With the recent Guardian Engineering breakthrough by Ram Tah, I thought this would be a perfect time to revisit Guardian Weapons, explore their flaws, and look for ways they could be made more useful, and given a viable niche.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the unmodified Guardian Weapons - save for Gauss Cannons - are traditionally seen as hot garbage. For the years before the Thargoid War, only gauss was seriously used, despite the efforts of several unorthodox players trying to find a niche for their use, myself included.
But what made them so little-used? Lets investigate.
It all comes down to one thing: Hitting your target.
The spread is the obvious problem here, and the one Fdev decided to fix with the Azimuth Modified Shard Cannons. Shards simply fire such a wide spread that even at very close range, they cannot get all their pellets on target. Even a single hardpoint cannot get all pellets on a perfectly-presenting thargoid beyond about 1100 meters, and with any sort of spacing between those hardpoints, that number drops precipitously. Even on a Krait Mk2, with its very decent hardpoint spacing, you're forced to close to more like 850m - which is within lightning range. And in exchange, you're still getting inferior hull damage against interceptors from Basilisks on up(16.5 DPS vs 17.5 for Gauss). Even if you are skilled enough to dodge close-range fire and get all pellets on target, you are getting worse performance in exchange for greater difficulty.
Don't get me wrong, simply for exerting, it's not impossible to use; it's just leaving a lot on the table. It gets MUCH worse, however, when you're talking about Heart damage. In theory, shard cannons are much better against hearts, doing 80% heart damage rather than the 50% seen on Gauss - but due to the small hitbox on hearts, in practice it becomes impossible to achieve that damage. Most ships are incapable of getting all hardpoints on target, even at point-blank range, and even the few that do will need to be pressing into the thargoid to achieve it; even at lightning range, you will not be anywhere close enough.
The Orange Circle is a generous depiction of the heart hitbox, while the blue circle is the approximate spread at lightning range, based on the spread of 5 degrees.
Notably, even Salvation's Shard Cannons struggle to get all pellets on the heart; the yellow circle shows this, with the approximate spread at 1000m.
The proof is in the pudding; despite Salvation buffing shard cannon Armor Piercing by an astounding 102%, improving the spread by 233%, and improving the projectile speed by 455%, there is still substantial debate over whether they're better than Gauss Cannons, which have gone completely unchanged.
The unfortunate part? In fixing this weapon, Salvation basically ended up making a completely different weapon. The Salvation Shard Cannons bear almost no resemblance to the standard Shard Cannons, behaving far more like Gauss Cannons than shotguns.
The most notable example is the C1 Guardian Plasma Charger. It takes 8.7MW of distributor(I tested it myself), and in exchange did 25.5 damage with 65 armor piercing. This means that against Basilisks and above, a player can use the entire capacity of a fully engineered class 8 distributor, and not out-damage a Hauler firing a single class 1 gauss cannon.
It's notable that even with the massive buffs in performance from the Salvation modifications, the C1 plasma charger still is not seen as worth using. It's so bad that even with 225% the performance, it's still not worth the effort.
He did to a better job with the C2 variant, which once again has been brought up to be roughly comparable to Gauss, by buffing the Damage by 66%, Armor Piercing by 35%, and projectile velocity by 400%. Unfortunately, in doing so, he ended up making a weapon that is also superlative in performance even in human PVE. Modded Plasma Chargers outperform a significant portion of normal PVE weapons in their intended niches, since it deals pure absolute damage and has better projectile speed than any human weapon. Fortunately, not so much as to be outright broken, but it did have significant knock-on effects in areas even outside AX combat.
This should answer fairly effectively whether or not the Ram Tah Shielding will have any significant impact on these weapons. The unfortunate truth is, even at damaging the Titan Core, Ram Tah Modified Large Shard Cannons barely outpace Sirius Missile racks in terms of straight damage, dealing about 3 DPS more. In exchange, they suffer from dramatically less total damage, running out of ammo in about 2/3rds the time Large Sirius Missiles do.
Medium Shard cannons, sadly, are a substantial downgrade from Sirius Missiles, both in terms of damage and ammo capacity. And no other option is particularly viable in this niche.
Shard Cannons - as long as they remain a shotgun and not a gauss cannon with a slight spread - are always going to suffer from the weakness of being a shotgun. They will spread out and sometimes miss. Buffing damage to counteract this can only go so far; make them too potent at range, and they become OP up close.
But there is an answer; splash damage. If you make each pellet from the shard cannon explode, then it heavily mitigates the downsides of being unable to get pellets directly on target. Even better, you can offer increased versatility, instead of raw damage.
