All Weapon Stats in Actual Values Test Results (Stage 1 – Shield DPS)

[QorbeQ]

Damage over Time plot for Vulture 5A distributor

View attachment 31659

The "knuckle" is the changeover from a charged WEP capacitor to the charge rate of the distributor.

Edit: New graph with markers to help identify the different lines

 

[Derath]

Damage over Time plot for Vulture 5A distributor



The "knuckle" is the changeover from a charged WEP capacitor to the charge rate of the distributor.

Sweet someone finally made a graph to chart the dps calculations, i've banged on about this stuff since release to show how beams perform better than pulses up to a certain point then drop off as a function of time, thankyou thankyou thankyou

 

[soma]

Repped for the rundown! Just gonna add some statistical clarification on these otherwise it makes some weapons look too good.

• Pulse Lasers seem superior to other types of lasers. They might do 30% less damage than a Beam, but they use 50% less energy, which effectively lets you fire twice as long. Overall the Pulse Laser will do more damage and missing a shot will be less dramatic than missing with the beam. No wonder the Pulses are so popular at the moment.
  (beams have instantaneous on/off so missing is very similar to pulses, you could also replace 3 pulses with 2 beams and retain the same dps with an additional weapon slot, general points about pulses doing the most sustained dps remain as thats what they are good at!)
• The C2 Railgun has almost the same DPS as the C4 Plasma Accelerator. And the Railgun it is an intstant hit weapon. I guess there really is not much point in running a PA at the moment..
  (they included reload times, C4 PA has a considerable reload time & gap between shots even with energy, but its instantaneous damage is considerably higher than rails, this also applys to frags to a degree which fire x3 extremely quickly, then have a relatively long reload - rails reload is about 1s its really not long at all.)
• The damage of the C4 cannon against shields is about the same as the damage of a C1 Fixed Beam Laser. (hull damage specialist, performs as well as PA vs hulls without energy cost)
• So in general, the currently available C4 weapons are not good against shields and thus pretty much unsuited for PvP.
  (this is completely true and always has been just about, you can go risky and try to instantly take engines out after shields drop, hard to pull off though)
• Missiles are useless against shields (no surprise there)
• The C3 Pulse Turret does pathetic damage and is more or less equivalent to a Gimballed C1 Pulse Laser
• The damage difference between Gimballed and Fixed Multicannons is practically non-existant against shields. (I suspect this is because the difference in dps between these two is actually tiny)

Thanks for the feedback! Good clarifications, i guess my interpretation of the data is rather subjective. I will add them to the original post.

 

[samz812]

This is so much easier than sifting through the stats in the shipyard XD more filters in game may be needed i think but this is so much clearer than anything in game.

 

[QorbeQ]

Vulture C3 weapons damage-over-time

(Same data but only to 40-seconds instead of 60 (as nothing changes) and only for C3 fireable weapons, just to help the visibility.)

View attachment 31661

Illustrates quite nicely that there is no practical benefit of the C3 G Burst what-so-ever other than running out of steam faster than the C3 G Pulse.

N.B. This also assumes that the weapon is bearing on the target 100% of the time. We'd have to pop in some "fiddle factor" to scale down for fixed weapon aiming, which would vary on a per-pilot basis I guess.

 

[Nereus]

Great info, OP.

Rep incoming!

 

[QorbeQ]

I should add, those graphs of mine are running two of each type of laser simultaneously.

 

[Otis B.]

(Same data but only to 40-seconds instead of 60 (as nothing changes) and only for C3 fireable weapons, just to help the visibility.)

Thanks - I was struggling to decipher your previous graph.

 

[Morbad]

Pretty much exactly what I expected from my anecdotal experiences with these weapons.

What does high dps help if you're constantly out of weapon energy?

It helps with fitting the most damage into the shortest window of time when facing enemies nimble enough that you do not have a constant firing solution against them.

Turns out C3 F pulse lasers can dish out 40% and a C3 F burst laser 32% more damage per second than a C3 F beam laser. And a C3 G pulse laser is still 14% more efficient than a fixed beam laser.

Fixed pulse lasers are pretty awesome, but the real thing keeping me from using beams on my Vulture are trade offs in other areas, not emptying my WEP capacitor.

This is so much easier than sifting through the stats in the shipyard XD more filters in game may be needed i think but this is so much clearer than anything in game.

I think the game is deliberately imprecise to allow for FD to tweak things, and to encourage players to get actual experience.

I just crossed 1 billion spent on outfitting...and getting first hand experience with nearly everything is why. It's a massive pain, but I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

 

[Morbad]

The EPS (Energy per Second) of Thermic weapons was calculated from the energy used in WEP Capacitor and the time fired.

Though somewhat academic it should be noted again that WEP capacitor doesn't power the weapons, it powers the weapon cooling system. Thus weapons like medium pulse lasers expend WEP faster than medium multi-cannon, despite having lower power plant energy use. This is important when actually fitting weapons to a ship and being able to power them all simultaneously, independent of how much fire time you get from them.

