Overcharged beam laser and thermal conduit = massive damage?

nosleepdemon · Mar 16, 2018

I tried a pair of medium g5 overcharge modded with thermal conduit beam lasers to see what sort of stacking I would get for the damage, and I'm not convinced this is working properly.

Theoretically, 70% increased "damage per second" ought to stack with the thermal conduit effect, which increases damage passed 100% heat (although I'm not sure how this ramps up, I assumed it doubled). In practice, it took me 10 minutes to kill an Elite Python with the beams in my DBS, which is insane! It seems like my PACs hit MUCH harder than the beams, but naturally I've done no actual measurement of this.

Does anyone have an idea of how these weapons should behave? I thought I was looking at a face melting 1.7(OC) * 2(TV)
= 3.4 (340%) damage for a single beam so long as I was over heating. In practice this simply did not seem to be the case.

Starwolfe · Mar 16, 2018

Thermal Conduit's been reworked and nerfed to piratical uselessness.

Last I remember it was incremental damage increase based on how hot the ship was, but you needed to get the ship hot before it started showing.
Even then, its incremental, like 1% per 1% heat or something.

Its really not worth it on most ship designs, and I don't think it suits well for a DBS - as I assume you can't keep the Beam on continuously.

nosleepdemon · Mar 16, 2018

Starwolfe said:
Thermal Conduit's been reworked and nerfed to piratical uselessness.

Last I remember it was incremental damage increase based on how hot the ship was, but you needed to get the ship hot before it started showing.
Even then, its incremental, like 1% per 1% heat or something.

Its really not worth it on most ship designs, and I don't think it suits well for a DBS - as I assume you can't keep the Beam on continuously.

Welp. That figures. *Insert tirade questioning whether Frontier have actually ever made another game before*.

bladebss · Mar 17, 2018

Hello fellow thermal conduit enthusiast,

The effect ised to take 20% off your dmg, but do double damage when overheating.

Now.. so the theory goes, you do 100% damage and then +80% damage when overheating.

I have not yet done any hard numbers testing,

However, i have extensive experiance with thermal conduit plasma, in 2.4, i have an anaconda with all efficient thermal conduit plasma. It did about 400dmg when not overheating and about 800 when cooking.

My new 3.0 melting conda, i used short range plasma with thermal conduit,
I theoreticaly push out about 800dmg when not overheating, (wich is hard not to do with the thermal load from short range)
But 1,400 dmg when overheating.. witch would be quite amazing! However after fiddling i feel like thats not what im doing in practice.

Its better than in my efficient 2.4 build but not twice as good more like 30% better.

I takes about 5 vollys to take down an dangerous corvette.
But about 7 in my old build.

Now i could just be missing with some of the plasma or the ships may just be a bit tougher, but i do have a theory that the 70% damage from short range is not being used in the overheating damage increase.

I will hopfuly find time to properly test this over the weekend..

SpongeJim · Mar 17, 2018

I know it doesn't help you now, but my year-old DBS build with efficient thermal conduit fixed beam shield-melting and PP-killing cannons was rendered useless months ago. When I fired up the game around October I decided to do a bit of CZ blasting and I might as well have opened up the canopy and hocked spit at the NPC enemies (regardless of rank), because the beam was like stock class 1 pulse lasers as far as I could tell - just useless.

nosleepdemon · Mar 17, 2018

bladebss said:
Hello fellow thermal conduit enthusiast,

The effect ised to take 20% off your dmg, but do double damage when overheating.

Now.. so the theory goes, you do 100% damage and then +80% damage when overheating.

I have not yet done any hard numbers testing,

However, i have extensive experiance with thermal conduit plasma, in 2.4, i have an anaconda with all efficient thermal conduit plasma. It did about 400dmg when not overheating and about 800 when cooking.

My new 3.0 melting conda, i used short range plasma with thermal conduit,
I theoreticaly push out about 800dmg when not overheating, (wich is hard not to do with the thermal load from short range)
But 1,600 dmg when overheating.. witch would be quite amazing! However after fiddling i feel like thats not what im doing in practice.

