Engineers Multi-Cannons - Experimental Effects Question: Corrosive vs Incendiary
- Thread starter khaos526
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That doesn't affect aiming with gimballed though does it? Only counters silent running/ejected heat sinks.
I think there used to be a theory that better sensors helped gimballed weapons track targets tighter.
it does. try it with targeting a fighter with gimbals and a single emissive pulse in the mix, or no emissive pulse in the mix.
So I'm currently running G5 efficient multicannons with incendiary effect, in addition to OC G5 large multis (one with corrosive) on my clipper PVE BH CZ farmer. Seems to work pretty well, but I'm wondering how much damage loss I am suffering not going with OC on the medium hardpoints. I was also trying to consider the damage drop off on lasers, and thinking the medium efficient incendiaries would still perform slightly better. I am running G5 DD, and very much enjoy the flight characteristics - so I do not want to give up the DDs. Thanks!
That's what I do. If I have lasers to get rid of shields and the corrossive and emissive bases are covered, all the remaining multicannons become autoloaders. They work nicely with corrosives. While corrosives have lower total ammo, the autoloaders use up that surplus while the corrosive is on reload.
Interesting, I was wondering if this would have any PVE benefit to it, sounds like it may. On my FDL I'm running 2X G5 RF Auto Loader MCs, 1X G5 RF Corrosive MC, 1X G4 Long Range Railgun with Feedback Cascade (though I may switch back to SuperPen), and a G3 Efficient Huge Beam that I max rolled the thermal load reduction on AND over-rolled the dmg increase past G5 standard roll.
My Build
generally, as MCs are efficient themself, efficient mcs don't make a lot of sense.
on the other hand, you are missing out 2,5 sustained DPS, or 5,4 raw DPS per medium multicanonn - roughly 25% sustained and 33% raw DPS. that's not really a lot. for a pve build i would only reroll, if i'm anyway at todd's, and have the materials.
You only need one corrosive. I always put it on the largest MC I have because that's the slowest-firing and therefore makes the ammo last longest.
Incendiary converts the damage to thermal, but with much lower WEP drain per second of fire than even pulse lasers. It's actually still useful in PVP because 90% of PVP for me seems to be against shield cell banks.
I also add one emissive just to help combat target lock drop during PVP if they're using heatsinks to try and evade fire. If you find yourself struggling against ships that vanish off your sensors a lot, it's helpful to run a turretted beam laser with thermal shock. It won't do much DPS but it has very low WEP draw (because turret), very high time on target (also because turret) and it will keep their ship constantly cooking so that they're forced to use all their heatsinks, or lose modules to heat damage. Most attacking ships will stop putting up any kind of real fight within about 90 seconds of being cooked from thermal shock due to weapon malfunctions or even power plant reduced output. A thermal shock beam turret is obviously only going to be of use if you regularly engage in skirmishes where your opponents are stacking heatsinks, and also requires that you can afford to give up the hardpoint to something as low-DPS as a turret. You also have to stay alive for 90 seconds before it has any real effect, so in a lot of small/medium ships it's just better to fit something with better DPS like a rail or MC. I stick them on the puny little class-1 hardpoints of my Corvette and Anaconda, simply because those hardpoints are useless for DPS anyway - I figure they were tailor-made for "utility" weapons with quirky experimental effects on them.
Incendiary converts the damage to thermal, but with much lower WEP drain per second of fire than even pulse lasers. It's actually still useful in PVP because 90% of PVP for me seems to be against shield cell banks.
I also add one emissive just to help combat target lock drop during PVP if they're using heatsinks to try and evade fire. If you find yourself struggling against ships that vanish off your sensors a lot, it's helpful to run a turretted beam laser with thermal shock. It won't do much DPS but it has very low WEP draw (because turret), very high time on target (also because turret) and it will keep their ship constantly cooking so that they're forced to use all their heatsinks, or lose modules to heat damage. Most attacking ships will stop putting up any kind of real fight within about 90 seconds of being cooked from thermal shock due to weapon malfunctions or even power plant reduced output. A thermal shock beam turret is obviously only going to be of use if you regularly engage in skirmishes where your opponents are stacking heatsinks, and also requires that you can afford to give up the hardpoint to something as low-DPS as a turret. You also have to stay alive for 90 seconds before it has any real effect, so in a lot of small/medium ships it's just better to fit something with better DPS like a rail or MC. I stick them on the puny little class-1 hardpoints of my Corvette and Anaconda, simply because those hardpoints are useless for DPS anyway - I figure they were tailor-made for "utility" weapons with quirky experimental effects on them.
