Am i better off going for damage or Armour Piercing ? The frustration of finding Modified Embedded Firmware is making me reassess my weapons. Will sturdy weapons, with better armour piercing be a better option.
Engineers Damage or Armour Piercing ?
- Thread starter CryptoTrader
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Sturdy is not the most appealing mod IMHO when looking for more armour piercing, focused weapon should be the way to go instead. At least with lasers or plasma accelerators. Which kind of weapons are you thinking about?
That depends.
For small and medium lasers, Focused is definitely one of the best mods. It gives a double bonus - less damage falloff (helps against shields) and armor piercing bonus (helps against hulls medium and large ships). It also gives you up to 6 km range, which is nicredibly useful for kill-stealing (please never use it against other players!).
Kinetic weapons, such as multicannons and cannons - go and farm these MEFs, and do G5 overcharged.
Plasmas - focused is essentially a poor man's long-range. Plasmas have maxed-out armor piercing and 2 km damage falloff, so the only thing Focused is useful for is increasing shot speed.
For small and medium lasers, Focused is definitely one of the best mods. It gives a double bonus - less damage falloff (helps against shields) and armor piercing bonus (helps against hulls medium and large ships). It also gives you up to 6 km range, which is nicredibly useful for kill-stealing (please never use it against other players!).
Kinetic weapons, such as multicannons and cannons - go and farm these MEFs, and do G5 overcharged.
Plasmas - focused is essentially a poor man's long-range. Plasmas have maxed-out armor piercing and 2 km damage falloff, so the only thing Focused is useful for is increasing shot speed.
I fly a Python. 2 Medium Turreted Beam Lasers. I like the turreted because i can still inflict damage to faster moving ships as i loose sight of them, and 3 Large Gimballed Multi-Cannons. I went for Efficient Mods on the beams, due to lack of MEF's and could only do 1 roll on each Multi-Cannon, again due to lack of MEF's. I was thinking of going sturdy, on the Beams, as it gives a 45% armour piercing increase. That way if i ever decide to do another 'scanning run' to get more MEF's i could try to improve my Multi-Cannons, as i doubt i will ever get enough MEF's to do the number of rolls required to get good upgrades across all my weapons.
that's pretty much spot on.
I'd add it also depends on your powerdistributor (ship) - it doesn't make sense to overcharge your weapons and loose sustained DPS. especially small ships with class 3 powerdistributors win a lot from focussed pulse/bursts. the DPE ration also differs between classes of bursts/pulses and beams. my CZ viper mkIII for exampel has two focussed bursts for above reasons.
beam turrets scream for efficient. you won't win from focussed burst/pulse turrets against small fast moving targets, as the hardness of those targets is already below a medium burst/pulse. one of the loadouts of my CZ python has 1 beam turret + one longrange beam gimbal, plus 3 overcharged MC. my trade python works similar.
There's not much useful information left that the two guys haven't already posted yet. Very good wrapups what to do weaponwise. You already have the most useful mod for beams => efficient. If you want to keep your three large multicannons there is no viable alternative for overcharging them and thus the painful search for MEF... And make sure you have the corrosive special on one of the MCs - it's way too good / overpowered for not having it.
I personally don't like large multicannons because of their clumsy spin-up time before firing. For that reason I prefer a laser loadout on my Python. Currently I have two medium and two large focused gimbaled pulse on top and a long range cannon under the nose. The ship is entirely engineered so the gimbaled lasers have a very long time on target and are thus emptying the capacitor very fast even with four pips in weapons - too fast for my taste.
With four efficient pulse or burst lasers I could fire almost infinitely and would even get a higher DPS. The only sacrifice would be the lower armour piercing. So I'm currently thinking about this damage vs. armour piercing thing as well. Most probabely I'll go visiting Broo Tarquin soon and do some Anaconda shooting experiments in a hazRES with focused vs. efficient lasers.
I personally don't like large multicannons because of their clumsy spin-up time before firing. For that reason I prefer a laser loadout on my Python. Currently I have two medium and two large focused gimbaled pulse on top and a long range cannon under the nose. The ship is entirely engineered so the gimbaled lasers have a very long time on target and are thus emptying the capacitor very fast even with four pips in weapons - too fast for my taste.
With four efficient pulse or burst lasers I could fire almost infinitely and would even get a higher DPS. The only sacrifice would be the lower armour piercing. So I'm currently thinking about this damage vs. armour piercing thing as well. Most probabely I'll go visiting Broo Tarquin soon and do some Anaconda shooting experiments in a hazRES with focused vs. efficient lasers.
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Pretty much any beam screams for efficient. Without it it's just a fancy gadget that drains your WEP capacitor in seconds while not doing much damage.
Just wanted to add that according to https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/246086-Official-FDev-Damage-Stats-for-Every-Weapon there is a cap of armour piercing at 100% damage done. That means e.g. as hull hardness currently does not exceed the factor of 70 that the armour piercing of a stock class 4 cannon or plasma accelerator is already overpowered. Taking into account the 25% damage buff of corrosive shell ammunition weakening hull hardness down from 70 to 56 there is almost no benefit of the focused weapon mod beyond class 2 lasers.
Another story could be of course future ships like a Panther Clipper or any Thargoid vessels...
Another story could be of course future ships like a Panther Clipper or any Thargoid vessels...
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