand why, especially with access to Engineers. Without mods, it makes perfect sense to me, beams provide better DPS than either pulses or bursts, however beams don't have a blueprint that increases their DPS without severely reducing their range, and from what I can tell, you can get better DPS, as well as heat and energy efficiency from pulses, or even bursts. Am I missing something?
Ship Builds & Load Outs Beam vs. Pulse/Burst Lasers
- Thread starter Calvyr
- Start date
dayrth
Volunteer Moderator
I have often thought that the humble pulse laser was greatly underrated. Even without mods. Beams do a lot more damage, but only for as long as they are firing and on target. Gimbaled beams are very sluggish at tracking. Fixed deliver a lot of damage but all beams use enormous amounts of power and produce a lot of heat. Gimballed pulse lasers track much faster. All pulse lasers use less power and run cool.
When I was using a Vulture for bounty hunting I had two large fixed pulse lasers fitted. The nimble Vulture could stay on target most of the time and I could fire constantly without running out of power or overheating. I could do a lot more damage than with the more powerful beams firing less frequently.
When I was using a Vulture for bounty hunting I had two large fixed pulse lasers fitted. The nimble Vulture could stay on target most of the time and I could fire constantly without running out of power or overheating. I could do a lot more damage than with the more powerful beams firing less frequently.
I recently engineered two G5 rapid fire large pulse and two G5 efficient beams for a Vulture, from memory the pulse DPS was around 26 and the beams 28 - 29, power requirements are very close but the much lower capacitor draw allows the pulse to fire much longer to the extent I sometimes get heat warnings.
Subjectively the beams appear better at dropping shields but are lacking against hull whereas the pulses are ok against shields but do better hull damage, in actual combat (same Vulture) the pulses are a more effective weapon with longer firing duration and less pip management.
Subjectively the beams appear better at dropping shields but are lacking against hull whereas the pulses are ok against shields but do better hull damage, in actual combat (same Vulture) the pulses are a more effective weapon with longer firing duration and less pip management.
Since the last patch my G5 rapid fire pulses overheat like crazy, so now use efficient beams. Do you have G5 dirty drives on your vulture?
This may account for some of my confusion, since I do recall seeing the Efficient and Overcharged upgrades available for beams on Coriolis, but not listed on Inara, so I wasn't sure which one was accurate. I'm looking at using beams/pulses combined with MCs on my DBS until I can grind up to a FAS, where I'll likely use a similar setup.
I've never seen that at all. Pulse on the Forum, Reddit and even YouTube videos far surpasses those who prefer beams. They use power and generate heat. The exception I think is the 19 million credits class 3 Turret beams which run pretty cool but have relatively low DPS. Other class 3 weapons are a lot more damaging.
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Here's a link to some screenshots of the higher level beam mods
https://imgur.com/a/kmYw2
I've two Vultures one with 5A-G5 DDT and one with 5C-G3 DDT the first can just about run efficient pulse but the second build has enough spare power to run efficient beams and only overheats a little with the rapid fire pulses, I guess the lower heat generation of the 5C-G3 thrusters helps and the agility is still excellent with a modest drop in max speed.
https://coriolis.edcd.io/outfit/vul.../qXc9ZIyFYoJTCEg8a/nDy1YAg6iAQAA&bn=Vulture F
https://imgur.com/a/kmYw2
I've two Vultures one with 5A-G5 DDT and one with 5C-G3 DDT the first can just about run efficient pulse but the second build has enough spare power to run efficient beams and only overheats a little with the rapid fire pulses, I guess the lower heat generation of the 5C-G3 thrusters helps and the agility is still excellent with a modest drop in max speed.
https://coriolis.edcd.io/outfit/vul.../qXc9ZIyFYoJTCEg8a/nDy1YAg6iAQAA&bn=Vulture F
Yes that's what I was thinking. Personally I quite the efficient beams, as though the distributor draw is higher, with a G5 distributor it's still okay, and hitting small ships feels perhaps slightly less frustrating than with pulse.
running a DBS myself (really enjoying small ships), i have a lot of different set-ups with it... with a lot of different lasers.
one of the limiting factors of a DBS is its powerdistributor. you want to get the most out of it. two small beams/ two medium MC are heavy on the powerdistributor for taking down larger ships shields, if the small beams are not engineered efficient. so here are what i have explored so far.
- standard set-up: long-range beam, MC, 2 small cannons. works very well. medium beams have less distributor draw than two small beams. longrange allows you to use the speed of a DBS to attack ships out of their weapon range. when shields are down, get close.
- combatzone set-up: focussed burst, medium MC, 2 small cannons. the added arour penetration of focussed works nicely here!
- haz res hunting: small beam, focussed burst, medium MC, small cannons. if you have to take down shields all by yourself, and want to kill modules.
generally speaking, the DBS has perfect hardpoints placements for using fixed, and the second best heat-capacity in the game - i also run it with double medium plasma or double medium railguns in between. there it gets quite a heavy hitter. small cannons are great to hit above their size ... i'd say it makes more sense to fit them, than to fit two small lasers for stripping shields, because they will be very often too heavy for the powerdistributor, if engineered.
Beams make a cooler noise.
I've been running a Conda with 3 large turreted burst lasers with the long range mod and i'm just changing them out to beam turrets. I've not tested it out yet but the damage fall off is the one thing that concerns me. The burst lasers had a 4.5km range and 4.5km damage fall off where the beams have a 3km range and 0.6km damage fall off. I think this won't be a problem against other big ships but against fast fighters they'll be spending more time further out and DPS will probably be less than with the bursts.
Thankfully module storage means i've kept the burst lasers till i've tested the new beam build.
If you try Overcharge 5 a Pulse and compare it to an Efficient 5 Beam, you will find that the Pulse comes out on top on Small/Medium where-as Beams are better on Large/Huge
See here, and here for examples with extreme rolls.
That being said, I like focused gimballed Bursts best, mixed with Multicannons. The increased falloff is excellent as is the greatly increased Piercing. IMO longrange is only useful fixed as a gimballed weapon jitters too much anything over 2km.
For longrange I prefer Beams and rails.
Update.....I swapped out the bursts to Beams. Tested it with unmodified beams and it was terrible. Got the Beams modified to long range and, while it was better it was still not as good as the burst lasers had been.
The tracking didn't seem to be as accurate or as fast on the large beams compared with the large bursts. Heating actually became an issue where it really hadn't been on the bursts particularly with a charge enhanced distro feeding them.
So last night i swapped back to the 3 x large burst turrets and was much happier.