I like that the heat is down but I still find them to not be so great for module sniping. I've actually been using them to strip shields since I can fire them non-stop with plasma slugs, but I've been considering moving over to plasma instead. Currently using 2 Medium Grade 1 Short Range Blaster with Plasma Slug.
Railguns after 2.3- Anyone else tried?
- Thread starter Reav
- Start date
"How many railguns?"
"ALL THE RAILGUNS"
It's been nice being able to use a pair of railguns on my Python without being horridly heat-constrained.
Achilles7
Banned
i meant this...
having such a heat decrease makes them allot more viable.
also, multis are for newbs
Really? They are the hardest weapons to use against the new AI. If you refute this ofc, please post vid of you killing wings of high ranked Vipers III & IV with fixed multis in 2.3 - just to show the noobs how easy it is - thaaaanks!
Oh, please disregard all of the above if you are a gimbal user
Efficient PAs are nice, but I don't feel they are unbalanced. There is plenty of incentive to use some of the other modifications on them, most notably focused which is also absent on rails, probably for the same balance reasons that efficient is), on ships that can handle the heat and distributor draw.
The drawback is that you can't use something else.
PA's intrinsic disadvantages of slow projectile velocity and modest raw damage over time (at least where resistances aren't a prime factor) are not substantially improved by efficient mods.
Sturdy's only positive on rail guns is the lowered heat and increased integrity. Nice in some situations, but not an all round improvement in most areas like efficient is, and the increase in mass can handicap smaller ships that really need the reduced thermal load.
Since railguns have always hit significantly above their size, I think you'll likely be waiting a long time.
Hi mate.
To be more clear, I don't think PAs overall as a weapon are overpowered...I tried to highlight this later in my post by stating that PA fire can be evaded with relative ease depending on the ship you're in.
I have a bit of an issue with how mods have been pitched. That you can take a mod like Efficient, with a raw 9% damage boost, 60%+ thermal load reduction, 30-40%+ distributor draw reduction, a reduction in power consumption and whatever secondary effects (often armour piercing) that get thrown on top, and describe it as balanced.
The PA isn't overpowered no, but the efficient mod largely strips back the weapon's downsides...high cap draw and thermal load. It isn't infinitely easy to nail every hit on but you no longer need to care about what firing it does to your ship. I can spam them as long as I have ammo and can actually line the shot up.
Which is exactly why I said Rails shouldn't have that efficient mod. They WOULD have a very high potential for being OP. I know that I would jump straight on 4x efficient rail on my Gunship .
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I agree. The fall off distance can be countered with a long range mod but then you'd lose sturdy mount which for rails IMO is a must.
I'm running 4x hammers on my FDL with G5 sturdy and 3x super penetrator and 1x feedback cascade. It's definitely fun but even with a cool(ish) running ship, heat is an issue unless you are really patient between volleys and let your cap replenish and any residual heat to cool down. I was regularly in the 200%+ range when I was testing her out in a HAZRES. That's not too bad if you want an assassin build but no good for CZ or RES grinding.
The devs have said that they want to do more with rails and that they're just changing them slightly so that they dn't go too far and make them OP, which they haven't so hopefullly they'll be buffed further. I'd love to see the piercing value increased even more against big ships and even more heat reduction.
Alongside two multicannons, my Courier's railgun has short range blaster G5 + feedback cascade. No NPC can survive for long.
I even had a player Conda log on me. It's devastating
Plasma slug reduces your damage by 20% so its abit .
As for module sniping i find rails to be one of the best weapons ever for that?
If i get my aim right and I'll admit i am still getting better so I miss the module alot but if i get it right I can take out modules with the NPC (not so much hp) with over 60% hull left.
Even if my aim is pretty bad NPCs usually become incapacitated long before they blow up (big ships only).
As for small ships if you land super penetrator on ones hull most of their modules get destroyed. Which is funny to watch.
EDIT-
Update with 6 NON sturdy rails(no additional heat reduction) on an Anaconda with an efficient power plant, with dirty drives you can fire all 6 rails every 4.5 seconds without going above 100% heat.
This still provides very decent DPS but to go all out and fire every 2.5 seconds you have to use a heat sink or accept the module damage, which is not bad at all.
5.7-6km range and falloff on such a high damage hit scan weapon is amazing.
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Took mine for a spin out of storage and fitted on my FAS instead of the C2 long range PA. Both rails have long range G5 and superpenetrator effect on them. Can definitely fire them without overheating but still found long range PA more satisfactory to use
Efficient PAs are specialist weapons with the huge downside that they're only reliably usable against Huge ships. If you want to be able to consistently hit anything like a well flown FDL or smaller in PVP, you will need to use Focused for increased projectile velocity, or supplement with a ramming build. However only ships like the Anaconda or DBS/DBE can handle the heat of Focused PAs and still spam them when necessary. Hence most people use Efficient PAs even though they are vastly inferior to Focused, and they can only get away with it because:
A) most numb-skull NPCs linger prone in front of your ship repeatedly for 5 or more seconds.
B) many CMDRs in PVP fly FDLs (badly) or fly Big ships that can't dodge PAs from <1.5km
In reality, even a well flown sidewinder could harass an Efficient PA user until the PA user was forced to flee or lose shields.
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But that's no different from any other PA that isn't modded to boost the velocity. So it's not "specialist" at all, really.
Took this out to pvp last night.
Managed to score countless kills, one shots the power plant of anything asp and smaller, makes short work of anything bigger.