Its better than in my efficient 2.4 build but not twice as good more like 30% better.

I takes about 5 vollys to take down an dangerous corvette.
But about 7 in my old build.

Now i could just be missing with some of the plasma or the ships may just be a bit tougher, but i do have a theory that the 70% damage from short range is not being used in the overheating damage increase.

I will hopfuly find time to properly test this over the weekend..

Ah good to know someone else is perplexed by this as well. I'm going to give it another go tonight and push my heat to 200%. It will cause a lot of damage but I want to be sure I'm not missing anything. Certainly it does appear that the damage multipliers are not stacking. Curiously, in 2.x there were two stats for damage - damage per second, and just flat damage. It was possible to increase dps as a separate stat if I recall, which made absolutely zero sense as it is a value derived from flat damage and rate of fire. In 3.0, I notice that overcharged increases DPS, NOT flat damage. So now I wonder, was this a convenience thing to simplify the numbers for the user, or is this a symptom of some extremely strange mechanic that is also causing havoc with the damage multipliers. The stats in this game have never made all that much sense to me, and I'm not exactly mathematically challenged. The way damage works in this game is convoluted to put it mildly, and I would not be at all surprised to find that the entire system is extremely brittle and opposed to change. To put it less politely, I think there's spaghetti code afoot.

Guyperson · Mar 17, 2018

bladebss said:
Now.. so the theory goes, you do 100% damage and then +80% damage when overheating.

Seems to be more like +50% after a few completely unscientific shield% tests against a stationary target. It also doesn't appear to change much at higher temperatures, just so long as you're over 100%.

philngraves · Mar 17, 2018

If you read the 3.0 patch notes, near the bottom it states they removed the 20% penalty on initial, and lowered the bonus heat damage to offset. Doesn't provide empirical data at all, but normal frontier logic would lead me towards halving the bonus damage applied from heat as a guess. No idea if Truesilver has had a chance to update his data yet, but he is the one that would know. Best of luck o7.

nosleepdemon · Mar 17, 2018

philngraves said:
If you read the 3.0 patch notes, near the bottom it states they removed the 20% penalty on initial, and lowered the bonus heat damage to offset. Doesn't provide empirical data at all, but normal frontier logic would lead me towards halving the bonus damage applied from heat as a guess. No idea if Truesilver has had a chance to update his data yet, but he is the one that would know. Best of luck o7.

Yep it appears they wacked it with the nerf hammer without much thought. It's use is extremely situational already without its bonus being made bunk. In fact, it really was the players that invented a use for it more so than Frontier, who decided to do the design equivalent of chucking darts at a dictionary and seeing what words they stuck to. I can think of no use case where incurring unmitigated module damage is worth the bonus to damage for a weapon that must be trained on its target. Earlier this evening, my chaff launcher malfunctioned twice due to over heating. The module health was at NINETY SEVEN percent. Make of that what you will, but it's back to PACs and railguns for me yet again, whilst whoever makes design decisions for combat mechanics flounders about like a monkey on a bad acid trip being forced to watch the end of 2001 Space Odyssey on repeat.

Starwolfe · Mar 17, 2018

Yep, I gave up on it before the last nerf, long since having doubts on it - and now this new one doesn't sound much better than I thought.

I was not aware the nerfhammer hit so hard this time, but it sound beyond useless now.

Nowadays the ships I have tend to use Efficient mods exclusively on Beams to keep the DoT running and it does remarkably well - thanks to Weapon Distributors my Beams can fire almost indefinitely so if I can keep a bead the DoT outpaces what Overcharged would have given me on most mount sizes.

Pity, the concept holds merit, but now the more efficient route seems to be Thermal Vent than Conduit still.

Good Death · Mar 17, 2018

nosleepdemon · Mar 17, 2018

Good Death said:
[url]https://i.imgur.com/iSiYwxl.jpg[/URL]

Savage, but true.

