Weapon Pairing

I apologise if this is redundant, but I have not be able to find a good discussion on pairing of weapons. I’m looking for more than “Take down shields with thermals and then destroy the hull with kinetics.” With engineering there are more options. I’m currently trying to reduce the time it takes for my Anaconda to take down an NPC (it will help survivability when a get 6 pirates on me at once, because my lippits picked up expensive illicit cargo and the respawn occurs before I finish the first previous batch). I have most engineers unlocked and at grade 5, an SLF NPC nearing elite status, and a good amount of resources to engineer with. I play exclusively on Xbox in Solo (Connection limited). Therefore I’m limited to 2 trigger options (if I get fancy my aging brain screws up), and I’m not great a shooting with fixed weapons. My current load out is: two 1F turret beams on the bottom efficient 5, two 2F turret MC overcharged 5 on the front sides, two 3F turret Pulse overcharged 5 on top, one 3C gimballed MC overcharged 5 on belly, one 4A gimballed beam efficient 5 on belly. The thermals are on one trigger and the kinetics are on the other. I can somewhat limit the turrets firing by orientation of the ship to target (conservation of ammo, controlling whether I pull argo from NPC or not, distributor power, pip management, and overheating). I run an 8A distributor, charge enhanced 5 with supper conduits. The weapons are not yet experimental engineered. Also I try to limit having to return to port to reload weapons (I loose connection 50% of the time if there is more than 30sec ping to the frontier server, so I save and exit to main screen before dropping out of every FSD to save transit progress, 25% of the time I have to re log after docking and if I wait more than 30 secs to click next option after enter port services I’m re logging again, and after leaving stations too.) and I don’t desire to grind resources to synthesis all the time. Any discussion, suggestions, thoughts, would be appreciated, thank you. (This doesn’t need to be solely Anaconda)
 
Have you considered thermal vent as a secondary for your beams to control heat? You would probably also need to change to gimbals for extra dps and to control firing if targets use chaff

Pair those with fixed plasma accelerators with plasma Slug secondary for high alpha strike damage no need to rtb as ammo comes from fuel
 
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Hey there,

I loaded out my Anaconda with on the underside gimballed rapid fire pulse lasers, and on the two top hardpoints, one gimballed overcharged corrosive multicannon, and one long range high yield cannon. It rips through everything.

So that's:
Belly: Size 4 RF Pulse, Size 3 RF Pulse, 2x Size 2 RF Pulse, 2x Size 1 RF Pulse
Top: Size 3 OC/Corrosive MC, Size 3 LR HY Cannon

Only downside is it's hot as hell. For crunch time, I pack some heat sinks, so I can keep firing.

In your case, if you want to limit trips back, you may want to consider replacing the cannon with a second multicannon. The cannon is awesome, and makes big boom, but it's the first thing to run out of ammo.
 
Efficient Beams + Multi's... I know you said...!

Your smallest Multi should have the Corrosive special effect as this weakens the hull on enemy ships. You can use Incendiary on the others if you want a bit of extra help on the shields.

If you are concerned about "hang time" in your chosen arena then consider reload materials for the MC's.

Alternatively you can only take ONE small Multi with the Corrosive effect. Just use this in combat to "top-up" the Corrosive effect on you opponent when required and let your Beams do the rest.

I'd ditch any turreted weapons as you shouldn't really need them on an Anaconda if you've engineered the thrusters. Go gimbaled.
 
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If you've not used it before, Coriolis.io is a great tool for working out issues like this. I built your ship with the info you gave, and from there we can see all sorts of things, like theoretical damage per second (DPS), how long you can shoot all weapons at once before your distro drains, and if you swap tabs on the bottom, you can even see your theoretical damage vs shields and vs hulls on various ship types.

I like the basic idea of your build - huge beam for main damage, turrets for support - but I can think we can do better keeping that same spirit. I'd consider swapping your two large beam turrets for more overcharged multicannons. That'll be a lot more effective use of those hardpoints, and give you a lot more damage vs hulls.

That done, I'd then swap your small beam turrets for small gimballed beams (efficient modded, still) to support your huge one. Then put some pulse turrets in your medium hardpoints, so you still have almost complete turret coverage, but a lot more of the damage is under your direct control (and higher). You're basically looking at this build then.

My Anaconda currently has a class 4 fixed long-range beam laser, three class 3 fixed overcharged cannons, and two medium pulse turrets, and I am really liking the loadout. There's a lot of options to go with though.
 
I clicked on this thread hoping to get some advice as to which beer or wine I should drink with certain weapons. Thoughts?

Well, I like a nice cold shed head when I'm running PAs and rails on my cobra and a nice Speyside whisky when running TV beams and OC multicannons on the Python. I kitted my new Krait with 2 large OC pulses and the rest DS frags which led to shots of ice cold gin and falling out of my seat.

Does that help?
 
