My corvette has:
2 huge MCs, gimballed overcharged
1 large Beam, gimballed, efficient, thermal vent
2 medium Beam, fixed, efficient, thermal vent
2 small Beam, fixed, efficient, thermal vent
melts their shield, not your sanity or bank account.
Twin huge high yield cannons, and replaced the packhounds with LR burst lasers I had lying around. All gimballed as flying fixed with a gamepad is not much fun for me, except for PAs.
The lasers are a bit meh, but once shields drop and you sub target modules, the cannon absolutely ravages them. At times it takes 2-3 hits only to destroy them, it's quite comical really.
Yeah I'm not sure I'll keep them long-term, but they can be fun.Interesting point regarding the cannons.
I went through a phase of wanting to like cannons but I always found the ammunition capacity too low.
I guess, really, the true niche for using cannons is as a "secondary" weapon for delivering module damage rather than as a primary means of exploding other ships.
My 2nd 'vette often gets used for dubious purposes.
I might consider one or more cannons to replace the C3 MC or the C2 Imp Hammers, just to see what happens after I break a target's shield.
In CZ, they are all heavily armored, everywhere else, you won't have a problem. And I don't even need 4 pips in Weapons. 2 -3 are plenty.I just changed my build as the one you mentioned above. Not done with G5 yet, so no chance for a test drive.
Before, i'd swapped MCs with Beams; Beams on huge, MCs on the rest. Shields were done pretty quick on opponents, it would take some time to crush the hull though.
Do you think your build -also my new build- will be able to kill the hull fast enough? Do you go all in with both beams and MCs to take down the shileds by the way?
Player vs Environment. Means you are only playing against what the servers throw at you.What's PvE?
Okay ... on further testing, the PAs were very rarely all hitting due to the width of the Corvette so I’ve reworked it for:
That’s actually freed up some power for an additional Guardian Shield Reinforcement so now rocking 2,900MJ (raw) shields!!
- 1x C4 Beam (Efficient / Thermal Vent)
- 2x C1 Beam (Efficient / Thermal Vent)
- 1x C4 MC (Overcharged / Autoloader)
- 2x C2 MC (Overcharged / Autoloader)
- 1x C3 PA (Focused)
Coriolis EDCD Edition
A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerouss.orbis.zone
Pretty darned impressive results ... only thing that took anything off the shields was a Clipper that was running seemingly infinite chaff!! Justified the PA in the C3 slot, though: damage not actually that impressive but good to have a fixed option that is good against shields AND hull until the chaff is gone and then unleash everything else again!!
I'm slowly coming around to the idea that I don't need to fire all 7 hard points at the same time, constantly - the huge beams on their own do a lot of damage in most cases already, so the rest is more of a bonus.
Very true.I think that's one of the main differences between PvP and PvE.
For PvP, it's all about the "devastating first-strike" and (usually) your only goal is to explode somebody.
When you run out of ammo' you synth' more or go back to a station and re-arm so you can do it again, and again, and again, and again....
For PvE, you're likely to have more diverse goals and so prolonged combat-effectiveness becomes important.
It's a PITA having something like a Corvette, schlepping out to a CZ or whatever, and being absolutely devastating for 10 minutes and then needing to synth' reloads or go home to re-arm.
C4 Efficient Beams, on a Corvette, will easily destroy 80% of the ships in the game by themselves - without using any ammunition at all.
You can sit in a CZ or RES perpetually, destroying ships, and never need to use an additional weapon if you don't want to.
Beyond that, it's all about optimising your efficiency.
Put MC's, rails, frags, PAs or cannons in some of the other slots, in a 2nd fire-group, and you can bring them on-line to give tough ships a good pasting and then you can switch back to the lasers and conserve all your other ammo until you need it again.
Also, to digress slightly, one of the reasons I prefer rails to PAs is that they make it easy to avoid squandering ammo.
With PAs it's easy to just keep plugging away with them and not hit much.
With Rails, the "spin up time" means you get a couple of seconds to think "am I still on target?" and take your finger off the trigger if you think you're going to miss.
I'd say you're "wasting" those C1 slots.
When you've got a bunch of big weapons on a ship, the C1 slots don't add a lot in terms of "raw firepower".
It's far more useful to either use them for rails, missiles or turrets.
Use them for rails and they can infict significant damage, especially to big targets which, conveniently, will be moving slowly enough to allow you to hit them fairly easily.
Use them for missiles and they will, at least, inflict a bit more damage.
Use them for turrets and, regardless of the damage they inflict, they'll provide you with a reference as to where your target is.
I used to have a pair of C1 rails on my Corvette and they were pretty handy.
They were easy to aim and delivered reasonable damage.
I now have a combination of pulse/burst turrets with G5 long-range and the Emissive/Scramble Spectrum XFX.
They don't do a lot of damage but the Long range mod' means they're a great way to attract the attention of a target and bring them into range of my big guns, they don't require ammunition, they use almost no power which means they will carry on firing regardless of what pips I have set, they give me an idea of where my target is so I can steer my ship toward them and the combination of Emissive and Scramble Spectrum does a good job of messing up opponents' ships - especially useful when they pop and SCB and "go dark".
Also, I don't think you need to have so many Efficient lasers with the Thermal Vent XFX.
Efficient lasers, themselves, don't generate a lot of heat and if you're spamming the PA to generate heat, the Plasma Slug XFX will solve that.
Maybe the "problem" is that you've only engineered them to G3 thus far?
I'd suggest modding the C4 beams to G5 Efficient ASAP and then you'll find they don't heat up anything like as much.
I forget the exact series of hoops I need to jump through to unlock the series of engineers required for G5 but I suspect it involves mining 200T of something and/or combat bonds - neither of which I'm inclined to do!