Crimson Kaim · Mar 17, 2018

Thermal conduit deals 11% more damage at 100% heat (been using triple OC PAs with TC on my FAS, carefully heating up to 100% per shot), up to 33% at like 160% heat (didn't do that test properly).
So 11% more damage for a carefully 100% heat before damaging yourself is not worth it. Should be atleast 25%.

With a beam laser you need to consider damage falloff. So you start losing damage at 500 meters and at 3km you barwly deal any damage.

That said, no. This Beam Laser won't deal much damage at all.

Pauciloquent · Mar 17, 2018

Crimson Kaim said:
Thermal conduit deals 11% more damage at 100% heat (been using triple OC PAs with TC on my FAS, carefully heating up to 100% per shot), up to 33% at like 160% heat (didn't do that test properly).
So 11% more damage for a carefully 100% heat before damaging yourself is not worth it. Should be atleast 25%.

With a beam laser you need to consider damage falloff. So you start losing damage at 500 meters and at 3km you barwly deal any damage.

That said, no. This Beam Laser won't deal much damage at all.

Dude!!!... the damage falloff for beam laser is like 600 meters man... thats like... more!!!

The damage bonus should a little higher, like you said 25% damage bonus @ 100% heat would be reasonable.

Raino · Mar 17, 2018

thermal effects only pay out if you use it at multiple weapons at once(bigger the better), so they all stack up, otherwise effect drops faster as you can load it

Imo · Mar 17, 2018

Can't tell of 3.0 but in 2.4 my beam laser turrets had the same strengh when just overcharged and when using thermal conduit during burning my ship, so in general thermal conduit was useless.

nosleepdemon · Mar 17, 2018

Crimson Kaim said:
Thermal conduit deals 11% more damage at 100% heat (been using triple OC PAs with TC on my FAS, carefully heating up to 100% per shot), up to 33% at like 160% heat (didn't do that test properly).
So 11% more damage for a carefully 100% heat before damaging yourself is not worth it. Should be atleast 25%.

With a beam laser you need to consider damage falloff. So you start losing damage at 500 meters and at 3km you barwly deal any damage.

That said, no. This Beam Laser won't deal much damage at all.

Lol wow. Gotta love FD style balance. "Ya we like totally removed the really bad bit that made the thingy useless, but then we like, realised people might use it? Ya. So we nerfed it like, completely."

ArchEmperor · Mar 17, 2018

Everything that is "special" ... is worse.

It is called tedium or anti-fun for a reason. You grind your off to get better, but ends up using a nerfed nothingness from the land of boredom.

Good Death · Mar 17, 2018

ArchEmperor said:
Everything that is "special" ... is worse.

It is called tedium or anti-fun for a reason. You grind your off to get better, but ends up using a nerfed nothingness from the land of boredom.

What exactly is going on there with your avatar? Its causing all kinds of visions in my head.

ArchEmperor · Mar 17, 2018

Good Death said:
What exactly is going on there with your avatar? Its causing all kinds of visions in my head.

The visions takes control over your mind and soul. It makes you my slave for eternity.

Or: A girl walking along looking at the stars, thinking it is amazing, having some flashes of imagination about what the stars have to offer.

Or an exceptionally lovely sunset, or daybreak. With the stars twinkling above and the moon dimmed in orange glow from the rising sun of a distant world in a distant time. No way of knowing if it is a dream or reality. That special time....

The realization that what we are experiencing is a long time ago in the past... in the future. In more ways than we at first can imagine.

The time it took for the light to reach our eyes. The fact that our experience itself is from a moment ago, which turns to eons, which turns to eternity. There is no going back. And we only exist here and now for a brief moment of time in the history of the universes. For real.... or is it? The plot deepens, our understanding tries to get a grip of it all. An anchor of sanity and anchor of verifiable truth. How can anything live in a reality as strange as ours? Light among spheres in a void, living on the surface of just one of those suspended by invisible forces.