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Incendiary MCs are dead to me for the most part. In PvP they lost their overall DPS boost and most people employ level shield resistances, and in PvE there's little point using them and having ammo concerns instead of efficient lasers, which will still melt them anyway with minimal cap draw - and can fire all day without ammo synth.
Aside from the obligatory single corrosive I might employ an emissive weapon, but for the most part it's auto loader all the way. Way too advantageous as an effect; no idea why dropping the magazine size penalty was necessary.
Aside from the obligatory single corrosive I might employ an emissive weapon, but for the most part it's auto loader all the way. Way too advantageous as an effect; no idea why dropping the magazine size penalty was necessary.
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Really? I found that since the change to reboot and repair to give you back 50% shields instantly, people didn't care about regen times quite so much - meaning that the reinforced shield generator mod became a better choice than the thermal-resist mod. My 7A prismatics with 4 resistance and 2 heavy boosters give me:
- 8K MJ effective thermal, 16K MJ kinetic/explosive when using a G5 reinforced generator
- 10K MJ effective all round when using a G5 thermal-resist generator.
So, unless you're under fire solely from thermal attacks, the reinforced generator looks much better. As a bonus, the larger raw MJ value makes it better proposition for ramming damage, if you let that happen.
The only downside is that the larger raw value means you get effectively ~20% less from each shield cell bank, but I don't typically stock up on many of those. If I have to use them and I'm not clearly winning the fight, I tend to wake out instead.
Additionally, "most people employ level shield resistances" does not apply to NPCs.
For PVE the incendiary MCs have more thermal DPS than lasers and at longer ranges with superior damage drop-off characteristics. I mean, lasers are so lame at range; Multicannons do full damage out to 1.8km, where lasers are already at less than half their output and it's not always possible to control the engagement range yourself.
For long-stints in a CZ or REZ, you're completely right that lasers are nicer because they don't require synthesis, but I'm going to assume that anyone not willing to run an all-laser build is well aware of this already.
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Thanks! I was using the efficient mod to mediate the incendiary heat penalty and hopefully maintain better sustain. I think I'll build a second OC set and compare.
Yep just put incendiary on those g5 OC medium MCs, and there is a noticeable improvement in rate of shield knockdown and overall npc kill speed over the efficient g5 incendiaries. The heat pops a little, but with a little trigger discipline its fine. Definitely recommend 2 med incendiary g5 OC, 2 large MC (one corrosive) on a clipper for BH / CZ farming.
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I did clarify that this applies to PvP
So okay, I could have mentioned that several CMDRs now opt for integrity boosts on their modules, especially on the PP for hull-tanked/hybrid builds.
However this falls foul as a general statement in a couple places: if your enemy didn't bring the cascade torps, you only get a benefit from the mod's main purposing if you actually expect your shield to come back online after dropping AND you don't expect your foe will hit your PP. This is pretty far and few in between.
Ignoring that many builds rely on high resistances and other fluff discussion, the other facet of this is that what is theoretically more advantageous to bring is not the same as what's actually better to bring. For argument's sake, let's say the reinforced gen is theoretically stronger for a pure duel than thermal resist...well kinetics have tended to rule the roost for staple weaponary since the incendiary mod bit the bullet, and yet I'd say the vast majority of damage I'd take is thermal. There are still a lot of incendiary MCs out there.
So actually yes, I am ringing with your statement "unless you're under fire solely from thermal attacks" - for the most part.
Yeah, they are lol.
It depends on what you're doing though...when I think "PvE combat", I expect to be holed up in a site for a short while at least. And then either close ship control or the use of a G1 long range mod mitigates this, allowing me to strip shields and surgically remove the weak PP in minimal time.