My preferred fix for Shard Cannons? Make them also serve as Flak. Pellets should detonate when they get close to an enemy, allowing them to kill swarms, as well as allowing them to damage heart near-misses. They still won't be as effective as Gauss for raw damage, but could potentially be used on ships with limited hardpoints to serve multiple roles. Additionally, the existence of C1 shard cannons means even smaller ships can have an answer to swarms without needing to sacrifice a quarter or more of their total DPS!
This change means Shard Cannons will now be far more effective at all roles, without meaningfully impacting their status for human PVE. Ideally, I'd like to see a new Ram Tah engineering effect, giving them splash damage and anti-swarm capabilities.
Plasma Chargers are more difficult. Their high distributor draw makes them very challenging to fix purely with utility-style effects, like is possible with Shard Cannons. One domain that could be explored however, is ammo totals.
Plasma Chargers have the most total damage of any of the Guardian weapons, with the Modified Plasmas having fairly outrageous damage totals compared to the others; on the order of 5x as much as Gauss. Ram Tah could take this even further and make them a purely energy weapon, with literally unlimited ammo. This would make them a good choice for long-term fights where ammo can become an issue, like AXCZs or hydra/medusa fights.
In addition to this, they could actually generate their OWN power. Rather than drawing power from the distributor, what if they had some sort of trickle-charging reactor inside, aiding the charging process? Players could manually charge them like normal, OR they could leave them be, and after ~10 seconds, they would have charged themselves, and could be used essentially for free.
Even with this, however, I suspect they still wouldn't be used much. So to add one final bit of utility, I'd have them apply a temporary debuff to their target. Something like temporarily reduced armor hardness, or reduced regeneration, or something like that. Blocking thargoids from regenerating, either scouts or interceptors, would be a powerful and very convenient utility, especially if it came at low or no cost!
I'm thinking something like...
Guardian Nanite Reactor
G5
Unlimited Ammo
Weapon charges 10% per second.
Weakens Thargoid Regeneration
This would have the side effect of reducing the distro draw on them by about 18%, which would be enough to make them much more viable in some cases. You still wouldn't want to go ALL plasma charger, but it could be worth carrying a few for the sake of ammo efficiency and the free charging effect.
Conclusion
So, what do you think? Would these effects make you more tempted to use these weapons? Let me know!
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the unmodified Guardian Weapons - save for Gauss Cannons - are traditionally seen as hot garbage. For the years before the Thargoid War, only gauss was seriously used, despite the efforts of several unorthodox players trying to find a niche for their use, myself included.
But what made them so little-used? Lets investigate.
Guardian Shard Cannons
Guardian Shard Cannons are the perfect example of an idea that's great in theory, but bad in practice. In theory, Shard Cannons do more damage, have more breach damage, and use less Distributor power than Gauss Cannons. In practice, they were only really used for bypassing heart mechanics('gibbing') on Cyclopses. What's the deal?It all comes down to one thing: Hitting your target.
Spread
The spread is the obvious problem here, and the one Fdev decided to fix with the Azimuth Modified Shard Cannons. Shards simply fire such a wide spread that even at very close range, they cannot get all their pellets on target. Even a single hardpoint cannot get all pellets on a perfectly-presenting thargoid beyond about 1100 meters, and with any sort of spacing between those hardpoints, that number drops precipitously. Even on a Krait Mk2, with its very decent hardpoint spacing, you're forced to close to more like 850m - which is within lightning range. And in exchange, you're still getting inferior hull damage against interceptors from Basilisks on up(16.5 DPS vs 17.5 for Gauss). Even if you are skilled enough to dodge close-range fire and get all pellets on target, you are getting worse performance in exchange for greater difficulty.
Don't get me wrong, simply for exerting, it's not impossible to use; it's just leaving a lot on the table. It gets MUCH worse, however, when you're talking about Heart damage. In theory, shard cannons are much better against hearts, doing 80% heart damage rather than the 50% seen on Gauss - but due to the small hitbox on hearts, in practice it becomes impossible to achieve that damage. Most ships are incapable of getting all hardpoints on target, even at point-blank range, and even the few that do will need to be pressing into the thargoid to achieve it; even at lightning range, you will not be anywhere close enough.
The Orange Circle is a generous depiction of the heart hitbox, while the blue circle is the approximate spread at lightning range, based on the spread of 5 degrees.
Notably, even Salvation's Shard Cannons struggle to get all pellets on the heart; the yellow circle shows this, with the approximate spread at 1000m.
The proof is in the pudding; despite Salvation buffing shard cannon Armor Piercing by an astounding 102%, improving the spread by 233%, and improving the projectile speed by 455%, there is still substantial debate over whether they're better than Gauss Cannons, which have gone completely unchanged.
The unfortunate part? In fixing this weapon, Salvation basically ended up making a completely different weapon. The Salvation Shard Cannons bear almost no resemblance to the standard Shard Cannons, behaving far more like Gauss Cannons than shotguns.