I'm sure you realize this, but not everyone does.

1. We have verified with different size ships and different shield/weapon combinations, and confirmed that smaller weapons or hardpoints will NOT have penalty against any ship’s shields.

Good to have this confirmed.

2. As previously tested by other commanders, most weapons had same damage between 0-500m, and reduced damage with distance 500m-3km, finally become out-of-range after 3km. We tested our most of weapons at 500m except for Fragment Cannons, which was closer at 150m to ensure 100% hit.

Any plans to test damage drop off on energy weapons?

It seems quite severe to me and though I haven't done any formal testing, the difference between 1km and 3km on most lasers seems to be in the ballpark of 200-400%. I can land hits at 3km, but it's rarely worth doing.

3. We did not test Mine Launchers, but we did test Torpedo Pylon and Mining Lasers. Torpedos had very similar shield damage to missiles (basically useless against shields). Mine lasers can indeed damage shield and hull, but their range is very short (a few hundred meters).

4. Missile weapons could use some love from FD – They already been countered badly by point defense, and now they don’t have any effective shield damage at all, which doesn't make sense – you will think an explosion of a missile could carry more damage than a few shots of multi-cannon!

Missiles and torpedoes are hull and subsystem breakers. Assessing them purely from a shield damage perspective is overlooking most of their role. This info is good to know, but poor shield damage doesn't automatically imply they need a fix.

 

[QorbeQ]

Oops. I think I forgot to double the output damage on my damage over time chart.

The chart is identical, but you should assume the damage output levels on the left axis are double the indicated value.

 

[Dejay]

Damage over Time plot for Vulture 5A distributor
The "knuckle" is the changeover from a charged WEP capacitor to the charge rate of the distributor.

Wow this is a pretty nice graph! (Not pretty, but nice! )

I guess overall the time spend on the target doesn't matter as long as your weapon capacitor never fully recharges.

Also I'd love to see such a graph comparing different ships and loadouts for the Python / Fer-de-lance / Anaconda. I think someone needs to make an online calculator

Actually they deal 40% and 32% more damage per energy than a beam, thats not the same as damage per second.

Well it is if you're nibbling away at a slow NPC (e.g. anaconda) constantly having to wait for weapons energy. So in this case not taking weapons energy into account does affect your effective DPS. But of course there are plenty of areas where weapon energy isn't the limitations. But this is what I was always wondering about on how to optimize so I'm very happy with the awesome work StarLightBreaker has done.

 

[QorbeQ]

Wow this is a pretty nice graph! (Not pretty, but nice! )

Sorry, I'm not terribly experienced at getting anything beautiful out of Excel.

Also I'd love to see such a graph comparing different ships and loadouts for the Python / Fer-de-lance / Anaconda. I think someone needs to make an online calculator

Feasible, but...deciding which weapon gets power priority in the same way that the game does could be tricky. If your WEP is empty and, for example, you're running one pulse and one burst, will the pulse keep firing whenever one pulse-worth of energy is present, stealing everything before the burst gets a chance?

At least with two identical weapons it's pretty easy to just take the available power and divide it down to get the damage. Apportioning the damage between multiple weapons on something like an Anaconda sounds a nightmare without essentially running a WEP cap simulator...

 

[SushiCW]

Some really strange variances in how much more damage fixed does than gimbals. The conventional wisdom is about 20%, but...

* C3 beams are 25% better if fixed instead of gimballed. C3 burst are 35% better, while C3 pulse are only 17% better.
* C2 beams are measuring a whopping 43% higher.
* C2 cannons did 5% less damage when fixed instead of gimballed.
* C2 multicannons are only 8% better... but C1 multicannons are 77% better?!

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones I looked at. Seems all sorts of random.

 

[Aimeryan]

Some really strange variances in how much more damage fixed does than gimbals. The conventional wisdom is about 20%, but...

* C3 beams are 25% better if fixed instead of gimballed. C3 burst are 35% better, while C3 pulse are only 17% better.
* C2 beams are measuring a whopping 43% higher.
* C2 cannons did 5% less damage when fixed instead of gimballed.
* C2 multicannons are only 8% better... but C1 multicannons are 77% better?!

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones I looked at. Seems all sorts of random.

The tests aren't 100% accurate, so small differences can be accounted for by this.

For reload time weapons, it may be that when Frontier decided on the numbers they didn't take into account reload time, only the DPS due to damage and fire rate (either purposely as a burst vs. sustained damage argument, or they just didn't think about it). In this case, things like the cannon may have around a 20% greater dps before reload, but once the reload then comes into play it removes a lot of the difference due to how long the reload time is compared to firing time. This could lead to meager sustained DPS differences, like the C2 Multi-Cannons. Then tack on the margin of error involved in the tests...

That said, C2 beams are indeed odd. I don't think the margin of error is that high.

P.S. Excellent tests. Thanks for the charts, both you and Cmdr Pale Night. Also, thanks to some of the other commanders here that have done some analysis on these results.