I certainly would never, ever call lasers more powerful than MCs straight up...but for PvE, let's be honest; who has a fully engineered ship and worries about how difficult the fights are? Quick shield removal and hitscan module sniping is all that's needed....PvE may as well be a game of convenience, which is exactly what lasers give in that situation.
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I've found that for PvE the vast majority of NPCs tend to use a laser-based loadout which is why the thermal shield mods tend to be the most effective against NPCs. There's also the issue that the thermal mods don't increase weight or power draw so you can fit them into any build without changing the rest of the loadout. I usually use a combination of thermal-mod shields (standard type) and thermal mod shield boosters, with the occasional heavy duty shield booster to get the MJ rating a bit higher on some ships with weaker shields. Usually this means the FDS/FAS/FGS series, although now with their military slots for SBCs I've found that a high thermal resist tends to be more valuable since they have so much of their total shield MJ reserve contained in SCBs.
I've just switched my incendiary/corrosive multicannon loadouts on several ships over to beam laser/corrosive MC setup and I've definitely noticed I need a MUCH closer engagement range to keep the beams effective. Plus the beams have such a high cap draw that I need to actively manage my wep capacitor now whereas with incendiary MCs they did fine with only 2 pips to weapons. I started out by just changing my Corvette loadout to dual class 4 efficient beams but I liked the setup enough to try it for my Python and FDS/FAS/FGS ships as well. I've found that despite the limitations I've actually been surprised at how well the beam laser/corrosive MC combination works against hulls and the lack of ammo for the beams is quite nice as well. I'm told that some players find that a long-range pulse/burst setup is actually very close to the MC damage dropoff and is probably a good match for the incendiary loadout so that would be another option. I've always liked beam lasers however and they really need the efficient mods to be viable so long-range beams really isn't a useful option with my current setup. The lack of ammo dependence however is the main motivation for trying the beams out and even though I use them in combination with corrosive MCs the overall setup is generally quite efficient in terms of ammo usage since the corrosives are just there to optimize the hull damage. I tried MC ammo synthesis on my FDL once and it was just not an effective use of time to do that much mat gathering vs. returning to a station for restock so I'm thinking my beam/corrosive MC might turn out more efficient for RES/CZ combat.
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One thing to consider is what the pilot is flying. Anaconda? Everything is going to be able to hit you all the time. iEagle/iCourier? Mostly its the lasers that actually land as the constant high speed thrust makes dodging kinetics not super challenging. This applies to PVE as well.
Although I've been switching the large incendiaries on my larger ships for efficient beams I've found that on the smaller/medium sized ships the incendiary multis still have a good niche as they can put out higher dps than a laser setup with minimal pips in weapons cap. The smaller ships in particular need as much dps as they can get out of their medium hardpoints and usually the incendiary multis tend to be most efficient method to inflict thermal dps in a class 2 slot. That's also why I still use an incendiary multicannon setup on my FDL with a class 4 corrosive, the medium incendiaries strip shields off very quickly and I've specialized the loadout to handle the thermal load. The other advantage for smaller ships is that by minimizing wep cap draw you can keep the pips in shields or engines most of the time to maximize their survivability and maneuverability.
Between efficient beams and incendiary MC's, you are basically choosing between:
low-dps, short range weapons that can hit curved-trajectory targets.
high-dps, longer range weapons that will miss curved-trajectory targets.
I know people say that lasers are better because you can't dodge them, but at the sort of range (efficient modded) lasers are useful at, practically every on-target MC shot hits too.
low-dps, short range weapons that can hit curved-trajectory targets.
high-dps, longer range weapons that will miss curved-trajectory targets.
I know people say that lasers are better because you can't dodge them, but at the sort of range (efficient modded) lasers are useful at, practically every on-target MC shot hits too.
Inside the effective range of efficient beams, they have more DPS than OCed MCs of the same size and mount.
With a nimble ship, I can dodge a substantial portion of 1600m/s projectile fire at 600-1000m. Since TLB is so common, often only long range MCs at very short range can land hits against smaller/more agile ships as readily as lasers can.
Lasers need to be long range modded, then they shine.