I apologise if this is redundant, but I have not be able to find a good discussion on pairing of weapons. I’m looking for more than “Take down shields with thermals and then destroy the hull with kinetics.” With engineering there are more options. I’m currently trying to reduce the time it takes for my Anaconda to take down an NPC

If you want the absolute most efficient loadout vs. NPCs the best sustained dps combination I've found is incendiary overcharged mulicannons and corrosive overcharged multicannons in a roughly 2:1 ratio. There are a few reasons why I consider this loadout "optimal" against NPCs:

1. The incendiary overcharged multicannons have the best thermal damage to cap draw ratio of any of the weapon options and can often be run with 1 or 2 pips in weapons for continuous fire. This makes it much easier for you to keep 4 pips in shields most of the time.
2. The corrosive overcharged multicannons have good hull damage and the corrosive buff adds to the incendiary multicannon damage against hulls. If you save the corrosive multicannons for when shields are down they run out of ammo around the same time as your incendiary multis.
3. Multicannons have a maximum range of 4 km with a dropoff starting at 2 km which gives them much better sustained damage at longer ranges. This is particularly relevant for large or slow ships which can't quickly close to within 700 m optimal distance for laser weapons. You can also maintain effective damage against a laser-armed target at much longer ranges while they can only do minimal damage if you are able to maintain that distance.
4. Multicannons are ammo-dependant but they have enough ammo that by the time you're out you usually need to go back to the station for repairs or to replenish SCBs, chaff, etc. so the ammo dependency isn't as much of a limitation as you might expect.

On most of my ships I will usually run two thirds of the hardpoints with incendiaries and one third with corrosive multis but I vary this somewhat to ensure I have enough thermal damage. On ships with only three hardpoints, i.e., two medium and one large I will put the incendiaries on the medium hardpoints and the corrosive on the large hardpoint to maximize the AP value against hulls. If I have larger ships I will usually install corrosive overcharged multicannons as medium turrets and put incendiaries on the larger hardpoints. Generally it works well for the most part, the only issues are that the burst damage isn't as high as for some other builds (i.e., frag cannons) and if you are doing RES hunting with a lot of assistance (i.e., cops doing most of the work) then you will probably run out of ammo before you actually need to return for repair/restock.
 
An all gimballed, efficient, phasing sequence pulse laser build would fit the bill.
You would have unlimited firing time at 3 pips to wep, with no ammo to deal with.
You'll do hull damage right through the shields, and the phasing isn't affected by falloff iirc.

Otherwise, a mix of long range/focused lasers and overcharged MCs works well, and has a fairly large ammo pool.
Use hi-cap with one of the smallest MCs to add the corrosive effect, since it does not stack adding it to more than one is a waste.
Beams are horribly inefficient overall.
 
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I normally use three large efficient thermal vent beams, a huge overcharged corrosive multi, two medium turreted efficient vent beams and dual fixed small long ranged regen and concordance beams, though I only ever use the smalls for topping up wingmates shields since they like using prismatics or for tagging targets.

However I have started using a huge efficient oversized beam, two class three efficient vent turrets and a large overcharged corrosive multi. The other four hardpoints haven't changed and I love watching my turrets shoot targets behind me that I can't be bothered to turn towards.

If you can't tell, I love beams and the multicannon is just for giving my beams more damage against hulls.
My capacitor only runs low when I'm melting down the last percentages of a high ranked Anaconda's hull and only if I haven't had 3+ pips in weapons, which is enough to perma-fire all four turrets and the large multi.
 
Hi OP, dunno about your Anaconda issues, I fly much smaller crafts myself but for your connexion issues, my wife plays ED on Xbox too and improved her experience by unplugging the Ethernet wire and connecting the Xbox via WiFi. Seems to help greatly.
Sorry, not trying to derail your thread, just throwing this out here.
 
Switch to gimbals, they punch harder than turrets and in an Annie aren't hard to keep on target, you'll see a big improvement in kill times and you'll have more fun in combat as you get better at staying on target. Gimbals are quite generous, if you can see the target in an anaconda your gimbals can probably hit it.

I prefer pulse lasers to beams, I think efficiency is always better than burst for PvE except in specific builds for assassinations. Pulse lasers regulate heat and distributor draw much better which lets you be more generous with your pips to eng and sys. In fact I've been running efficient pulse lasers with rapid fire MCs and it's been amazing fun on my corvette. I can fire for days and keep lots of maneuverability and survivability. They aren't the fastest kills but extremely consistent DPS. If you like beams I can't blame you. You can also try rapid fire pulse. Make sure to put scramble spectrum on one of your pulses if you go that route; it's always fun to see your enemies thrusters malfunction as he just spins off in a random direction.

I'd probably do 1huge/2 large or 3 large kinetics (multis) with the rest thermal. Smaller hard points do less damage to bigger ships but I do not believe this penalty applies to shields so I put thermals on the smaller hard points and let the big kinetics tear up the hull without any damage penalty (someone can correct me if I am wrong).

When I first got my Annie a long time ago I ran pulses on top (2 large and 2 medium) and cannons on the bottom (1 huge, 1 large, 2 small) and had a lot of fun.

Overall I would just try a lot of loadouts before investing lots of mats into engineering and see what you like. Find somewhere with lots of outfitting options and a good HazRES and try mixing things up for as long as your ammo lasts then try something else, see what feels good for you. It isn't always about doing 100% max DPS if you can do 90% and enjoy the style more.
 
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