Guardian Plasma Chargers
Plasma Chargers are once again the result of an idea that was interesting in theory, but bad in practice. The idea of being able to store up power and release it when needed is great! Unfortunately, they overtuned the power draw, resulting in weapons that could only really be fired once at full strength, before dramatically falling behind. Due to the incredibly high distributor draw, it was literally impossible to power them, and even if you could, why would you?The most notable example is the C1 Guardian Plasma Charger. It takes 8.7MW of distributor(I tested it myself), and in exchange did 25.5 damage with 65 armor piercing. This means that against Basilisks and above, a player can use the entire capacity of a fully engineered class 8 distributor, and not out-damage a Hauler firing a single class 1 gauss cannon.
It's notable that even with the massive buffs in performance from the Salvation modifications, the C1 plasma charger still is not seen as worth using. It's so bad that even with 225% the performance, it's still not worth the effort.
He did to a better job with the C2 variant, which once again has been brought up to be roughly comparable to Gauss, by buffing the Damage by 66%, Armor Piercing by 35%, and projectile velocity by 400%. Unfortunately, in doing so, he ended up making a weapon that is also superlative in performance even in human PVE. Modded Plasma Chargers outperform a significant portion of normal PVE weapons in their intended niches, since it deals pure absolute damage and has better projectile speed than any human weapon. Fortunately, not so much as to be outright broken, but it did have significant knock-on effects in areas even outside AX combat.
Ram Tah Guardian Shielding
This should answer fairly effectively whether or not the Ram Tah Shielding will have any significant impact on these weapons. The unfortunate truth is, even at damaging the Titan Core, Ram Tah Modified Large Shard Cannons barely outpace Sirius Missile racks in terms of straight damage, dealing about 3 DPS more. In exchange, they suffer from dramatically less total damage, running out of ammo in about 2/3rds the time Large Sirius Missiles do.
Medium Shard cannons, sadly, are a substantial downgrade from Sirius Missiles, both in terms of damage and ammo capacity. And no other option is particularly viable in this niche.
Fixing Shard Cannons
Shard Cannons - as long as they remain a shotgun and not a gauss cannon with a slight spread - are always going to suffer from the weakness of being a shotgun. They will spread out and sometimes miss. Buffing damage to counteract this can only go so far; make them too potent at range, and they become OP up close.
But there is an answer; splash damage. If you make each pellet from the shard cannon explode, then it heavily mitigates the downsides of being unable to get pellets directly on target. Even better, you can offer increased versatility, instead of raw damage.
My preferred fix for Shard Cannons? Make them also serve as Flak. Pellets should detonate when they get close to an enemy, allowing them to kill swarms, as well as allowing them to damage heart near-misses. They still won't be as effective as Gauss for raw damage, but could potentially be used on ships with limited hardpoints to serve multiple roles. Additionally, the existence of C1 shard cannons means even smaller ships can have an answer to swarms without needing to sacrifice a quarter or more of their total DPS!
This change means Shard Cannons will now be far more effective at all roles, without meaningfully impacting their status for human PVE. Ideally, I'd like to see a new Ram Tah engineering effect, giving them splash damage and anti-swarm capabilities.
Fixing Plasma Chargers
Plasma Chargers are more difficult. Their high distributor draw makes them very challenging to fix purely with utility-style effects, like is possible with Shard Cannons. One domain that could be explored however, is ammo totals.
Plasma Chargers have the most total damage of any of the Guardian weapons, with the Modified Plasmas having fairly outrageous damage totals compared to the others; on the order of 5x as much as Gauss. Ram Tah could take this even further and make them a purely energy weapon, with literally unlimited ammo. This would make them a good choice for long-term fights where ammo can become an issue, like AXCZs or hydra/medusa fights.
In addition to this, they could actually generate their OWN power. Rather than drawing power from the distributor, what if they had some sort of trickle-charging reactor inside, aiding the charging process? Players could manually charge them like normal, OR they could leave them be, and after ~10 seconds, they would have charged themselves, and could be used essentially for free.
Even with this, however, I suspect they still wouldn't be used much. So to add one final bit of utility, I'd have them apply a temporary debuff to their target. Something like temporarily reduced armor hardness, or reduced regeneration, or something like that. Blocking thargoids from regenerating, either scouts or interceptors, would be a powerful and very convenient utility, especially if it came at low or no cost!
I'm thinking something like...
Guardian Nanite Reactor
G5
Unlimited Ammo
Weapon charges 10% per second.
Weakens Thargoid Regeneration
This would have the side effect of reducing the distro draw on them by about 18%, which would be enough to make them much more viable in some cases. You still wouldn't want to go ALL plasma charger, but it could be worth carrying a few for the sake of ammo efficiency and the free charging effect.
Conclusion
So, what do you think? Would these effects make you more tempted to use these weapons? Let me know!
Last edited:
