Phasing sequence beam lasers

[CMDR Corlas]

Outside of extreme niches, every beam laser is, or should be, efficient or long range, with thermal vent.

Agreed. And due to issues like this, weapons and weapon engineering need another look, in my opinion.

Things like no-downsides mods or specials - efficient and thermal vent, mostly - are too good and it's problematic for other modifications or even other weapons - like incendiary multicannons, which are in such a niche they're nearly pointless. Heat in weapons especially needs another look. It's a major mechanic and balancing factor in several weapons... but is also able to be completely ignored as a factor in many of those weapons, due to engineering. I like the idea of being able to cool down hot weapons with engineering, but if you're going to make it to such an extreme that heat can be irrelevant as a game mechanic, you're better off just discarding the mechanic and going another way for balancing.

Making balance mechanics optional just increases the difficulty of achieving good balance to an absurd degree, and it's not viable.

 

[Morbad]

Yes, efficient beams have no negative modifiers, but they do have trade offs relative to other mods. It's just that efficient reduces the primary downsides of beams, while the others exaggerate them, often to the point the weapon ceases to be viable.

Likewise, thermal vent itself isn't especially overpowered, it's just that there are essentially no other beam laser mods worth taking for 90% of setups.

Anyway, the core issue has always been that Engineering in general is a straight-up, and massive, upgrade. It should have been a collection of side grades, with maybe a modest overall improvement at the high-end. Instead it's pure inflation.

 

[60mm]

Meh. Can't say I'd ever bother with PS Beams. If I want to skip shields I'd use the Flechette.

 

[galahad2069]

In general, an efficient beam has moderately better DPS, slightly better DPE, lower thermal load, and slightly lower power consumption than a rapid fire pulse. Efficient beams also have zero jitter and 20% greater distance before damage falloff starts.

According to EDSY, huge eff beams have 12% more DPS than huge RF pulses. On the other hand, the medium RF pulse has about 3.5% more DPS than its eff beam counterpart. Large ones are somewhere in the middle (beams have 4% more DPS). As you said, distro draw is roughly the same. I never tried huge RF pulses, but the jitter on the large ones is not that bad. And damage falloff is irrelevant if we're talking about phasing.

So if phasing beams were a thing, only on the huge hardpoints would they give you any noticeable advantage over the already existing alternative (the RF pulse). But it wouldn't be really significant IMO, because on which medium ship can you use more than 1 huge hardpoint? (Again, I don't use large ships, so I'm not really the right person to have an opinion on them.)

Unless you decided to use some other mods on the beams instead of efficient, that is. But that would come with other compromises.
That's why I said "forget [phasing] beams".