Rapid Fire on Pulse and Burst Lasers needs some sort of extra perk. How about giving them increased minimum range?

[DemiserofD]

If you compare Rapid Fire on a C4 Pulse Laser to Efficient on a C4 Beam Laser, you'll see that the Beam Laser has 10% more damage and 15% better DPE, plus it doesn't have the added jitter. Plus, the Pulse Laser has 7 heat per shot, compared to the Beam Laser's 4 heat per shot.

Basically, the Rapid Fire engineering effect is never worth using, even before the jitter is added, since a Beam Laser will always do everything the pulse laser can do, only better. The same applies for the Burst Laser, which actually ends up slightly worse, because Rapid Fire doesn't enhance it as much as Pulse Lasers.

What if Rapid Fire gave lasers +100% minimum falloff? So lasers would start to fall off at 1000m instead of 500. That would give Rapid Fire a nice niche as a mid-range weapon modification, allowing them to be quite effective in the 1000-1500m range, but rapidly losing effectiveness beyond that range. This could be contrasted with Short Range, which is only really effective from about 500-1000m.

 

[here_it_comes]

Engineering is chock full of these issues. It's mostly filler to make it look like there are a lot of options.

 

[Fake Newts]

500m falloff is a universal issue (among many balancing issues) for pulse and burst, it's not going to be solved by changing one mod. More would need to be done to rebalance weapons in the current ecosystem, unfortunately. But like the above post states, 90% of mod types (and module grades to boot) are objectively trash filler... so it's hard to know where to start.

 

[DemiserofD]

500m falloff is a universal issue (among many balancing issues) for pulse and burst, it's not going to be solved by changing one mod. More would need to be done to rebalance weapons in the current ecosystem, unfortunately. But like the above post states, 90% of mod types (and module grades to boot) are objectively trash filler... so it's hard to know where to start.

I don't know that's entirely true. Short range is definitely useful, as is Overcharged in certain scenarios. Efficient is obviously useful, and long-ranged is also very good.

The only ones that really fail to perform are Focused, Sturdy, and Rapid Fire. The first two mainly fail because Corrosive Shell exists, which pretty much singlehandedly renders them irrelevant, but if that were tweaked/removed, they'd be much less of a problem.

Rapid Fire alone is inherently flawed because of its contrast with other engineering effects. And I think that, with some slight tweaking like I proposed, it too could at least have SOME niche!

 

[RamirezKurita]

To be honest, the biggest problems that I see are that efficient and long range are simply far too powerful. Long-range and focused used to be similarly performing before damage falloff was removed from long-range, while efficient used to actually have drawbacks (notably, it used to reduce fire rate to the point where even high-grade mods had roughly stock DPS and wasn't available on beam lasers).

Overcharged vs rapid fire is actually in a reasonable spot for pulses. They both give similar DPS on pulses, with the rapid fire having better energy efficiency at the cost of jitter, plus rapid fire is better at tagging shields to stop regen or for reliably applying secondary effects. The biggest problem with rapid fire in terms of DPS is that it doesn't affect the actual burst part of burst lasers, giving them a lower boost than would normally be expected and making it a terrible mod for burst lasers. Fix rapid fire bursts so that they fully benefit from rapid fire and there won't be any issues here.

Rapid fire's niche is that it provides a combination of damage and efficiency increase. The problem is that efficient also gives the same damage + efficiency combo, but does it better. Even overcharged on pulses and bursts is made pretty irrelevant by the brute power of the efficiency mod, as a G5 efficient beam laser has only 5% less damage than an overcharged pulse but has over 32% greater distributor efficiency - that's a hard sell by anyone's metric.

 

[Fake Newts]

Not quite sure exactly why rapid fire has been singled out, of all the pulse mods that see use in pvp that is one of the most common - it does overcharged tier DPS but with reduced distributor draw, more shots for less time on target and a higher frequency of strikes means a higher chance of piercing/module damage/powerplant triggering/debuff application.

I would be happy for lasers to get a gentle buff though because it's been a long time since they've been anything but an extremely hipster choice competitively.

 

[Kissamies]

Stepping away from the lasers a bit just to remind everyone a bit, on ammo based weapons the rapid fire has the added benefit of making reload faster. I feel it's a huge. Any potential perk for rapid fire lasers needen't be universal for all rapid fire mods.

Going back to the lasers, there's also the experimentals. Is there any benefit for hitting with Scramble or Shock with greater frequency, or are they capped?

 

[RamirezKurita]

Stepping away from the lasers a bit just to remind everyone a bit, on ammo based weapons the rapid fire has the added benefit of making reload faster. I feel it's a huge. Any potential perk for rapid fire lasers needen't be universal for all rapid fire mods.

Going back to the lasers, there's also the experimentals. Is there any benefit for hitting with Scramble or Shock with greater frequency, or are they capped?

For kinetics, the rapid fire mod also reduces ammo efficiency by a bit, and significantly so compared to overcharged. In fact, rapid fire has less than 60% of the ammo efficiency of overcharged multicannons, so in exchange for very slightly higher sustained DPS you are sacrificing effective range and a good chunk of your long-term damage potential. Considering how enemies are tougher than they used to be, those ammo concerns are quite an issue nowadays unless you are willing to abuse synthesis like it's going out of fashion.

For the experimentals, most of them don't stack nor do they scale with weapon size. A single C1 turreted pulse laser is basically just as good at scrambling modules than a pair of C4 pulses with the scramble spectrum mods as the real limit on that experimental is the long immunity period between module failures. Thermal shock does scale with weapon size and quantity, but it is capped so as to not increase heat past 100 or so, which makes them functionally useless as either a target will therefore never exceed 100 or would have exceeded 100 heat on its own without the thermal shock.

 

[Kissamies]

Running out of ammo faster with a rapid fire weapon is a sort of obvious thing you plan around when you outfit your ship for a specific purpose. It would be boring if a single blueprint or weapon was the best in all situations. Not all fights are res site or CZ endurance tests. Sometimes you don't need all that MC ammunition. Sometimes I prefer not to wait for PA to reload for 6 seconds when the target is right in my crosshairs, mocking me. If I feel that I want the endurance too, plasma slug and perhaps an extra tank even. My love of plasma is what made me make a note on that reduced loading time effect, even though Rapid Fire is not my favorite mod for the PA.

IIRC, the scramble spectrum requires a hit and then a confirming hit to take effect and that is why I thought rapid fire could possibly have some merit. As for thermal shock, don't knock the 100% limit. It's anecdotal, but I have noted that the NPCs like to pretend they are affected by heat. They move sluggishly and shoot less often. Peppering them with some thermal shock fire should keep the nice and docile while I do my work, or so I think.

 

[Ytterium]

Well. Usually rapid pulses are used with Phasing which doesnt calculate falloff or hardness, and as fake newts said, if you see a pulse on any PvP ship that isn't a cutter, its roughly 50/50 that its Long Range or Rapid fire.