Managed to easily slay elite player engineered vipers, vultures, fdl.
Managed to kill a few anacondas and a vette, any fully shield tanked big 3 turns into the usual battle of attrition though where you will fight probably for 15+ min.
That is with Anaconda, 6x long range rails, 5.5km range, 5x super penetrator, 1x feedback cascade, 5.5km fall off.
Sturdy powerplant.
Feels like a sniper with a 0.50 cal.
Managed to score countless kills, one shots the power plant of anything asp and smaller, makes short work of anything bigger.
Managed to easily slay elite player engineered vipers, vultures, fdl.
Managed to kill a few anacondas and a vette, any fully shield tanked big 3 turns into the usual battle of attrition though where you will fight probably for 15+ min.
That is with Anaconda, 6x long range rails, 5.5km range, 5x super penetrator, 1x feedback cascade, 5.5km fall off.
Sturdy powerplant.
Feels like a sniper with a 0.50 cal.
Interesting, when 'Sniping' the PP do you find a shot through the length of the ship took out the PP faster than a shot at the top of the ship did?
Every single time a ship of FdL size or smaller is hit by a projectile flying at 875 mps, the only explanation is pilot error or (once in a hundred times) luck.
It makes no difference how good a shot the plasma firer is because he cannot control the movement of the projectile or the target after the shot has left the barrel of the gun. I don't mean that the target should usually see the plasma ball and dodge it, I mean that it is possible to fly in randomised patterns that make the chance of plasma connecting trivial.
In these circumstances, the only chance the plasma user has of securing a "can't miss" opportunity is to fire at extreme close range, which again is pure pilot error on the part of the target. Anyone who knows what they are doing can keep an aggressor at over 1.5 km near permanently, again assuming target in FdL or smaller. This is why frags and ramming are also 100% guaranteed fail tactics against alert medium/small ships pilots.
It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the current success of efficient plasma is an indictment of the (lack of) evasive flying amongst much of the PvP player base.
Ha ha, repped for what must have been a great time. If you don't mind a suggestion, have you considered 2 x feedback cascade? (That would mean if you get one volley on target during the SCB deployment, you would immediately get the full pay day of blocking 90% of the charge.)
This is a very tasty build against the Big 3 but I'm afraid when it comes to the Viper, Vultures, FdL ... see above. That you were able to hit any of them once, let alone consistently, is pilot error on their part - and I'm more than willing to assume here that you're a really good shot.
Although rails are hit scan the ability of a Viper III, a Vulture or a FdL to vector in a curve across the nose of an Anaconda is, at appropriate range (which they control), faster than the firing ship's nose can track, with or without FA-off, with or without reverski and with or without 4 pips to Eng. So a hit shouldn't just be difficult, it should be impossible.
I'm thinking that perhaps my next guide should be devoted to evasion from the ground up, but in the meantime, my last guide about gimballed duelling covers a lot of the above in more detail ...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/341107-Truesilver-s-Top-Tips-No-3-Gimballed-Duelling
... because it's basically largely devoted to avoiding plasma and rails.
With super penetrator it seems to hit powerplant equally from any angle, against drives it seems bugged though and does no or very little damage, so im just targeting powerplant atm.
Hi bud.
If I have to clarify my intention twice, I must be really ineloquent these days.
To summarise my earlier posts in a fail-proof manner: I don't think efficient PAs are OP by any stretch of the imagination. I think the efficient mod on the whole is a poor idea in the face of trying to achieve balance, because with ANYTHING thermal, you get to optionally blitz the offsets that weapon was intended to have - higher cap draw and thermal load.
The reason I brought this up was almost solely to remark that I'm glad rails don't get efficient-you know, with rails being the topic here. PAs can be dodged with relative ease in PvP (though I've been meaning to try long range on a single PA w/ MCs elsewhere, and see if it fares better)...rails on the other hand a) are hitscan so with effective aiming the chance of evading is far less in the defender's hands, b) pack a punch anyway - and would hurt employed in a group of say 4 on a FDL - and c) would make applying feedback cascade trivial.
As it stands there are still daring CMDRs taking several rails to the party. I mean come on, it was a viable - nay, meta - choice pre-2.1, but the point still stands that without efficient, the rails still have offsets. You either deal with them draining the distributor fairly heavily, or still generating substantial heat and being obliterated the moment a missile touches them.
And that is how weapons should have remained in the first place...each with positive and negative properties.
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The elite viper seemed to be the best player i came across but obviously he had never really fought against a long range rail build.
At close range i agree it would be hard to keep track of a good viper but in a drawn out fight i think the anaconda would win unless the viper hiwakes while continuing to evade in close range, why?
As soon as any ship goes more than two km away, all rails will autoaim lock onto the module of your ship, combine this with the reduced transversal velocity and you are dead.
That was the mistake the elite viper made yesterday he attempted to out range the mass lock to low wake which only increased my dps and tracking on him.
Most people run when you instigate a fight and this build takes great advantage against that.
Its not perfect, for jousting in big ships pa, cannons etc are probably better, for purely murdering any small ship id have a emissive pulse and full pack hounds or something.
To snipe people, something elite players are not used to yet, this is great.
Edit; im also thinking of replacing class 1 seekers with rails with cascade then go 6x super pen, id then only use the class 1 when required.
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Yeah, this all makes sense to me, o7. You still won't get the full 90% SCB block off one hit with 2 x c1 rails but you will get more than with 1 x c2 rail.
I think you might miss your seekers against small ships / SLF's though ...
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