 

[StarLightBreaker]

Brilliant work. Your thread is a GEM. Rep +1.
I've added your thread to my "Complete list of all third party tools, spreadsheets, manuals and other data sources" and to ED3PTT (codename for the WIP website version of it). Hopefully it gets a bit more exposure that way - it certainly deserves it.
Note: If FD would reveal this kind of information (stats I mean) threads like this wouldn't need weeks of testing.

Very nice. Thank you for collecting the threads. Great work too.

Would have thought a size 4 plasma accelerator would do more damage than a size 3 beam, its certainly harder to hit with, but I suppose the hull damage is very different, this is only looking at the shield damage.
+1 rep

Hull damage is something we have tested, but still difficult to come to a conclusion. We are doing additional testing and verification to ensure it works as expected.

Thanks a lot for doing all these tests!
I'm really surprised about the damage of the fixed beam lasers. I thought beam vs. pulse would've been mostly on par, with maybe a slight advantage to the beam...but not this much. Good to know, maybe I will switch to beams on my Python then

Don't forget the energy Beam uses are much higher. You can only fire for a brief time compare to pulses (e.g. vulture with 2x3G Beams can only fire 6 sec, vs. 2x3G Pulse 24 secs). Which one is better is really depending on your fighting style.

So essentially the C3G bursts I'm running are pointless compared to the pulses.

I prefer C3G Pulses than C3G Bursts too because not only DPS are similar, use less power, but also feels more accurate when Bursts sometimes seemed only 1/3 shots hit the target in distance and fast speed.

<...>Another interesting metric I've thought about is "damage per energy". What does high dps help if you're constantly out of weapon energy? If a weapon does 10% more damage but uses 30% more energy, you're mostly better off with the lower energy weapon. This might be more important if you're in a ship with lots of hardpoints vs a ship with only two. And it might be more relevant for hunting NPC anacondas than for regular bounty hunting / PVP.

Anyways, I simply divided DPS by EPS so you can gauge this:
<...>
Turns out C3 F pulse lasers can dish out 40% and a C3 F burst laser 32% more damage per second than a C3 F beam laser. And a C3 G pulse laser is still 14% more efficient than a fixed beam laser.

Great point. Yes DPE is also a good way of comparing them. I will add a DPE chart to OP with the data I collected. Some kinetic weapons were using too few energy and I didn't get enough time to collect all of them.

But high DPE doesn't always means better, and we can't leave out the time element completely. There are also considerations of how much time you can lock on target, how the target will use Shield Cell Banks, and so on. Like you said looking at both DPS and DPE together should be helpful to make decisions.

 

[StarLightBreaker]

Great discussions. Some of my thoughts.

• The C2 Railgun has almost the same DPS as the C4 Plasma Accelerator. And the Railgun it is an intstant hit weapon. I guess there really is not much point in running a PA at the moment..

C2 Railgun is still 15% less DPS than C4 PA, but for me the chance to hit is much higher than PA lol. Railgun also requires skill to hit with its delays, and also at high firing rate it may generate more heat.

• The damage of the C4 cannon against shields is about the same as the damage of a C1 Fixed Beam Laser.

And it's also hard for cannon to hit with slow traveling speed. I also wish cannon could get a better visual and audio feedback - right now it's kind of hard to tell whether I hit the target or not during intense fights.

• The C3 Pulse Turret does pathetic damage and is more or less equivalent to a Gimballed C1 Pulse Laser

But C3T Beam is actually looking pretty good! Might be a good defense weapons for miners in 1.3.

 

[StarLightBreaker]

Vulture C3 weapons damage-over-time

(Same data but only to 40-seconds instead of 60 (as nothing changes) and only for C3 fireable weapons, just to help the visibility.)

View attachment 31661

Illustrates quite nicely that there is no practical benefit of the C3 G Burst what-so-ever other than running out of steam faster than the C3 G Pulse.

N.B. This also assumes that the weapon is bearing on the target 100% of the time. We'd have to pop in some "fiddle factor" to scale down for fixed weapon aiming, which would vary on a per-pilot basis I guess.

Beautiful chart. So after the WEP capacitor drains (at the "knuckle"), did you then use weapon DPE * Capacitor Recharge Rate to calculate the rest?

 

[QorbeQ]

Beautiful chart. So after the WEP capacitor drains (at the "knuckle"), did you then use weapon DPE * Capacitor Recharge Rate to calculate the rest?

Pretty much.

It's actually keeping track of total historic energy for 1 thru 120 seconds over 120 cells in a sheet, then using DPE to multiply up the damage. Works nicely for symmetric setups like 2xC3F Burst on the Vulture but I can't come up with an easy way to deal with variable loadouts as it's hard to know which weapon would steal the power first.

- - - Updated - - -

As an aside, I've realised that up to 20 seconds firing the C3 F Burst is the general winner (minor early start lead for the beam). It's a shame the gimballed burst isn't differentiated like that.

 

[QorbeQ]

Another aside, I wonder if FDev have actually plotted this stuff themselves or if they just fiddled with the figures till they looked about right