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Hmm. Can you please explain why pacifiers would be preferable? I mean, i have half a dozen of them stored away, but i just can't see their point. In my perception pacifiers are somewhere in between regular frags and regular cannons. They give you somewhat more range than normal frags, at the price of some damage. So at really short range, the frag is better. Then there is a rather small gap, where the pacifier still brings the damage on target while the frags spread is too big. But by just increasing the distance a little more, the Pacifier also looses damage due to its spread, making the cannon the better choice then.
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So i see that there is an optimal range, where Pacifiers are the best, but it requires your ship to be fast and agile enough. But if your ship is fast and agile enough to keep the target in that range, it usually can also keep the target in range for regular frags.
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I haven't tried my Pacifiers for long, as i found them to be lacking. Is something of what i concluded wrong? What am i missing?
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Pacifiers have DRASTICALLY longer effective range than regular frags due to having both a significantly tighter spread, and a significantly higher projectile velocity. A regular frag can potentially do more damage, but your need to be practically ramming your target to do so. Tighter spread means you can hit with all your pellets from further away, and that far higher projectile velocity means you need way less lead to place your cluster correctly on a moving target.
When compared to a large fixed cannon, the pacifier does higher DPS, has more ammo, and has a slightly higher projectile velocity. Sure the cannon has no spread, but at the ranges the spread starts to become a problem, projectile velocity is already starting to be the limiting factor. In fact, the spread at these ranges can actually be helpful, since if your target changes course at longer range, your cannon shell may miss entirely, while the pacifier might still get a partial hit. Pacifiers also have a lower breach chance which may seem like a disadvantage, but is actually quite handy. Often when a ship is running low, a lot of your cannon shells will breach the hull and waste all their damage on some random module. The spread and lower breach chance of the pacifier allows it to keep doing hull damage, and actually finish the target off more quickly.
Finally, pacifiers take to engineering wonderfully. High-capacity gives you a lot of extra field endurance, and a much higher DPS. Most weapons have to choose between ammo or DPS when engineering, but frags can do both at the same time. Corrosive is also a really strong experimental effect, and just so happens to give frags a major damage boost vs. larger targets. Dazzle shell can do interesting things, and screening shell can give you downright disgusting sustained DPS. Incendiary shell gives you damage type flexibility, though I generally don't care for that experimental. Drag is extremely good- so good it should honestly probably be looked at by FDev.
Overall, pacifiers just kinda give you the best of both worlds between a frag and a cannon. Very powerful and versatile weapon that's a blast to use, and really shines with engineering.
(Can be a pain against small ships tho)
